Redefining Safety: A Supporting Guide for Discernment

Each of my clients who commits to some serious "healing journey" work reaches a point where they realize they must redefine safety for themselves.

They realize people who they thought were safe were not safe in all the ways they assumed. Not because those people intend to be unsafe per se, but because many of us grow up with a limited view of what safety is at a nervous system level, what it feels like, and what a deeper, more sustainable level of safety actually looks like in practice.

If they want to build a safe environment for themselves and invite "safe people" into that environment, they have to do some work around redefining what safety means for them now so they can choose accordingly.

The hard part is that we struggle to see what safety is, what it looks like, and what expectations are realistic in terms of safety. A lot of my clients wonder "am I just being dramatic" as they realize how soft some of our preferences of safety need to be.

Something I've noticed a lot is people falling into black & white thinking about "safe people" and "unsafe people", not realizing that safety isn't black & white. The conversation has nuance.

Something that's been helpful for me in navigating that level of nuance, and redefining safety, is going by my rules of trust...

As in: trusting people to be who they are. And setting expectations accordingly.

To help with that, I'm going to share some of my categories of safety, what safe and unsafe behaviors look like in each of those categories, and how they impact us.

This breakdown isn't exhaustive, but it's to help you get started in redefining safety and noticing who in your life you believe is more or less safe for you, in what ways, and how you want to develop some boundaries and expectations around the areas where they might not be so safe.

Reflection prompts are included in each section to help out.

Make sure you're logged in with a Journey subscription and let's dig in.