Cultivating safety

Cultivating a sense of safety is the base floor for healing because it shifts the brain to the parasympathetic branch responsible for recovery. What is the best way to cultivate a sense of safety and tell your brain to lower the alarm system and stop being hooked on the fight or flight mode? experts and people who healed themselves share their insights:

 I believe that a sense of safety is the floor  really the base of where we have to get, so it's a really, it's a really important question., and it's hard to feel safe when you feel like your body is failing you. Right?  I did feel like my body was failing me. It's hard to feel safe when your body is, is telling you that you're not, and I will tell you that it was a slow unwinding, First realizing that safety in your neighbourhood  and  safety in your body or  relationships that you have with other people are different.  

I had an alcoholic father. As a child It was not safe to even exist sometimes. So,  try to go back there and unravelwhere this sense of unsafe happened and how it now manifests now.

Feeling safe is to feel that it's all right, to feel the emotions  that reside inside in  me. Remember? I'm the goodist, right? So I wanna see myself as good and doing good and being good and being a good girl was highly priced, so this wouldn't surprise you that If I feel jealous  or any other shadow emotion I don’t feel safe, but until you realize in your heart, that it is okay to feel these emotions and they do not define you, that everybody does feel petty jealousy or envy or sometimes and it doesn't mean you're a vengeful person and it doesn't mean you're a jealous person. That's just energy coming through you past you and then washing through. It's just like a wave, you've got to experience it. You've got to sit in your own jealousy or sit in your own bench and tell yourself it's okay. A lot of self-compassion work is needed here too, and I'm not saying I understand all my emotions, I'm I I'm sure there are emotions. I still repress, but I was able to uncover enough of them and, and sit with them and, and them, and self compassion myself for having them that I was giving myself enough safety that I didn't have to have symptoms anymore. 

By Ann Miller

Telling myself every day: The Universe is kind and safe, with few glitches. RA is my faithful and loyal friend and companion. I got out of deep end many times, and will do just fine again and again J

 

By Victoria K. Carman

There's no question that our childhood experiences, all of our life experiences, are imprinted on our brains. We have memory. We have explicit and implicit memory. We have subconscious memory. We have emotional memory, and all those memories can make one feel safer or less safe. It can make one feel more trusting or less trusting. The people who have disruptive childhoods are much more likely to develop mind body syndromes are much more likely to develop physical ailments as well later in life. That's been shown very clearly in the adverse childhood event studies and many other studies. However, we exist in our past and we exist in our presence.

What we found is that you can help people heal and recover in their present and in their past. Modern medicine hasn't really understood or taken on this. A lot of psychological therapies I would also suggest have not taken on because it's not just cognitive processes that are necessary to heal people. It is also emotional processes.

Many ways of helping people feel safe

There's many ways of helping people feel safe, cognitively in their lives in the present, but it's often necessary to help them feel safer in their past by using emotional processes such as memory reconsolidation processes to help people heal some of the hurts from their past.

What do you mean?

Well, memory reconsolidation. The idea is that we can't change our past, obviously, but how do we know what our past is? We only know our past because of our memories of it and memory is constantly changing. This is a scientific fact. We don't have memory like some video camera. We have memory pockets and emotional pockets of information.

Go back to the past and heal it

There's ways of helping people in fantasy go back in time to visit their younger selves, or express feelings from their younger selves, or ways of imagining changing the situation, changing the memories purposely to help them feel more empowered, help them feel safer, help them to express feelings that they couldn't express then, help them deal with the anger that they felt, the guilt that they felt, the sadness that they felt and help them move move through those feelings, to have compassion for themselves, caring for themselves, letting go and forgiveness, and when you do those things, they're healing their past, which helps them to heal their presence.

It is a visualization technique

Yes  but you applied it  on the past, not on the future. It's the idea that we hold our whole life is held within us.  so our child is held within us, and that's healing the child that was within us and the parts of us that are child parts, the parts of us that are parental parts.  so everyone has different parts of themselves.  sometimes those parts feel like they're at war or they're fighting with us or they're betraying us, but the idea is to move toward integrating those parts and being at peace with our past with ourselves and with the different parts of us that we carry with us.

Question: Let's take an example, a concrete example. If a child back then had a critical caregiver and he lived a normal childhood, no abuse, no physical, no sexual abuse, nothing big, not a big trauma, but he lives with criticism because this was the way of his parents to show love and to Hone the child for life challenges to come. Practically. How would such a child go back to his past and heal this?

Create a new experience  your younger version

You can simply ask the person to summon the parts of themselves currently that are caring and kind and loving and strong and courageous and then mentally go back in time and visit their self when they were eight years old or twelve years old or whatever, and they imagine meeting that person who's themselves and they can feel what that person was feeling, what their younger self was feeling, the emotions that they were feeling, the hurt, the sadness, the anger, the depression, the fear. Then they can empathize with that person and  then give that person in this imaginary scenario what they needed, which was love and caring and compassion and give them the opportunity to express their feelings.  they can help them imagine doing whatever it is they need to do so they can create a new experience for that person that younger version of themselves, who is empowered, who cares for themselves, who can stand up for themselves. Maybe the person wants to talk back to their parents or scream at their parents or tie their parents up or make their mouth shut or push them out of the house or whatever. It is that they need to imagine doing. Or maybe they need to ask their parents to just love them and hold them and hug them.  then your adult self is hugging that person and caring for that person and letting them cry scream or do whatever they need to do.  maybe you take them to a beach and you laugh and you give them space and you ask if they can let go of their hurts. It's a variety of things that people have learned over the years to help heal the big trauma.

