Safety

[shimmerz]

Sorry, I am on a roll today. Please forgive if I plaster posts all over the board. My head is just letting so much go today.

I am thinking back on my various therapy sessions. We seemed to focus so much on 'feeling' and how to assign various feelings with appropriate words etc. They all seemed to be negative feeling words though. Terror, humiliated, shameful, pain, and so on and so on. I got pretty good at recognizing these things. And it made me feel all of them .... so much so that I wrapped all of those words into my sense of self, I think, too much.

Stupid maybe, but I am going to bring it up. I am now doing things that I enjoy. I have been playing a racquet sport with a whole range of people these days and I am occassionally making some pretty good shots. And it feels good. Safe even. Competent even. Like a human being even. Like I have, if even for a brief and shining moment, a glimmer of okay-ed-ness. And it feels grounding.

And I think back to all of those years that I did therapy and nobody EVER talked about if I EVER felt safe. If even for a moment. Even if I had to really dig to see it. Like driving in a friends car and having coffee and a conversation. Like coming out of one of my catatonic bullshit moments and realizing I was out for the time being. Like realizing that I was no longer triggering about something as badly as I did before. Like walking my dog. Like anything.

Why can't we be taught how to identify safe? Does anyone's therapist do this with you or did I just get crap therapists, or am I totally off base with even thinking this way?

 

[Chava]

My therapist talks a lot about safety. Initially it was confusing because I had no access but we worked on things together. Now I have a sort of little tool kit for "safety" but it doesn't always work or I can't access it because I've flipped around in my head and believe I'd really be more "safe" through hurting myself. Anyway, my therapist talks about feeling safe all the time.

 

[sun seeker]

Why can't we be taught how to identify safe? Does anyone's therapist do this with you

Yes. The traumatized parts of me, which a lot of the time feel like all there is, are very resistant to believing such a thing exists, but he really tries. That's part of what a trauma therapist is supposed to do. Bessel Van der Kolk and Laurence Heller both focus on how important this is, to name two.

 

[DogwoodTree]

My Ts talk about it pretty regularly, too, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.

We had a really good conversation a couple of months back about a revelation I had. I read on this board somewhere, I think, where someone had said, "Safety isn't a place. It's a state of being." One of my Ts said she actually got chill bumps at that. So I've been trying to camp there for a little while, and understand the idea of not needing external cues to feel safe, but rather finding a sense of courage to keep moving even when I don't feel safe (in times when I know it's my feeling that's out of whack, not red flags from any real danger...that's different).

I still don't know what safe feels like. But I'm learning that "safe" doesn't have to mean that absolutely nothing bad can possibly happen.

 

[Suzetig]

Mine did work with me around feeling safe when we first started working together - mainly identifying that I couldn't identify a time when I didn't feel unsafe in some way and that, at that time, I went through shades of feel unsafe from a little bit unsafe to utterly terror struck. Nearly 2 years down the line I realise I do have a better sense of safety, what that means to me and why I often feel unsafe - I guess safety is less of a feeling "out there" and more something I can own for myself,

 

[hodge]

My therapist helped me find a safe place in my mind that I can imagine, and I go there every day, several times a day. I think it's a critical component of managing PTSD.

 

[Hope4Now]

Sorry, I am on a roll today. Please forgive if I plaster posts all over the board. My head is just letting so much go today.

I LOVE it when you go on these rolls!!! Keep rolling @shimmerz ! You always raise fabulously apropos questions and responses. No apologies needed from my perspective!

Why can't we be taught how to identify safe? Does anyone's therapist do this with you or did I just get crap therapists, or am I totally off base with even thinking this way?

Yes! Safety is key. You are not out of whack at all. I think it is sometimes hard for Ts to help us identify "safe" because some of us (me, for instance) have never felt it. But after two years of pretty intense therapy, I've gotten to the point of being able to identify "safe-ish". That's as close as I can get. I work a lot with my therapist on safety but we don't often use that word. I've created safe places in my mind which are pretty elaborate (but sadly don't really exist inside of me, so there is some level of dissociation there still). I have an audio recording I asked my T to make for me (because his was a safe voice) that is from a meditation in a book. We have worked on visualizing "containers" for some of my challenging parts (not terribly successful until recently when he did this direct access thing with me for one part).

There are different kinds of safe, too, I've figured out. One is physical safety. One is emotional safety. My physical and emotional are pretty split off from my intellectual. So I have been trying to rewire my brain to teach myself how "safe" FEELS physically and emotionally by noticing when I am "safe" physically (e.g., generally not in danger of harm or death) and "safe" emotionally (...still not quite sure what that means unless I am in SELF). Then holding that thought in my working memory while I investigate what the body feels like.

