The Safe Enough Podcast Episode 8: What is safety?
Welcome to the Safe Enough Podcast! This podcast is an exploration of what it means to feel safe enough in order to live the kind of life, or make the kind of changes that transform our lives, into those with all the love, connection, belonging and purpose that we seek and strive for. My name is MacPherson Worobec, founder of the It Begins To Move studio. I am a safety and self-worth recovery partner, and I’m so happy that you’re here.Â
The first few episodes of this podcast were focused on The Felt Sense. I wanted to share the hybrid tool/philosophy/approach/theory with everyone, because I do think it’s at the heart of real change, and it happens to be both gentle and embodied! And that feeling hasn’t changed. But the reason I love the Felt Sense so much, and have both experienced and witnessed it’s marvelous and elegant ability to bring immensely powerful change, right at the root of issues, is because of its inherent safety. The process of finding and using the felt sense has safety built right into it. And though I’m still looking forward to talking about why that is, and how that works in future episodes, I realized that what I really want to talk about is safety. Absolutely every single process of healing and change, no matter what your approach, tool, method or philosophy is, must first and foremost create or be built upon a felt sense of safety. A real, embodied, can’t be forced or faked kind of safety. Results come directly from that, and it is flat out impossible to make any kind of progress without it.Â
So this next series of 4 episodes will be all about the basics of safety, safe healing and safe change. And I mean the foundation upon which all other episodes and discussions will be based upon, because there are so many important and interesting parts to healing.Â
As I begin the first episode of the Safe Enough podcast, let’s begin with a discussion about what safety actually is. This, of course, is a deep and complex topic that I’ll be exploring over many episodes, but let’s start with the basics. I think it’s important to operationalize the term safety, or to define it. So, according to etymologyonline.com, the word safe comes from the latin word “salvus” which means “uninjured and in good health,” and the root of salvus is the word “sol,” which means “whole and healthy.” So if we take a linguistic approach, the meaning of “safe” comes out of the concepts of being whole and healthy. And I think this is interesting, because we so often refer to safe, in relation to threat, instead of in relation to health. We often refer to it as an absence of threat or danger, rather than the presence of health and well being. Trauma and addiction specialist Dr Gabor Mate says that “safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.” Ok, so this quote begins to highlight that there’s something more to safety than simply not having an active threat. And I think this is an important point, because it explains why so many of us still feel uneasy, even when other folks say that there’s no danger in a situation. Gosh, it feels so invalidating to me when someone else thinks they know better than me, about what I should or shouldn’t feel and why. I once heard behavioral neuropsychiatric researcher and founder of the Polyvagal Theory, Stephen Porges, once say during a keynote that, “the mistake we make is to think we're like everyone else. There's great variability.” What I need for feeling safe, or feeling whole and well, might be different than what you need. You know, what I need might not just be different than what YOU need, it might even be different than what you THINK I need, or what YOU THINK is in MY best interest. In the context of healing from past trauma, or recovering self-worth, or becoming more empowered, using a kind of standard like absence of threat can be ironically counter productive to true healing. Trauma psychotherapist pioneer Judith Herman maps out 3 stages of healing from trauma, and the first stage of healing from trauma, she says, is to establish a sense of safety. And I’ll say here that I LOVE using Bessel van der Kolk’s definition of trauma, which is when “your reality is not allowed to be seen and to be known.” Trauma neuropsychologist van der Kolk uses this definition in an incredibly deep, honest and frankly powerful documentary about the Saturday Night Live comedian Daryl Hammond. It’s called “Cracked Up,” and it’s about Daryl Hammond’s incredibly tough home life growing up, how it ultimately fueled his career in comedy of all things, and it also chronicles his pretty tough journey through healing. The reason I love the definition of trauma that Bessel van der Kolk uses in Cracked Up so much, is because it’s so simple. And it’s simplicity is what makes it relatable, accessible to many more folks, and also much more easy to identify with than the other more clinical or academic definitions of traumatic responses. There are a whole bunch of folks who don’t identify as having traumatic histories or being overtly harmed, but who DO have unhealed trauma and trauma responses. There are folks who don’t identify with being survivors of war or childhood sexual abuse, but who do grapple with shame and self-worth, who are compulsive achievers, and struggle with vulnerability, etc, etc. The list of trauma responses in the lives of folks who don’t identify with traumatic histories, could go on for days. Essentially, this simple definition of trauma, which is when your reality was not allowed to be seen or known, is elegantly ubiquitous. I think there are very few folks who’ve never experienced invalidation. And