Who Am I When I Feel Safer?
As I sat in the audience at an international conference on trauma research, one of the presenters posed an existential (and catalytic) question.
During the 35th Annual International Trauma Conference in Boston, Dr. Gita Vaid presented on psychedelic-assisted therapies—and how, “during therapy, people are often able to access and find peace with disavowed, exiled parts of themselves.” As I sat in the audience during her talk, Dr. Vaid posed a question that I found myself unable to answer. I took note: Who am I when I’m safe?
Sense of safety is subjective. Regardless of the setting, we cannot promise to create safety for another being because only individuals can determine whether or not they feel safe. In thinking about this for a few hours post-presentation, it struck me that I had no idea what fully safe felt like in my body—even as a trained and certified trauma-informed leadership coach with hundreds of hours of coaching and nearly two decades of talk therapy under my belt, not to mention dozens of trauma integration modalities, including plant medicine.
Talk about the ironic elephant in the room.
What initially started in early childhood as alexithymia—the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions—my lack of safety continued throughout early development and was exacerbated at nine when my dad moved out for the first time.
He and my mother were trying to sort out their dysfunctional relationship, but each time he departed from our home for weeks, months, or years at a time put me in more danger. For them, each separation was painful but spacious. For me, it meant that the totality of my environment became unpredictable, where there once was part-time protection.
On the third evening of the conference, my partner and I decided to go for a swim and found the hotel pool. It was heated, but not quite at body temperature, so I was shivering a bit from the onset. I walked from one end of the long pool to the other and found a warm-water jet. Because we were alone, we thought it would be funny to try to converse from about 30 yards away, but within minutes of submerging, I felt a lot of emotion arise, seemingly out of nowhere. Voice is a powerful tool.
The speaker’s question kept swirling around my head. “I don’t think I have ever felt safe in my body,” I said out loud. I revealed how overwhelmed I felt by the sheer magnitude of my unprocessed experiences of childhood abuse. I sobbed for 45 minutes straight in the cool water, continuously coming back to my breath and visually focusing on the potted palms at the other end of the room—simple but effective tools that I’ve learned through training for clients and with practitioners for myself.
For years, I’ve known this was coming. The volume of this inner voice had been increasing in the last year as I was finishing HEAL to LEAD. Then, a few months ago, I had a disorienting, in-person experience where my personal safety (along with several people I love) was jeopardized. It threw me back three decades to the last time I was physically unsafe due to an unpredictable primary character.
The Universe has a way of convening for us. Oftentimes, we cannot fathom how dots will be connected or how positive outcomes might be possible. The trauma conference offered the opportunity to engage with heavy content and deeper questions but with little integration time—the perfect storm for a somatic, emotional release. I felt held by my partner in the water, but being soothed did not feel like safety in my body.
Luckily, I’ve learned to trust my intuition. After an 11-year hiatus, I engaged a new therapist prior to the conference. My deep desire is that she will hold space and challenge me as I discover who I am when I feel safer.
Pause here and think for a moment. How would you answer the question, “Who am I when I feel safer?” (I’ll wait…)
The only semblance of a response I can come up with is a flashback to my experience with Ayahuasca (plant medicine) in Peru in the fall of 2022. And while being in the middle of the Amazon under the influence of a psychedelic brew may not elicit obvious feelings of safety, I do recall it as both uncomfortable and the first time I felt unconditional love.
As I begin to engage with a trauma-informed therapist who specializes in bodily autonomy, generative somatics, and EMDR for those who do healing, justice and social change work, I’m excited to meet the version of me who can tell you that a little discomfort feels safer because I’m actively growing there. I’ve surrounded myself with a handful of loving and supportive humans, so I know they’re excited to meet this version, too. At 44, I am ready.
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