How Can I Regain My Sense of Safety?
Behind many of your survival strategies of overthinking, analysis paralysis, strategizing, etc is a deep sense of feeling unsafe in the world.
You may be constantly working out what other people want to hear or receive from you in order to avoid their attacks, criticism, judgment and punishment. This activity consumes a lot of your energy, leaving you stuck and under-resourced in taking action towards your goal.
After all, they could make you or break you with just one word.
In a sense, your sense of safety depends on other people’s reactions to you.
If they are happy with you, it could create an illusion of being reasonably safe. But what if they are unhappy with you? When your inner sense of safety is dependent on other people’s responses, you become brittle because one word, one look or even a tone of voice could crush you.
How can you regain your sense of safety then?
The difficulty is that you’re trying to find the sense of safety, self-worth and value in a reference to the external. If they accept me/ don’t judge me, etc. then I am OK.
Paradoxically, until you accept and stop judging yourself, no one can give you that sense of safety from the outside.
Maybe you had the experience where people actually told you just how wonderful you were, while you blanked them out, deflected their compliments or shut down your senses.
It’s just doesn’t cut it when others say it, does it? After all, they could change their mind, if you were to slip. One wrong move, one wrong word and… So you continue feeling anxious and guarded, feeling like whatever you do is never enough.
For some, this sense of unsafety becomes so intense that the only way to take the edge off this feeling is to numb down with food and other addictions. You may put weight on to insulate yourself from the rest of the world. You become hypersensitive to everyone and everything.
The thing is there’s only a part of you that feels this intense unsafety.
This is not all of who you are. If you help that part to calm down and relax, then your whole being can settle too. This part has been trying to get your attention for a long time. Isn’t it time to attend to what’s *really* bothering you?
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With all my love
Gulara