The Distraction of Safety

Physical safety I concede, is important. 

But what of emotional safety?

I so often here both professionals and laypersons alike raise the flag of emotional safety.

"I would have (insert behavior change or action the person states they want to engage in) but it didn't feel safe"

When we use the word safety we are really talking about comfort. To say “I didn’t feel emotionally comfortable” is more honest than “I didn’t feel safe.” The issue of safety carries more weight and is harder to dispute than our comfort level.  Safety becomes the trump card that nobody dares to challenge. But maybe at times we should?

We as therapists are charged with the honor of walking alongside people as they wrestle with some of the darkest, challenging, and more difficult times in their lives. My experience, both as a real live human being and as a psychologist tells me that we adults don’t really want to change personally. More often we want everyone around us to change. We want our situation to change. We want our experiences to change. We will even go to fairly elaborate and sophisticated measures to create scenarios where we personally don’t need to change, in fact sometimes work ourselves into corners where we can’t change. In the end we settle into patterns, and even when they aren’t taking us where we want them to go- we’d rather wait on the world to change. 

So maybe safety is the trump card people play when they don’t want to go somewhere that feels uncomfortable.

Sometimes for very good reason. Sometimes for very big, hurtful, scary reasons.

However we therapists might do our clients a disservice by letting them avoid the very places we know they need to go. If the comfort of emotional safety was a good directional beacon I suspect there would be far less need for therapists. We would find peace, health, and fulfillment all on our own.

But we don’t. We don’t because what feels safe and comfortable is sometimes exactly what hinders change. So let us put down the shield of safety and get down to what really creates change: Plowing headlong into that which sometimes scares us the most.

I would offer a directional beacon re-calibration:

That which you want to avoid, is the very direction you should be heading.