What does "safe" feel like?

Have you ever experienced the "feeling" of truly feeling safe? Do you have a memory of feeling safe? Are you able to feel it now?

I've been searching in my mind/memories to find a place in time that I felt safe. Ok. It's just not there. It is almost causing a panic because I can't find that place. The panic is coming from wondering if I will ever know that feeling. What DOES safe feel like?

My counselor and I have talked about this and I can't wrap my brain around or understand what the feeling would be. It's much like me trying to explain to him, what it feels like to me when I'm there but as a passenger. I don't have words to explain that, and I don't have experience to understand what safe feels like.

I think there is anger under the panic going on. It won't help to get mad. It won't fix it.

Does "safe" sound foreign to anyone else?

Has anyone else realized they didn't know what safe felt like, and then find it?

yes sometimes the feeling of safeness eludes me.

One thing I always try to do with all my posts here is to include something that has helped me in the situation that the poster has a problem with. when I am feeling triggered/ unsafe I come online and read my past posts. it reminds me that I have had times when I felt safe and do have self nurturing skills to help me feel safe (if I didnt I wouldnt be putting them in my replies to help others )

maybe when the sense of safety is eluding you, reading your past posts will help you. I woouldnt be surprised if reading your past posts you may find hundreds of references to times and things that have helped you to feel safe. I know I do when ever I re read my past posts

I have this issue. I didn't even realize it until I started discussing EMDR with my T. He has not been pushing for EMDR because he wants to make sure I'm stable and have communication and cooperation between the parts, but we just started talking about it a little bit. And he talked about how I'd need to stay within a window of activation, and how we'd start off with me in a "safe" place, and that's when things deteriorated, because I realized that I simply don't have one.

We talked about it quite a bit, but everything he suggested that others have used was triggering for me. We literally could not find a safe place. So then he said it doesn't have to be a place, it can be a "state of being," only I couldn't find one of those either-- couldn't remember ever feeling entirely safe and if I had, I certainly couldn't recapture that feeling.

So we abandoned the idea of EMDR for now, and we've continued to do hard work around helping me feel safe, strengthening the relationship, etc. I will say that just in the past couple of weeks I've had a few glimmers of feeling really safe with him. It's a pretty painful feeling because it just highlights how I don't feel that way the rest of the time. But it is giving me hope that I may find that safe place, or sense of safety, in the room and in the relationship with him, at least enough to use as a starting place.

It's not a good feeling to realize you don't have a sense of safety, but I think it is something that can potentially be cultivated. At least I hope so.

"Safe" does sound foreign to me Thank you for this post

The only time that I felt safe was being locked up in my jail cell for a few hours a day.

i have definitely been struggling with this. it's hard when even your skin feels unsafe to you, and everything internally and externally is terrifying. i'm not sure what safe feels like. i know what content feels like at times, but not safety.

I have no ida what safety feels like.

I felt safe with a friend. We were very like minded. I don't recall feeling that with anyone else or anywhere else. I remember how it felt. It was like my mind was at peace. I felt free. I was in the moment and not consumed by my thoughts and memories. I don't know if I will ever feel that again. But I am grateful that I did.

Okay...safe for who? Safe for me...or safe for them?

Sometimes I wonder.

I felt safe a few times with my T, recently. We are still exploring why and what it means.

Parts of me are not convinced it was really safe though, or at least, I was fighting it because it felt so unfamiliar. So really, I guess my answer is "yes but I'm not sure."

I have an obsession with always knowing exactly what objects are behind me, they cannot move. T changed a painting on the wall in back of me a few weeks ago and it made things hard again. It is a beautiful painting but it's not THE painting.

Thank you for hearing me!! Safe is a big thing with me right now. I really don't think I k ow what it feels like. I know what the definition of it is, but I don't know what if feels like. It's crippling.

Definition.

Safe:
a. Free from danger or injury; undamaged or unhurt:

b. Not exposed to the threat of danger.

I don't know what that feels like.

I want to.

This definition makes me sad, because it only tells me what safe isn't! Absence of danger, absence of injury, but what exactly is it.... I guess Miriam Webster had a hard time too...

My T did ask me what safe meant, some time last year, and I also could only tell him what it wasn't.

I agree with you. I've not thought about it that way.

To define safety as being the absence of things that are harmful or hurtful does not really define a "feeling" of safety. It seems to define a place or situation where safety can be felt/experienced.

So, I agree with you also that the definition is not really a definition of what safe IS.

The analytical part of me is intrigued.

Thank you. I hope so too.

It's always been known, but it hasn't been as intense as it feels right now. A part of me was found last week, and maybe it's coming from it.

I have done EMDR with my counselor before. The first time it helped to dial down the level of anxiety I was feeling and when I left his office, I felt more at ease than I had in a long time. The next time I did EMDR, we were working with some mental images and in the middle of it, it's like something changed. I don't know how to explain it. I think a part of me stepped in and interfered. I don't know if that makes sense or not. That's what it feels like anyway. It was such an odd feeling, I'm, or a part of me, is kind of skittish of it now.