You carry all this hurt from childhood in your body 

When you take away some of the hurt and guilt and anger from the child and the adult who's in current life in present times can also feel relief and begin to realize that they're okay in the present that they are safe now. They don't have to carry around all this hurt and mistrust as much, and they can practice as I mentioned before self compassion now- in the present. They're healing their past and they're healing their present at the same time

Immersed in the fight flight freeze

Question :  how would you approach such a person who is so immersed in the fight flight freeze and he's kind of hooked in this emergency state of being? How would you access his brain and train it and reprogram his brain to feel safe again?

Start with listening to the little child in you

Start with compassion. You start with compassion and caring and love for that person. You start with understanding. You start with listening to them and allowing them to talk and tell their story, and you listen to that story and you help them see the issues that have occurred and are occurring in their life, and you help them to begin to be compassionate to themselves.  as you do that, you can then help them understand what the story means and change the story. Help them change the narrative from one of fear and mistrust to understanding and caring and help them see that of course, their brain is going to be afraid. Of course they're going to not be trusting. Of course they're going to be living in fight or flight because of what happened to them and then help them see that their current diagnoses are not dangerous. If that's the case, if they don't have clear structural problems, then you can help reassure them currently that their body is not damaged.  then you give them techniques and help them to reduce the fear of the pain or of their symptoms, and then you help them to see what they can do in their lives to help them be connected and safer and happier now in their lives.

It all starts with listening

Gradually over time, you can help them to heal, heal emotionally they have to re conceptualize their story as one which makes sense and to help empower them that they can do something about it, and it all starts with listening. It all starts with understanding. It all starts with compassion.

By Dr. Howard Schubiner MD

Once I understood what was happening with the condition and that I could heal, i took some of the fear out. I told myself every day that I was getting better and kept a diary showing the positives. I came off social media. I started to understand that the symptoms couldn’t hurt me and were just my brains interpretation plus some inflammation from the stress which would go once i found safety more often 
 

By Rachel whitfield

How do I cultivate a sense of safety? Before beginning meditation, I always ask that God’s light completely encapsulates me in a protective bubble.  There’s a lot of negative energy out there.  You don’t want to entangle with it!

By Debbie Viggiano

- 2 ways - one is in the body where I use my somatics - knowing there are sensations in our body that we don't have pain that we are not always aware of .  Leaning into positive sensations in the body can create a sense of safety along with some other somatic techniques.  The other way is talking to your brain and sending it messages of safety by having a conversation with your brain.  Tell it you know its tms. - you have nothing to worry about - brain you can calm down - i love you but i don't need to be protected anymore.  Again doing this with compassion as you would speak to a scared child and with persistence like you would train a puppy

Doing this can dial down the fear and anxiety   - you also want to respond to the brain and not react.  Bracing for the pain makes it worse.  speaking to your brain in a compassionate way is important which can help you be indifferent to it and go about your life the best as possible  - but always trying everyday to find joy

By Laura Haraka

Believe in the body's abbility to heal it self from within. There is alwayd a way out. You'll find it with research and patience.

By Joanna Maxwell

I create safety by breathing, actually just noticing my breathing. when you breath there is more right than wrong in your body

By Valerie Hickman

Breath work like you going to experience is a great way to learn how to feel safe in your body, and it is a process. It's not going there from severe pain that I'm just going to sit and be in my body all day.

A gentle titration

That's a gentle titration.  we work with the body in small amounts, safety and small amounts. It's not just like I said, hang out in your body all day. It's this titration where it's small steps, but yes, again, people who have had severe trauma or big or small trauma, too much excitement in life, too can be really scary to the nervous system. This is calming the nervous system, and we're talking about the nervous system being deregulated and we want to get it regulated again, so it feels safe now.

By Jeanni Kulwin

Safety and genuine healing go hand in hand. Anytime your body is sending ‘frightened’ signals through your nervous system, a cascade of chemical signals is sent out to fight the imagined threat. Those signals inflame your body but do not help in genuine healing.

The human body is primed to heal best when you feel rested, happy, well-fed, and safe. Sometimes it is enough to have the felt-sense of safety for a brief period of time when real safety on a 24/7 basis is impossible. Things like yoga, meditation, biofeedback, and prioritizing healthy food and sleep give your body the tools it needs to do its job. Everyone feels safe in their own way. This is why paying attention is so important. What feels safe for you will present itself to you best when you are listening for the signals in your body telling you what feels good and what does not.

Babies know very little about life in general but almost all babies could tell you (if they could talk) what feels good and what doesn’t. That tells me that we are designed from birth to know exactly what safety feels like. Too many of us doubt our own innate ability to listen for our own personal cues of safety.

By Christine Traxler

Cultivating a sense of safety can be done by acknowledging feelings and expressing feelings. One tool is journaling, which is writing about feelings. This can be a very useful tool because we want to get you out of your head and actually feel. I get people writing about their feelings for ten or 15 minutes a day. Also, people with pain might be very hesitant to walk or to bend or to move or to swim but It is good for them doing some type of activity. This represents the physical element of action so that you're not just in your head but also in your body.

By Dr. David Shechter

The best technique is to get good at being in the present moment.  Practicing this every day through meditation is so important yet many people talk themselves out of it saying they're not good at it, which is true for everyone at the beginning.  Meditation is so important because we are so used to being so caught up in our thoughts and never fully even being present in our lives.  We also have identified ourselves with our thoughts when we actually exist separate from them.  When we train ourselves to get in touch with our true selves, our soul, and no longer define ourselves by our thoughts, we are accessing the power of our Divine nature to unleash our greatness that exists within each and every one of us.

By Bonnie Sharf