Healing Trauma: Finding Safety and Expanding Our Aperture to Life

The Friday Edition | No. 18

Healing Trauma: Finding Safety and Expanding Our Aperture to Life

I want to acknowledge this place of insecurity, of feeling unsafe and unprotected in the world that you live in. I live in that world too. It makes me sad to think about it. It makes me angry to feel this vulnerability and lack of safety. It is a feeling that holds us and moves through us like the air we breathe. Holds us how a safe home and shelter should hold us but instead surrounds us with unfamiliarity, fear, little protection, or feelings of security. It often feels like a world built on shifting sands, filled with the air of past experiences echoing and ringing out that nothing can be trusted, and hoping things will be different will always bring disappointment, that “safe and trustworthy others” are rare in this world. This space can ebb and flow as all things do to moments that feel overwhelmingly scary and unsafe and then to times when it lessens as something offers us enough safety to calm the tyrannical voices that say there is no safe haven for you, and then back to existing on eggshells – forcing us to live on a knife’s edge – hypervigilant to every potential threat because nothing feels certain or secure.

These are the words and thoughts of a survivor of childhood trauma. A child that lived with one eye open. Never sure what horrible, unreal, or disappointing thing would happen next. A habituated lane of hoping that was always dashed and replaced with letdown. A dizzying circular life created with no off-ramps. It is a spinning wheel of death that we are strapped onto with a parent or abuser throwing knives at us, as we pray that the blades miss their mark. How is it possible to feel safe anywhere when this is the constant programming some are subjected to from infancy to adulthood?

The single most important issue for traumatized people is to find a sense of safety in their own bodies.

_Bessel A. van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma”