THE IMPORTANCE OF SAFETY
So, now I am going to teach you something quite counter-intuitive about the neurophsyiology of safety. If you have had an experience that shifts you into steam or ice, getting safe is not enough to shift you back into liquid water. I’m going to say this in a couple of ways so that it makes sense to you. Let’s say that you have had an experience that made you feel in danger, and as a result you are feeling anxious. Simply resolving the situation, though important, may not be enough to convince your Autonomic Nervous System that it is safe.
This is because the movement across these thresholds turns neurological and chemical systems on and off.
Can you see the largest circles above, in primary colors? Can you see that they are blue, yellow, and red? All of the blue circles have a foundation in the pulse of safety. Once the circles become yellow, a set of neural systems turn off, and a set of chemical systems turn on. This happens again when the outer circle changes color from yellow to red. Each of these transitions changes the way that your Autonomic systems are organized, and the chemistry that is released.
In order to come back into safety, we have to transition both the nervous system state and the associated chemistry (activation or shutdown).
Although this is an over-simplification, what is often required to help people downshift from danger back to safety is the completion of self-protective autonomic motor gestures (movements of defense that may involve the hands and arms or legs and feet). Completing motor movements of defense are crucial to helping our autonomic nervous systems reset. This is why somatic healing modalities such as Somatic Experiencing, The Hakomi Method, Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises, and other forms of somatic movement and release can be so helpful.
Our experiences of safety, danger, and lifethreat are not cognitions, so cognitively-oriented or talk therapies do not get to the depth in our systems where these insults are carried.
In addition to finding ways to heal stressful and traumatic experiences, it is important for our wellbeing to understand safety as a kind of medicine.
The embodied felt experience of safety is crucial to nourishing our experience of wellbeing. We talk in modern society about inequitable distribution of resources, but there is not yet adequate public discourse about inequitable distribution of SAFETY.
For healing to take place it is imperative that we experience and embodied sense of safety. Yet our society makes it nearly impossible for certain groups to experience this. If we wish to see human flourishing, this must change.
Safety is, in actuality, the deepest medicine.