Am I safe to feel safe?

- trigger warning violence

"Why don't you kill them and be done with it."

When I was little, and this is a story my mum has told me, me and my sister were in the backseat of our family car. My dad was upset about something and was slapping us across the face yelling at us to answer him. So my mum, completely unable to stand up to my dad in any meaningful way, dryly said: "Why don't you just kill them and be done with it?" I don't remember this happening, but it was certainly on brand for my dad. He was a kind, loyal and self-sacrificing father until he wasn't. He had a hard time saying no, which meant we didn't have predictable boundaries. This also meant he would blame us for asking.

I'm not really telling this to have you empathize for me, though that little girl certainly went through the wringers, I want to illustrate something I've come up against on my healing journey: Yes, there is no danger here, but my body remembers how quickly that can change. It doesn't feel safe letting my guard down.

I had a good psychomotor physiotherapist briefly who said that traumatic situations have a few common traits. They usually happen very quickly, don't leave us with much choice and are completely overwhelming. This is why people who are carrying trauma in their bodies may be fond of control. The same characteristics also explain why I, and many with me, can experience resistance to feeling safe. I certainly do.

I have spent weeks noticing this. Just being present with the fact that I don't feel safe noticing that I am not safe.

• Am I in danger now? I look around for big, fast movements: nothing. I listen for big, fast noises: nothing.

• Do I feel safe now? I notice what is going on in my body. A slight tension, a sense of apprehension, a sense of foreboding.

• Am I safe to orient? On and off. Right now: yes. The past few of months: no.

It's very tempting in this situation to try to convince yourself that you should feel safe. After all, I'm 55, I live with a kind husband who is not prone to quick movements, and my dad is dead. So logically I am safe. My body does not agree. Or rather, it hasn't had a chance to process the experiences in the past where I was, in fact, not safe.

A few weeks after being introduced to Irene Lyon's work I experienced a deactivation of a stress that might well have been activated for the past 50 years. It was a baseline that I had gotten so used to I didn't even notice it anymore. This experience taught me how important casual, safe orienting is. Then a few months later my parents dementia worsened to the point that they needed someone to step up and take charge. I became that someone. So I worried, overextended myself, interacted with my mom several times per day and coped as best I could. Then they passed and we needed to deal with the estate. We threw away several metric tons of stuff we didn't know what to do with, and combed through the rest. And through all of that I remembered, felt and coped with my childhood, my life, my losses and what I never had.

I'm writing this about a year after having prepared the house for sale, and I notice that I still need to process what it was like to go through that. That process brought me back into functional freeze, and no wonder with all that went on.

Why did I want to share this? Because it's so easy to blame the body or the self for not feeling or doing better. Even when you have all the knowledge and tools the body needs to be understood and that can be a really fine tuned process. Actually it needs to be attuned. So when I don't feel that orienting is available to me it means that I need more attunement. My body is telling me to look closer and kinder at what is going on.

I have said many times that I love resistance, and I do, and this usually applies to my clients and not myself. In here I usually see it as malfunction and automatically blame, accuse or criticize me for it. And that is just a fact I need to factor in when I practice being attuned and kind to myself. I've been through rough times in my life, I have lived most of it in funcitonal freeze and whatever I need is what I need. Might that apply to you too? Is it possible that you too could need a kind eye on what is going on inside? ❤️