When Safety Feels Unsafe
Safety is strange.
Safety is tied to what we know, to what’s familiar, not necessarily to the absence of danger.
When you’ve been in an abusive situation for a long time, constant vigilance can feel like safety.
You plan, strategize, and stay ten steps ahead, trying to predict and control what might happen next.
Vigilance keeps you alive and safe.
But when you leave the abusive situation, the absence of danger doesn’t immediately make you feel safe.
You might feel uneasy when things are calm, as if something must be about to go wrong.
Or you keep planning and anticipating, even though all it’s doing now is adding unnecessary stress to your life.
Sometimes, you might become obsessed with something — organising, cleaning, eating, learning — as a way to restore a sense of control, even when the threat is long gone.
And perhaps what’s even more strange is how not using those old survival mechanisms can feel unsafe.
It can feel life-threatening to stop doing the things that once protected you, even when you know they no longer make sense.
Creating a sense of safety took a long time for me.
I had to find new ways to remind myself that the danger was gone and no one could hurt me anymore.
But even now, I sometimes still wonder if this feeling of unsafety is real or imagined. Is it my intuition warning me, or an echo of old survival patterns that no longer serve me?
Maybe safety is more like a relationship; a fragile trust we learn to build with ourselves, over and over again.