Safe Spaces

Your Safe Place is a Temporary Stop

Photo-Kevin Dooley via Flikr

Whether you’re holding space for someone else, or lingering in your own, private safe place, remember, it’s not a place you’re meant to remain. Sure, it’s easy to snuggle down into those soft, comfy piles of clothes you were supposed to donate, or bury your face in last year’s winter coat, though it’s over 90 degrees outside. Easier still to leave those old emotions buried, thinking; as long as you don’t look at them, they can’t hurt you.

The trouble with those safe spaces is they give you a false sense of security. Meanwhile, they’re screwing up your world in untold ways, and worse, keeping you from living your very best life.

Those old coping mechanisms you created after each traumatic experience? They’re holding you back from finding a happy, successful relationship…or job…or life. Every time you get close to something where your mind thinks you might do something rash like maybe, trusting someone, those alarm bells go off, and it does everything in its power to pull you back from the brink of disaster into what serves as safety for you.

Coping Mechanisms Make Strange Bedfellows

The truth is, those coping mechanism created spaces aren’t safe at all. They’re dark, deep chasms cleverly disguised as soft, comfy hidey-holes where no one, and nothing can get close enough to hurt you. They also can’t get close enough to help you, whether it’s learning to trust in baby steps instead of giant, doomed-to-failure leaps, healing from the traumas you experienced yourself, or the ones you were born with. Those things require you to shine a bright light on the things that scare you most so you can see the monsters under the bed are nothing more than dust bunnies.

If you allow your mind to guide your ship, you’ll forever live in fear of the monsters in the dark who may or may not even be there. You’ll blow up every instance where you got hurt; physically, but even worse, in the intangible world of your emotions, into something so much larger than life could possibly have made it. You’ll keep stuffing things down inside until the pressure alone is enough to drive you mad, while blaming the outside world for having made you that way.

What makes it all so much worse, is the insidious lessons taught to you as a child that dictated hiding your emotions, burying your pain, sucking it up, and acting like your life was one, perfect 1950’s sitcom. To be honest, trying to live my life like the ones depicted in “My Three Sons”, “Leave it to Beaver”, or “Ozzie and Harriet” would either have turned my brain to mush, or made me a serial killer long ago! (my money is on the serial killer). Those shows were clearly idealistic lifestyles dreamt up by men with egos the size of the Sun, and due to burn themselves out like the many black holes dotting our solar system.

Being an Active Participant in Your Life

Photo – Julie Raccuglia via Flikr

What I’m trying to say is, living your best life means being an active participant, not a drone, lemming, or opossum. You have to take a few risks, step away from the dubious safety of your own little world, and experience everything you can in the short time you’re given the body you inhabit. Those adrenaline rushes that come from facing your fears, or simply stepping away from the protective cocoon make your heart stronger by making it work harder.

Much like a butterfly who must push its way out of the chrysalis in order to pump fluid to its wings so it can fly, you have to go through your own birth canal over and over again. Each time you do, you enter it with more strength, knowledge, wisdom, and guts than you had the time before, provided you allow yourself the luxury of escape. Do you really want to remain a caterpillar, crawling meekly through your lifetime? Wouldn’t you rather see the world from a higher vantage point? Don’t you want to consider all possibilities rather than being stuck with what’s within your shortest reach?

There was a time I huddled behind my own facade of false perfection. I put all my energy into pretending to be what I was not, leaving me nothing with which to pursue, and expand on what I was, and could be. I stagnated in crappy jobs, a lousy marriage, and a one-sided relationship or two, believing what I’d been taught, and cursing myself for failing to live up to the unattainable ideal. It took years of misery and abuse before my butterfly heart screamed out for mercy, and broke a lot of masonry on its way out.

Re-Write Your Script

Everything I broke needed breaking. In fact, it was all long overdue. Outdated coping mechanisms, false beliefs, and most of all, the walls pretending to protect my heart, but suffocating it instead, all had to go. Until they did, I couldn’t learn to give and receive a healthy kind of love, to trust myself enough to be authentic instead of pretending to be someone I could never hope to be, or live a life without limitations.

I had to stop being an ugly caricature of myself. Until I did, I’d never fulfill the need inside to hold space for others embarking on their own journey away from the lies and constraints they’d lived with for too long themselves.

It was a bit like tossing all the things I’d built as an adult into the trash, kicking off my shoes, and running through the grass as I did when I was a child; oblivious to the many things that could cut or bruise my feet, trip me up, or toss me off the nearest cliff. I had to relearn how to recognize what and who could truly hurt me, and what were illusions meant to keep me in my place.

There’s a joke I used to tell my daughters. My mother used to tell me not to let a boy touch me there, but she never told me where “there” was. And yet, she imparted the direst of consequences on my innocent head should I disobey, again leaving those consequences to my own, fertile imagination rather than spelling it out so I could see the monsters for what they were, in all their naked glory. The worst part is, it wasn’t entirely a joke.

The Devil You Know Isn’t Always the Safest Place

Photo-moonjazz via Flikr

Your family, and your own mind keep you in a wasteland of false safety where things might not seem terribly wrong, but you never get a chance for them to be right. It’s as if you’ve secluded yourself inside a mirrored ball where all input from other people is reflected back to them, and never touches you. At the same time, nothing you say or do touches a single, other human being. But in so doing, you block out everything; the good, the bad, the mediocre, and things that wouldn’t touch you anyway. And you deny everyone else of the gifts you have to give.

Instead, step away from what you’ve been convinced is a safe place, and recognize it for the prison it is. If your skin gets sunburned, put a little aloe on it. If your feelings get hurt, dig deep so you can understand why you feel hurt. When you start to mindlessly react, or dive back into the safety of oblivion, stop, and ask yourself why you think hiding is the right answer. If you can come up with an answer at all, you might be surprised at how lame it sounds.

You deserve to live a full, complete, messy, vulnerable, authentic life. Sure, you’ll stumble, and maybe even crash and burn a few times. But when you’re out in the world, among the living, two things will happen: you’ll learn to bounce better, and you’ll have people around to help you up, dust you off, and even patch you up if necessary, so you can go back to the business of living.

When you do, it’ll be from a happier, stronger, more legitimately safe place than you ever saw through the cracks in your soul sucking, bullshit dispensing walls.

Grateful for the Walls I’ve Destroyed

My gratitudes today are:

1. I’m grateful for all the times I’ve tripped, fallen, and gotten back up again, to charge heedlessly back into life with the fearlessness of a child.
2. I’m grateful for all the people who were there to pick me up when I learned to stop trying to be something I’ll never be.
3. I’m grateful for the continued growth and opportunities I receive now that my walls are shattered beyond repair.
4. I’m grateful for healing. It’s a lifelong process, but worth the effort, the fear, and the pain to get there.
5. I’m grateful for abundance; love, joy, healing, friendship, community, peace, balance, harmony, freedom, philanthropy, and prosperity.

Namaste

About the Author

Sheri Conaway is a Holistic Ghostwriter, and an advocate for cats and mental health. Sheri believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. Her mission is to Make Vulnerable Beautiful and help entrepreneurs touch the souls of their readers and clients so they can increase their impact and their income.

If you’d like to have her write for you, please visit her Hire Me page for more information. You can also find her on Facebook as Sheri Levenstein-Conaway Author