Make Your Soul Your Safe Space

There’s a lot of talk in the therapeutic and self-help worlds about creating a “safe space.” Many of us who have experienced trauma or stressed out childhoods think about a “safe space” and think you gotta be BLEEPING me.

We don’t even know what a safe space is, let alone what it feels like, so imaging a tree by a river definitely ain’t gonna cut it. The physiological response to stress over sustained periods of time feels like a permanent, recurring problem we have no control over, it gets in the way of everything, and that, to put it mildly, just sucks.

A door slams and we jump. A partner’s mood shifts and our heart sinks. We struggle to stay focused at work in a stress-bound fog. We get irritable and controlling over nothing. Being us and often, being around us, is a BLEEPING delight, let me tell ya.

Lately, I have been walking through some exercises in an app called Breeze that has modules on childhood trauma. The exercises are useful, but I also highly recommend doing so in tandem with meeting with a licensed therapist. Confronting our childhood wounds is not for the faint of heart. One of the exercises was a step-by-step process of visualizing a “safe space” and it made me realize, holy BLEEP, I don’t have one. Worse still, I realized I never have. I have felt stressed and unsafe my entire life. It wouldn’t be a stretch to guess that I felt that way because my childhood homes did not feel safe.

This is not about blaming my parentage, although that is totally fair game these days. The comedian Gianmarco Soresi made this wonderfully hilarious and astute observation about his childhood, saying “if you were in a building with a BLEEPED up foundation, would you feel safer on the 36th floor?'“ My parents are good people who were trying to survive their own choices and they made a lot of mistakes. They could’ve done much, much worse, and they also could’ve done a lot better. Both of them probably know that, but their experience isn’t really the crux of the issue here. The reality is, I ended up with a systemic case of the jitters based on certain conditions in my most formative years.

So, what about that safe space? First, I tried imagining my home now. I am, after all, an adult paying a mortgage. Is it my bed? My backyard? Where in the BLEEP is it? I tried visualizing a tree near a river, but that just felt fake and amorphous, something I was forcing and could not attach to.

Then I realized something important - I am in the midst of considering a move, and therefore my safe space would probably have to travel with me. I also thought if anything, safety really has to be internalized and systemic. Suddenly, I realized that safety needs to be seated in my soul. It can’t really be my physical body, because that will change with time. It can’t really be my mind, because lord knows that gets me into trouble. But imagining my soul as a golden glowing place of warmth, comfort, and safety felt pretty good, so that’s what I’ve chosen.

Now, it may have been because it was a hazy day and the whole world was glowing. The sun was that copper, golden red that goes with it. It may also be because I was reading about Quakerism that morning and learned they believe each soul carries an Inner Light tied directly to God (or Good). It is also probably because I myself often associate my own faith with the sun, because it’s always there, always glowing, never fades or changes or goes away.

All of these things combined may have just swirled around in my brain to help me land on a simple, useful association to define my safe space as a golden, glowing, kind, compassionate seat of love inside myself. That or God hit me with a hammer to make sure I got it. I don’t really care either way, because I started the day knowing I had never had any place to feel safe and ended the day with a place to go to find it.