Safety is Essential for Healing

By Beth Broom, LPC-S

Before I talk about safety, I’d like to recap the other posts in the series so far. If you’ve missed any of them, I recommend you go back and look them over before continuing ahead. I’ve placed them in a particular order because understanding and clarity should begin to occur before jumping into the practical steps for healing.

Here’s what we’ve done so far:

• “Is Anxiety Rooted in Trauma?” – In this post we discussed the overlap between anxiety and trauma, and we explored how we can discover whether our anxiety comes from unhealed traumatic events in our past.
  
• “What Makes an Event Traumatizing?” – Here we listed several types of events that can traumatize a person, and we discovered that an event becomes traumatizing not based on the gravity of the event, but based on the state of the person involved and his/her ability to make choices.
  
• “How Trauma Affects Us” – In this post I shared three signs to look for that may indicate you’ve experienced trauma that needs healing: changes in mood, relationship struggles, and bodily symptoms.
  
• “The First Step in Healing from Past Trauma” – This post focused on the importance of having a safe person with whom you can talk about painful things. I also addressed how to be a safe person for someone who’s experiencing traumatization.
  
• “Deep Breathing for Anxiety and Trauma” – Last week’s post focused on the importance of calming our bodies through deep breathing. Without a calm body, mental and emotional health will be incomplete.

Now we’re going to take a deeper dive into the idea of safety. We do not find hope and joy in a vacuum. We also don’t find it while chaos is reigning. That’s why it’s so important to create spaces of safety when you’re trying to heal. So how is this possible?

First off, if you’re in an unsafe environment on a daily basis, healing will be hard to come by. Think of it like someone who’s just had surgery at a hospital. In the recovery process, the patient needs to be monitored and re-bandaged often in order to ensure he is getting back to normal. If a person refused these services and demanded to go home for this process, the doctors would surely object. When there’s been a significant wound, that wound needs time, space and intentionality in order to heal. If there’s continual re-injury, the wound will continue to fester.

Let me put it bluntly: if you’re in a home or a workplace in which you’re being wounded continually, your healing process will be slowed. It’s not impossible to heal in this context, but I would definitely recommend that your first step is to seek counsel on how to increase safety in your environment. You can talk with a trusted friend, a pastor with a good reputation for understanding and caring for those in oppressive situations, a hotline for those who are experiencing abuse (1-800-799-SAFE), or a professional counselor.

So your environment needs to be safe for healing to occur. This means you have:

1. At least one safe person you can trust
2. A physical place of refuge in your life
3. Access to resources that maintain and increase safety

Let’s take these one at a time.

A safe person is someone who knows how to listen before they speak. It’s someone who commits to pray for you and offers wisdom that isn’t based solely on her own experience. She doesn’t throw Bible verses at you as if they’re pills for you to swallow, but she focuses on the attributes of God and His love for you in the midst of sorrow and difficulty. She’s not afraid to say hard things, but she believes in God’s timing and purposes in your life. She’s there for the long-haul and isn’t scared away by your struggle, even though she might not know what to say when you’re hurting.

A safe place allows you to have refuge. When chaos seems to be reigning in your everyday circumstances and in your mind, finding a quiet space is essential so that you can re-center your thoughts, emotions and body. This was essential even for Jesus (Mark 1:35), so of course we all need it. I have arranged a room in my home and called it “the quiet room.” I gave it this name so that my children would respect the space and speak quietly when they come in (not that this happens all the time, or even frequently, but we’re trying). This room contains my favorite chair, my favorite furniture, my favorite smells. It’s the space where I pray, read God’s Word, breathe deeply and journal. Maybe you don’t have access to an entire room, but I highly encourage you to create a space that is comfortable, cozy and relaxing (and do your breathing exercises there).

You’ll also need access to resources. I have known people who spent years just hanging on, waiting for their trauma to heal with time. It doesn’t happen. The Lord has given us His Body (the Church), wisdom from His Word, knowledge from the common graces of medicine and neuroscience, and educated people who have learned the steps toward healing in order to guide us on the journey. We are meant to utilize all these resources for the sake of healing.

You may not feel strong enough to create safety for yourself. If that’s the case, I encourage you to take one step. Just talk to one person who seems safe. Tell him or her that you feel weak and need some help to create physical safety and access resources. One step can take you a long way.