When we experience the world through our wounds, we are not experiencing things as they are. This is hard to accept especially if we are still using the lens of victim consciousness. We seek the world to become a “safe space” instead of investigating why we are having the experience over and over again.
Sure there are absolutely situations that are actually unsafe, but the majority of the time we are reacting to things that play out a previous wound.
I was having this conversation with @_angelgrant_ the other day about how people who fawn are terrified of me. And the reason we got down to is that fawning doesn’t work on me. I see right through it. I can’t be manipulated. And so if that’s your only strategy for talking to me you will either feel unsafe or you will step out of the reaction into connection and then it’s like “oh that’s not scary at all.”
For me, I have allowed my fight response historically to add a layer of defensiveness that didn’t serve me. I can look back from where I am now and see that many times I was setting a boundary tainted by this trauma.
There are different ways to work with this. On one level sometimes we really do need space to open, but if we just avoid anything that activated us then our lives are deeply limited in so many ways.
Practicing opening in the situation (if we know it’s us and we are not in actual danger) by slowing down and asking, “how would I like this to go”? And then you can practice doing it differently. It may take time, but every time we make a choice to do it differently we build a new program that we can hold ourselves.
Our trauma responses create a lot of the situations we are terrified of because the wound is asking for an opportunity to heal. So you can live in a bubble. But it will eventually burst.