I think the question then becomes... what happened afterwards? What happened after you experienced a denial or an invalidation of your pain? Were you able to find connection and support? Were you able to re-establish your sense of safety, wholeness, well-being? Were you able to re-establish your sense of self-worth? And I think this question about re-establishing a sense of safe wholeness, really begs the question, how do you do this? How DO you establish or re-establish a sense of safety, as Judith Herman notes is the first stage of healing from trauma. Because the issue isn’t that some people experience traumatic events and don’t. We all do. We all experience significant invalidations. The question then becomes why do some folks experience lasting results and others don’t? And that begs the question, how DO you re-establish a sense of safe wholeness, wellbeing, and an affirmation or a knowing of your unconditional self-worth, after it’s been invalidated? After your experience, your perspective, your wellbeing, identity, your wholeness, your relationship to the world and the people and the systems around you, is denied? After your sense of safety is violated. So just like Bessel van der Kolk’s elegantly simple definition of trauma from the documentary “Cracked Up,” I equally LOVE Brene Brown’s definition of connection. Shame and vulnerability researcher and social worker Brene Brown defines connection in her early, yet AMAZING book “The Gifts of Imperfection,” as “the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued.” The definition continues into more amazingness, but this first part is what I’d like to highlight. Connection, she says, is when people “feel seen, heard, and valued.” Well, this definition of connection is the exact opposite of van der Kolk’s definition of trauma! AND, it ties in so well with Gabor Mate’s definition of safety, which is that it’s not an absence of threat, it’s a presence of connection. Look, life is unpredictable. It’s always going to have ups and downs as long as humans are interacting with each other, and as long as we live in a wild and natural world. And that means that folks will inevitably do things that are hurtful, and we will inevitably be hurt by things that other folks do. Always. It really stinks, and I’m sure that every single one of us would rather it not be that way. But this is the nature of living amongst others. Psychotherapist Deb Dana, who really took Polyvagal Theory and digested the very brilliant and complex theory into understandable and workable terms, coined Polyvagal Theory “The Science of Safety.” That it’s the “science of feeling safe enough to fall in love with life and the risks of living.” Because living is risky. What she means by that is that everytime we open ourselves up to another person, we risk getting hurt. Everytime we do something nice for someone else, we risk getting hurt. Everytime we express ourselves, we risk getting hurt. Everytime we explore something new, we risk getting hurt. And for anyone who’s been very badly hurt in the past, it’s SO, SO reasonable to protect yourself against ever getting hurt like that again. Past hurts run a wide wide range of severity, from the atrocities of war and physical abuse, to emotional neglect, to a critical remark. But regardless of the severity, the impetus to self-protect after a past hurt, is universal. As a matter of fact, it’s automatic. In a sense, no human can CONTROL the impetus to self-protect after a hurt. UNLESS, unless the hurt has been fully processed. And I mean fully. Unless the hurt, the invalidation, the violation has been completely unwound and integrated. Until there’s no residue left over. And THAT is the power of connection. THAT is the power of true safety. True health and well being. It’s being seen, heard and valued. It’s in NO WAY being invalidated, violated, second guessed, gaslit, abused, ignored, neglected, rationalized. THIS is the kind of safety that allows you to feel SAFE ENOUGH to change an automatic, compulsive, subconscious self-protective response, that then ultimately creates room for opening up to the kinds of everyday connections that are life giving, that feel so good, and that make life enjoyable and worth living! This is what Deb Dana means by feeling safe enough to fall in love with life and take the risks of living. You have to feel safe enough. Whole enough. Well enough. And ironically, connected enough. Connected enough to begin with, in order to open to more connections that leave you feeling safe and secure. But you need the safety and security in the first place in order to open to those connection that bring you that feeling of safety. This can create a bind, like, where do I start? This conundrum, how to navigate it, what gets in the way, what brings this real, embodied sense of safety that allows for true, deep and sustained healing and the quality of life that comes along with that. These are the kinds of questions that I’ll be exploring in great detail in this podcast. The next episode will explore why establishing a real and true sense of safety requires going beyond trauma-informed practices. If you find this interesting, please leave a review and subscribe so that you know exactly when the episode drops. And if there are any topics that you’d like me to cover, please make those suggestions in the review or comments section! Also, feel free to check out current and future offerings at my website itbeginstomove.com. This is MacPherson with the Safe Enough Podcast and It Begins To Move studio. I’m so glad that we’re here together. I’ll see you in the next episode and take care, kind soul.Â
