Safety is perceptual.
You can feel fear sitting on your couch watching a horror movie. Does that mean your home isn't safe? No. What it means is that your sense of safety is not circumstantial, it's perceptual. It's based on your thoughts or feelings in any given moment.
What about the idea of making other people feel safe?
For the most part, the people that choose to hang around you feel safe in your presence the majority of the time. However, it is pretty much inevitable that you will run into people that you can't make feel safe without completely shifting who you are to do it.
I used to shift who I was to make other people comfortable. That's essentially how I got here. I lived that in technicolor every single day of my life. It's taken me a long time to be okay with not being for everybody and ultimately to actually be okay with scaring them somewhat.
I offer people the option of risking their sense of safety to heal themselves. Can you risk making that change? Can you risk not reacting to that thing? Can you risk digging through the pain to find the truth? Can you risk shifting your perspective? Can you risk questioning your own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs?
Those things all create fear. They all create an unknown outcome. They all make people afraid of me in some way, shape, or form. Is she going to challenge me? Is she going to make me defend the problem? Is she going to make me be somebody I don't want to be? Is she going to make me figure out who I am without all the pain I'm carrying around?
I offer fear all the time. I don't generally make people feel very safe when I do it. What I will always do is honor the fear though. I will honor that perceived sense of risk because I've felt it myself. What I know is that the risk is only a perception. It's not real. It's not true.
I landed on my feet. The chaos my mind made up never happened. The story I told myself wasn't true. The risk was imagined. The fear was based on my imagination, no different than being afraid of a horror movie. My sense of safety wasn't at risk because it was inside me the entire time. What I learned was that I could anchor to that and not worry so much about the circumstances that surrounded me.
Safety is perceptual and not based on other people or circumstances. When you're unable to offer safety to people or you're like me and you just challenge it constantly because you can, you have to recognize that it's their perception. It's not about you. It's not yours. It doesn't make you a failure or a bad person. It's not a reason to beat yourself up.
You're not for everybody. You can't make everybody happy all the time, nor should you have to. I learned this lesson the hard way. I earned my battle scars with this one because of the amount of powerlessness it created in my life. But that powerlessness was a gift. It taught me everything I now know. I promise you that your perception of fear around changing things is just that, a perception. It's not true. You can change anything you want to. It's your fear of the unknown that makes you feel unsafe in doing that.
When you don't feel safe around somebody, it probably has more to do with you than it does the other person. Keep yourself out of the extremes of the experience. We're not talking about people out to actively hurt or kill others. We're talking about those random people you meet. They aren't actually dangerous, but something in your perception makes them feel that way. Why?
This happens because people trigger things in us unintentionally. People are the way they are and sometimes we just don't like that. The idea is to recognize what's happening without projecting it onto the other person. The idea is that we're taking responsibility for ourselves. How I feel is not about you and what you did. How I feel is all about me and my thoughts or triggers. If you do something that triggers me, that's not on you, that's on me. That's mine to take responsibility for. Ultimately what you want to do is thank the Universe for showing you the trigger because it allows you to heal it. You can't heal it if you don't know it's there. Now the Universe is showing it to you through this random person. It's time for you to use that to your advantage. Do the work on yourself.
Why don't we do this? Because it's easier to blame the experience. It's easier to create boundaries and defend ourselves. It's easier to just evict people from our lives. It's easier to defend our own pain than it is to heal it. We're afraid of what happens if we do heal it. Does that mean we have to be a doormat? Does that mean I have to let people treat me like crap? How will I handle it instead? What will other people think of me?
I can remember defending the pain. I've done that many, many times and I still do it on occasion. The only difference now is that I'm more easily able to see it and I'm not afraid to shift it when I find it. What I often say is that it's not about whether I'll do it, it's just a question of how long it takes me to get there. Generally these days, at most it takes me a day or two and that's if I'm really struggling with it. Usually I can shift it in a few minutes because I understand how to do this work and I'm no longer afraid of it. I'm not jumping over the hurdle of fear anymore. It's not a safety risk to me to do the work.
But if it is still a safety risk for you and it's still offering you fear, then your job is to figure out why. What are you actually afraid of? What are you actually bothered by? What's the story you're telling yourself?
It may be an unconscious story. It may not be something that's consciously roaming around in your head, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening in the background or that it's not affecting your choices. That's where your work is because you have to become aware of what's back there so you can deal with it.
How do you do that? Question it. Question what's coming up. Listen to your intuition. Pay attention to yourself. Look around at other similar experiences and how you handled those. Is there a repeating pattern?
