I started working with an energy healer a few years ago because I desperately wanted to be in a relationship, but the affirmations and vision-boarding approach espoused by many spiritual bloggers just wasn’t getting me anywhere. Many well-meaning spiritual books and workshops were insistent that the problem must be that I didn’t love myself enough. Even though low self-worth can be a factor for some people trying to manifest love, I sensed that it just wasn’t the issue for me. It was only when I started working with an energy healer that I realised the problem was much deeper – it was about safety.
At that point in my life, the idea of ‘safety’ was associated with whether I’d be comfortable walking down a dark alley by myself at night (nope, nopity-nope), rather than something that was holding me back on the regular. But in a spiritual sense – as I came to understand – safety is about your ability to trust that you will be OK, that you will always have enough of what you need and that you can comfortably go after what you want, need and deserve. It’s not about physical safety (although that can be part of it) but emotional and psychological safety. If you don’t feel safe in the world, your ability to feel happiness, express your feelings, achieve your goals and, yes, be in a healthy relationship will be hampered.
Here are four ways lack of safety can show up in your life.
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1. You worry about what could go wrong, 24/7
Even when things are going well, you’re constantly on guard against catastrophe. When something minor does occur, you instantly go into panic mode, even if there’s no logical way the event will adversely affect you or your loved ones. You struggle to sleep because you’re too busy going over and over what’s happening in your life, looking for potential for adverse outcomes and how you can avoid them. You’re often late leaving the house because you need to run around and check you’ve turned everything off (and then check again). Often, the only way you can get respite from this relentless worry is by numbing yourself with alcohol or drugs.
What all this means is that you are unable to trust that you are safe, so you try to control your circumstances in order to guard against anything going wrong. That’s not a peaceful way to live, and it’s certainly not a great platform from which to reach for new opportunities, professionally or personally. When you’re in survival mode, growth – the very thing that your soul came here to do – is going to seem almost impossible.
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2. You are afraid of joy
I know this sounds silly – like, who would want to avoid the very thing we’re all seeking?! – but it’s true: some people find joy acutely uncomfortable. Similar to the constant fear of things going wrong, this is about being unable to really settle into happy experiences because of a fear that that will be followed by terrible consequences. Consider these examples: someone gets a mysterious, holiday-ruining tummy upset every time they go overseas, or someone regularly getting injured when they’re in their happy place on their mountain bike or surfboard. That is the body trying to get you out of a situation which it perceives as dangerous. Joy is scary for you because it might be taken away. Joy is uncomfortable because, for reasons you can’t fully explain, it feels like it carries a price, so you keep joy at a wary distance.
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3. You keep relationships at arm’s length
Relationships can be a terrifying prospect – they require us to be authentic and there’s a high risk of rejection. Little wonder, then, that an inability to feel safe in relationships shows up in so many clients I work with. If you’re single, it might lead to you choosing a string of unsustainable flings which will either end quickly, so that you avoid getting deeply hurt, or so you have an excuse to sabotage things before they get serious. In established relationships, lack of safety can see you watching your partner like a hawk for clues of infidelity, even though you don’t have any reason to believe they would actually cheat, or perhaps being constantly worried they will leave you – for example, if they come home late and don’t text you beforehand, you completely fall apart, convinced that they’ve abandoned you. All of these behaviours indicate an inability to feel safe emotionally in an intimate relationship.
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4. You keep swallowing your opinions and feelings
You’re really not OK with the way your friend keeps asking you for money or expecting you to pay for everything, but you don’t feel comfortable saying ‘no’ to them. And you want more sex in your relationship, but the idea of outright saying that to your partner is way too hard. If we don’t feel safe, it’s going to be difficult for us to express what we need and want. To avoid taking action, we might tell ourselves things like ‘I don’t want to upset [other person’s name]’ or ‘they should know better!’, but these are just excuses to keep us from putting ourselves in a situation which feels incredibly unsafe. It could be that you grew up in a household where there was so much drama that you kept yourself small to feel secure, or maybe your role was to be a good girl and not upset anyone. Sometimes feeling unsafe to express yourself can stem from a past experience – in this lifetime, or a past lifetime – where you asked for what you wanted and were punished for it (you lost your job, for example, or were verbally attacked in some way).*
So, what should you do?
If any of these ideas about safety (or lack thereof) resonate for you, I’d recommend you do some major self-reflection work to get to the bottom of what’s going on for you – including when it started, what situations it shows up in and what might have given rise to it. You might like to use a journal to explore this, or do meditation. Then, you’ll need an expert to guide you. If you’ve already got a good relationship with a therapist or coach, you might like to work with them. If you sense that these issues go back a long way, perhaps even into past life territory, you might prefer to go down the spiritual path and work with an energy healer to help you heal on a subconscious level.
If you’d like to work with me to shift these fears out of your energy so that you can move forward feeling safer in the world, contact me here.