I've also had a hard time finding a safe place. What feels safe one time, doesn't feel safe another time.

I'm so glad that you are feeling more safety with your T. It means a lot to feel that the space you share with him is a safe place. I feel that way with my counselor, but there is a feeling of it not being real. I hope that in time that will change.

(((hug)))

(((hug)))

Content. I had to look it up to decide if I knew what it was.

- In a state of peaceful happiness.

Maybe. I do find that at times, mostly when I'm outside.

(((hug)))

I'm glad you had such a close friend and you had a true and honest relationship, something I have never had. I did have a friend in high school that I was very close with. We had some fun times, but I wasn't really able to be open and honest with her. It seems that I've always hidden parts of myself and put up a front so things would appear to be ok.

The front was for "safety" but not the right kind of safety.

Curious.

Them - as in people around you, or them - as in parts of you?

I'm sorting this out myself. That puts a different angle on it.

I totally get it!

I feel "safety" with my counselor, as far as being able to really say how I feel and speak without feeling like I'm going to say the wrong thing. I feel like I can talk with him about anything, and not get in trouble. It feels pretty foreign to me too, almost to the point of it not being real. Sometimes he doesn't seem real. I would guess that would mean that a part of me doesn't really feel trusting toward him, or that I don't know how. ? Hum. I'm not sure.

It is unsettling to me also when things get changed around in my counselor's space. It takes a little while for it to settle in. He recently changes locations and his office. I think it's been 4 weeks. Maybe. It's starting to feel ok, but it doesn't feel like the space I met with him before.

Analytical came up with a different question:

What does safe "feel" like, in the presence of, as opposed to the absence of?

This seems more on track for both of us... being that safety is an abstract, I supppose our best idea of what it is will come from the way we experience it in our bodies.

For me, I suppose I can identify safety by the feeling that I do not have to actively protect or hide any part of myself-- that I can be confident and secure in my vulnerability. I feel warm and fluid and connected, and I can sense every part of my body rather than small bits and pieces of it which is more usual. I can say for sure that it's happened a couple times with T. And also a few times with a friend. Both in the past year, absolutely never before.

I have not felt safe since I realized that I had a dissociative disorder in 1991. At first it was mild but the fear intensified over time. My Dad died in 1993 leaving my mentally ill Mother alone. I tried to call her every day. Mom caused and promoted my dissociative disorder. It was inevitable that she would cause my dissociative disorder to exhibit more often. As the symptoms increased so did my fear. My alcoholism increased to deal with the fear. Then I had a total mental breakdown in 2001. After that I got into a whole lot of legal problems which only made everything worse. So now I live with intense fear and paranoia on a daily basis. I am hoping that if I get back into the Jenkin's Veterans Domiciliary in Lake City, Florida that I can feel safe again. I never should have left but I was so mad at the mental health professionals at the VA for not even talking to me about dissociative disorders that I deluded myself into thinking that I could get to a specialist in Georgia. This trip to Georgia, my original home state, has been a total failure.

The first thing I did with EMDR was to establish a "safe place". For me, it was an imagined place, around a campfire, stars above, warm from fire but cool out, horses eating hay quietly, smell of horse and fire and coffee. Then we'd reinforce it with EMDR. We did a lot of this. I came up with another imagined safe place, a bear cave with triplet cubs and us all piled together with the Mama bear guarding the entrance.

I thought that "safe place" was always the first step with EMDR. T2 described it as the place I would go if things got too weird doing the EMDR work, or just with us talking. I used it a lot. Like at the end of every session. Several times a week. For several years. I haven't had to go there recently. I just realized that!

I had an aha moment this week... I've been doing some memory processing from when I was a teen (for about a month now) and I noticed that after I would work through some stuff that was more difficult than the rest, I would end up holing up under a blanket and kinda day dreaming about this guy I hung out with some time back in the day. I'd get lost in some generally pointless story of some times that never happened. But the day dreams had a common theme of things being okay... the stories in my head helped me hit the internal reset button and be able to get on with my day without becoming a total wreck. I kinda wondered for a minute what my deal was and why I kept thinking about this dude who was not like someone I hung out with a lot or anything. Why him? It was weird to me. Then it occurred to me while I was tackling one memory and he showed up in it as the one person in the middle of an awful event who showed me genuine concern, care, and kindness. This wasn't the first time he did that to me. There was one year in my life where I remember this guy being the only person who ever asked me how I was doing and looked like he cared, and not like I was annoying as f*** for being a buzz kill (as my circle of friends did back then).

Anyway... long story to get to one point... yes, first time in my life I remember feeling safe was sitting in a doorway with some guy who was only kinda my friend back in 10th grade. Go figure. This last month has brought me a few moments of feeling safe, calm, okay. They've been becoming more normal to me. It's not a constant or anything, but it's happening and I never thought it could be this way. I didn't know any different (or recall knowing different) until recently.

-V