Unsafety…

Erin Schaden
5 min readSep 11, 2024

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I had a pretty good session with my therapist yesterday. EMDR is exhausting, but good. What came up was this idea of safety, and how utterly lacking it has been for me in some areas in my life. While in other areas of my life, it has been overflowing. I have always had parents who were present, loved me, provided for me and cared for me. I was raised with love and concern and compassion. My dad and I battled from the beginning and he became someone that was not safe for me. We were just at odds, always. Well, until he got sober and now we have worked through all our ancient shit, and have a good relationship that is safe. However, it was not always so.

Without going back in time and giving you the complete breakdown, I grew up with a lot of unsafety in this world in certain areas. What is bizarre and sad is that it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized this. How it all unfolded. I can completely see the trajectory now. Totally makes sense.

But what was most revealing yesterday was that while it was happening I did not allow myself to own the feelings of unsafety that I had. I created this internal divide where I did not own and could not handle, I just didn’t. I created this world where I just did not address the glaring issue in the very center of my life.

I didn’t realize until yesterday just how anxious this made me. Looking back, I was a kid that was riddled with anxiety but I created this really good cover of being a vivacious, tenacious, outgoing kid that was precocious and over flowing with energy. And some might still describe me in this way. It is a familiar mask I wear often. But it has never, ever been who I really am.

I still have crippling anxiety about a great many things. No one sees it because it still occurs in this place inside me that I cannot own, have not addressed and largely pretended doesn’t exist. So weird that I really didn’t see the gross incongruence in my life until yesterday.

What is interesting is that because I was lacking safety in some fundamental areas in my life, I ended up not being able to see this glaring oversight so instead of me actually addressing the issue, my plan of attack was to behave in a way that made me less safe, all the fucking time.

And I saw that yesterday with a painful and heart rendering clarity. And I allowed that pain to land. To just grant it a place on me and in me. It was hard because the old me was rapidly dancing around attempting to create no stable places for any kind of purchase. But because I felt safe in that moment, I was able to grant myself this grace and allow something that has been circling forever to finally, blessedly land.

When we are children, safety is something that is supposed to be a no brainer. But so many of us grow up with a pervasive feeling of safety’s fleeting properties. I don’t think any parents ever intend for this to be their children’s experience, but it so often is. Financially, emotionally, sexually, physically, things happen to us as we grow up that cause a person to be oriented towards finding and creating safety or refusing to seek safety because it just doesn’t register as something that is either possible or likely.

It is a new thought process for me. I know the place I have been most unsafe in my life is in my romantic relationships. Selecting unsafe people, mostly those that were not “bad” people but people who were broken and damaged and could only inflict pain because that was all they had to offer.

I know that I move toward the broken. I move toward the pain. I move toward the abusive. I think I did this as a life long strategy in being able to neutralize it. Somehow in my deluded mind, I thought that if I could just get close enough to the indifference, the malignant or the dangerous, I could ventilate it, alter it, morph it into something else.

What I never realized until yesterday was that I was the most unsafe person in my life, because I was refusing to acknowledge or even recognize that I was continually and habitually selecting people who were and are unsafe. So that made me fundamentally unsafe for me. And that is kind of great news because while I cannot make the world a safer place, or men safer, or change the past, I can allow this new and revealing truth to take root in my life and change who I am in relation to safety.

I cannot stop the world from doing what it does. I cannot corner the market on safety and lock it down. But I can be more selective about who I grant access to and who I set up hard and razor covered boundaries with. This I have control over. And for someone who grows up believing the world is a very unsafe place, control is what I have been seeking always. Of course, in all the wrong ways and my strategies have been largely unproductive…but still, I have worked tirelessly to ensure a level of control in my life.

All because I was behaving in ways that only made me feel more unsafe. Me. I picked up the mantle of unsafety and then I ran with it, pretending all the while that I was doing something else all together…

Sometimes, you leave therapy in tears, sometimes you leave feeling so broken, sometimes you leave feeling hopeful and powered up. Yesterday I left feeling resolved. Resolved to create a life from which I do not need to escape. One where I am a safe person and I only allow other safe people in my life. I no longer need to move towards the chaotic or confusing. I walked out of therapy yesterday empowered to be the most safe version of me ever.

And that feels like rounding a corner where I have been forever stalled. Free now to walk down any street I like, provided I have evaluated the feeling of safety for myself, and calculated the risk. Sure, there are some streets I will not walk any longer, but there are plenty of new ones that I now have access to…Now, I finally feel like I can address the real issue. It is not the streets I wandered, but the burdens I carried with me that caused me to repeatedly select that all too familiar hell instead of making choices that would lead me to an unfamiliar heaven.

Wow, that feels pretty huge…

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Erin Schaden

Who am I? I am all that I write, all that I learn, share and grow. Read and find out? Check out www.nakedrandomthoughts.com for more.