When do you feel most safe?
Someone I worked with for a while, asked me to leave the team we were both on this past year, because they didn’t feel safe with me, due to me triggering something in them.
At first I felt like it was really lame to not want to unpack that and use it as an opportunity for healing something, and then after listening to them explain how they prioritise safety and simply don’t wish to need to have a big trigger in a core-team, they invited me to consider the question:
“How do you feel about your own safety?”
This was a consciousness bomb inside me, and my system has been re-sorting itself ever since.
I had never really consciously considered that before, although I see how my lack of a sense of safety has been unconsciously steering me my whole life. In my need to control. In my addiction to stress and intensity.
I realised, through this question, that I have never developed a real foundation of what safety feels like in my body.
That I have spent my whole adult life, putting myself in situations in which I stretched myself way beyond my comfort zone in the name of adventure and growth and letting my pioneering spirit lead the way. Resulting in a rather frazzled and reactive nervous system.
Life feels different since that question was proposed to me, some months ago.
I am prioritising cultivating a sense of safety for myself, above adventure, getting to know what safety feels like in my body. Allowing myself to be protective and precious about myself.
I am choosing to grow through staying in my comfort zone for now! Through stability, grounding, routine, consistency and giving my nervous system spaces to relax. Avoiding spaces and situations that I will find triggering.
There will be a time and a space for adventure again, but only when it can be built on a foundational sense of safety.
When do you feel most safe and how have you built safety in your body? How much was about finding it within you, and how much did you learn about safety, through healing relationships with others?
Image by @amoureuxee