“What we don’t need in the midst of struggle is shame for being human.”
~ Brené Brown
I haven’t felt safe for a while now.
I’m not referring to my physical safety — I don’t fear for my personal safety in any way. I have a roof over my head, I feel perfectly safe in my home, in my small town, and going for a walk around the park in my neighborhood.
But unfortunately, my physical safety is where any safeness I feel ends.
This unsafe feeling I have been feeling for a year or two is the reason I have developed anxiety for the first time in my life. And at the exact moment I’m writing these words, I am suddenly questioning some conversations I had with my therapist when we were unpacking my anxiety not too long ago.
I remember explaining to her how anxious I felt even making the transition from teletherapy back to in-person sessions. I experienced massive anxiety at just the thought of walking from my car, through the parking lot, down the sidewalk, and into her building…until I finally reached her office and could breathe again.
For the past year, I have felt the same way taking my son to orthodontist appointments, flying my daughter to college a few states away, going to watch my son’s basketball games, and even taking my kids on vacation this summer. Walking from our condo down to the beach gave me almost as much anxiety as I felt walking through the airports.
And none of this anxiety has anything to do with the global pandemic we’ve all been living through. I have no fear of catching Covid. This anxiety is quite foreign to me, and it’s a feeling that’s very hard for me to describe. The only way I could find to describe it to my therapist was the feeling of being unsafe.
I told her how I felt just walking to her office. I told her about how I still get my groceries delivered, because I can’t even think about walking into a store unless I absolutely have to. I told her about all the text messages I haven’t answered and invitations I haven’t accepted because it gives me actual heart palpitations even thinking about going to a dear sweet friend’s Halloween party or New Year’s Eve party, or meeting a long-lost friend for coffee, even knowing that she lost both of her parents within days of each other.
It’s not that I don’t want to see my loved ones. It just makes me feel incredibly overwhelmed…and unsafe.
All this time though, I thought it was my newly developed anxiety that was causing me to feel unsafe. But when I wrote the words above, I suddenly realized I’ve had it backwards all along.
It is actually this feeling of being unsafe that has caused my anxiety.
So of course, I get curious about that. I wonder…when did I start feeling so unsafe?
I felt pretty emotionally grounded after the end of my 25-year marriage. I processed a lot of my feelings in the years before the divorce, and while I think that working through and releasing what happened in my marriage will be an ongoing process, I don’t think that’s where this unsafe feeling started.
When digging into this feeling, I realized that I have experienced unsafe feelings with some friends over the past few years. Friends who didn’t know everything that was going on in my world and who might have made a comment in jest or in judgment about a topic in general…not knowing that I was going through the exact thing they were judging.
It suddenly felt impossible to let myself open up to them anymore about the truth of what I was going through. I no longer felt safe around them…at least enough to let them in that close anymore.
Those moments were upsetting, but I’m also confident that we have friends for different reasons and times in our lives, and I know they didn’t mean to hurt me, because they simply didn’t know what I was going through. But it still made me feel unsafe.
When I ask myself when I really started feeling unsafe, I think it was actually a succession of events — or maybe “a succession of people” is more appropriate. Two guys I dated, one after the other, came barreling into my life in the exact same way with the exact same intensity and big, flowery words — that they then promptly took back only days later — leaving me reeling in their unhealed wakes.
And then there was a dear friend who disregarded my feelings about one of those endings and took away the loving ending I could have had for that relationship, under the guise of wanting to protect me. And then another giant, wounded ego who came into my life with the same flowery words as the ones before him…until he showed his true colors — this time very early on. Thank goodness.
Each of these instances has made me feel less safe in sharing myself with people who claim to care deeply for me. A few weeks ago, a dear friend of mine told me they needed me to open up more to them and I was surprised because I’ve always considered myself an open book. (Maybe even too open.) But apparently, I feel less safe in doing so now…and I didn’t even realize it.
So here I am, more than a year later…struggling more than I ever have to simply feel safe around people I care about. Even with the one or two souls in my life I hold nearest and dearest to my heart.
Because here is what feeling safe means to me…
To know that someone will be there for me, without them thinking they have to carry any of my burdens. I never want that, and frankly, someone feeling like they have to carry any of my shit makes me think they don’t trust me to carry my own stuff. I truly don’t need anyone to carry anything of mine. I just need you to listen…and I mean really listen.
To know that someone can just sit with me in my pain, someone who can be comfortable enough with pain — mine and their own — to show me their love that way. Without filtering my pain or my story through your own wounds. Because then it becomes about you instead of you supporting me.
Someone who knows that I don’t need protecting from anyone I choose to have in my life. Someone who doesn’t need to control or fix the situation. I don’t want that…I want your support. Not your judgment. Not your protection. Not even in the name of love.
I have been struggling with all of this recently. And then I listened to a podcast conversation between Glennon Doyle and Brené Brown. In their conversation, Brené Brown was talking specifically about her children’s pain, but I’m paraphrasing the conversation here to include all of our loved ones:
“When we see someone in struggle, we need to reframe ‘I’m here to fix’ to ‘I’m here to walk with’. The enemy of connection is control. When we see our loved ones suffering, and they tell us ‘this happened to me and it was so painful,’ and we jump in to fix it rather than sitting in the pain with them, we have severed connection for the sake of control.
And it’s not Machiavellian control…we’re just trying to control hurt. We’re trying to control our own discomfort, their discomfort…our pain, their pain. So the small thing we can do when we see someone struggling — especially someone we care about — is to be in connection with, not to fix.”
I have learned over these past few years that people can only sit with others’ pain to the extent that they are comfortable sitting with their own. And let’s face it…not many people are comfortable being in their own muck, let alone anyone else’s.
Because of this, I don’t think supporting each other like this can be — nor should be — transactional. In a friendship, or in any other kind of relationship. Just because I can be there for you at 2:30 in the morning doesn’t mean I expect the same from you.
Being someone’s safe space should be an act of love we offer from our heart because we have the emotional space to offer it in that moment…and none of us are going to have that to give all the time.
But for those of us who have felt like they’ve been in the muck for a year, for four years, or even longer…it’s hard to watch our safe spaces dwindling.
It’s hard to feel like we don’t have the people we used to have to talk to. Someone who will love on us — without judgment, or fixing, or wanting to protect.
I love the connections I have formed on social media, with long-distance friends who are my biggest cheerleaders and supporters, and I feel the same way about them. But at the exact same time I’m relishing those connections, it’s hard to witness the virtual love and virtual support they offer each other on an online platform, when that’s all I wish for in a real-life conversation with them. And with my favorite souls.
The people I most need to feel safe with.
I know this unsafe feeling is my work to do…no one else’s.
My broken bit to repair.
My wound to heal.
And I also know that we can do better — myself included, for sure — at showing up for each other. Not in the way that we want to show up for our loved ones, but in the way our loved ones need us and ask us to show up for them.
Even if it’s 2:30 in the morning.