I made the great discovery the other day that I feel a kind of opening up/softening in my core when I feel safe-ish. It doesn't happen very often, but I think maybe I've begun to forge that new neural pathway. And I have to keep reminding myself over and over again.

The emWave software thingy is helping me learn what it feels like in my body too. And, of course, my therapist when I can let myself connect beyond the intellectual.

Not sure any of this makes sense to anybody else, or resonates. But there it is.

I am now doing things that I enjoy. I have been playing a racquet sport with a whole range of people these days and I am occassionally making some pretty good shots. And it feels good. Safe even.

THIS is GREAT! So often we spend so much energy trying to identify and feel scary or uncomfortable feelings and remind ourselves that we are safe NOW. We need to spend equal time identifying and feeling good feelings, and reminding ourselves that it is equally safe to feel good. I have a lot of challenge with that because as soon as I feel a good feeling, I get scared and go into the fight/flight/freeze mode.

I think therapy needs to focus on good stuff just as much as uncomfortable stuff if we are to get our nervous systems back into smooth and coherent functioning again.

Keep hitting those balls!

 

[jaccat]

My therapist has done a lot of talking about creating a safe place. She did that when I first started seeing her, told me it was very important I had that place to retreat to when we got into the hard stuff later on. We focussed on my creating a safe physical space in my home, or at least getting me to feel it's as safe as I can make it, which is not the same thing at all. My T knows safety is a big thing for me, it comes up in other aspects of our therapy quite regularly, along with the issues I have with it.

Just picking up on something else you wrote about the feelings that came up when you were working with your therapists, my T broke feelings down into their very basics. She tells me when it comes down to it there are only 4 basic emotions- fear, anger, sadness and joy, and that all the other stuff, all the other words we use, are just different ways of explaining those 4 basic emotions. It helps me, when things are getting too complicated, to be able to take a step back and work out what's really going on using that as a model. I think, I don't know, its easier to see what's going on because it clears everything else away.

 

[oasis2003]

I feel safe when covered in 2 duvets over my head and repeating the mantra I am safe from harm over and over again. physically safe. Sometimes I meditate and I feel emotionally safe but sometimes it does not work, at least I feel physically safe there though finally.

 

[Hope4Now]

I am in the process of making a weighted blanket. They are expensive to buy, so I am going to make one from old t-shirts (yes, although not a yankee, I am the queen of the yankees when it comes to darning socks and repurposing old clothes that are unwearable).

In DBT (dialectical behavior therapy), they identify 6 basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, shame, disgust, surprise. http://www.dbtselfhelp.com/html/describing1.html

What I found extremely helpful in the DBT group I attended for two weeks in June was hearing people describe the physical feelings and match them to the emotion. They were surprisingly consistent. I have tons of difficulty with this as I am just beginning to be able to tune into how my body feels beyond excruciating pain or nausea. I seem to feel the extremes, but am less aware of the subtle stuff. As I have begun to get better at matching physicality to emotion, I find that my own body is somewhat consistent when I can stay in some semblance of self (not flooded).

It helps me believe I am safe-ish because once I identify what I am feeling (as separate from what I think I'm feeling, or what I SHOULD be feeling), I can sometimes identify the source of it and deal with that. And usually, the source is quite dealable as opposed to what those emotions indicated when I was growing up.

Of course the caveat to all of this, and the part that is so very difficult, is catching things BEFORE the emotional train loses all its brake power. Because then all rational thought and ability to be conscious of oneself in the moment goes flatline and all that is there is the amygdala response. No rationality. And DBT and CBT are based on the assumption that one can be rational.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

I think that feeling safe has to do with if I trust a person or not and I have learned that people will always dissapoint me. I am still too naive and gullible when desperately needy and that is bad for me. I long to become a safe person. I want to have safe people in my life as well and it is all a huge learning curve for me.

Only I can make myself feel safe as I see it for right now. I could be wrong but it works so far. Very enlightening thread.

 

[barefoot]

My therapist has talked about safety quite a bit...a bit more in quite a conversational way (she'll just casually throw in something around safety/feeling safe etc) rather than us really exploring and working on my own sense and feelings of safety. I think it's because when she first started talking about it at the beginning, I probably just stared at her because I didn't really understand why she was talking to me about feeling (un)safe. Because I didn't realise that had anything to do with how I felt. It's only really fairly recently that I've been able to actually feel and identify fear and feeling unsafe. So, I guess it's progress that now I can actually feel those emotions - before, I just wash't connected to them. But now I can't make the fear and lack of feeling safe go away.
I should probably bring that up with her...!