When Safety Feels Too Snug
The day comes when it's time to wander out and smell the world again.
This morning, I went out for a walk around the block.
This in and of itself isn’t particularly newsworthy, so let me add in a small point of data.
Three years ago today, while climbing at the local bouldering gym, I fell from the wall and fractured my ankle in three places.
I didn’t know at the time how much my life had just changed. I was pretty calm when it happened. I was surrounded by a supportive group of climbing friends, who stayed with me and held me–quite literally, stabilized my leg–while we waited for the paramedics, who proceeded to give me the good drugs and then I was fucking high as a kite.
There was so much I didn’t know. I thought the accident itself was the hard, scary part. I’d never broken a bone before. I didn’t know how long & scary the recovery would be. It wouldn’t have occurred to me then that taking a shower was about to become way scarier and more painful than falling off the climbing wall. I didn’t anticipate that I would develop a dependence to pain meds, and that the process of weaning myself off of those, and the intense nausea that would develop as a result, would fuck up my digestion for **checks notes** well for at least three more years.
I was so gung-ho, I started going to physical therapy right away, like a good little yoga therapist. I was determined to be just the best PT student. I wanted to be back on the wall, back to climbing, which was then a new but intense passion, as soon as possible.
I didn’t know then that we would be hit by a pandemic in two months’ time, that the world would shut down and that all access to the PT and bodywork that I desperately needed would vanish, right when it would’ve been time for me to start putting weight back on my leg. I would not walk again until Easter, which was in mid-April; I didn’t drive again until July.
I had no clue that my injury and the pandemic’s combined two-punch would compound and essentially level my life to the ground. The focus of my entire life, both personally and professionally, was to rebuild a foundation of safety for myself. In the aftermath of this sea-change (including the Black Lives Matter uprisings following the death of George Floyd) I started to refine my focus from yoga therapy to developmental trauma: I changed my Insta handle from @yinyogamagic to @the.trauma.witch; I launched my membership program, Safe Haven, that would run for a year and a half; I took the level 1 NARM training which changed my whole world.
Injuries, losses, grief, both personal and collective, have a way of bringing up to the surface all of our previous unhealed, un-tended-to wounds. I know I was far from being the only one who was nursing some old hurts along with the fresh ones at that time: the utter failure of our government officials to care for us in the face of the pandemic activated a lot of developmental trauma for lots and lots of folks I was talking to.
So it made sense, then, to make my world really small, and really manageable. To focus on feeling safe so that I could heal, to focus on feeling safe so that I could help my kids navigate their worlds being turned upside down by the abrupt lockdown, to focus on feeling safe so that I could reimagine a life outside of yoga studios and yoga therapy offices. (Maybe one day I’ll tell you how magical my office was, how hard we had to work to set it up, how wildly I loved it.)
And that’s what I did. I learned how to feel safe with myself, with my mending ankle. I learned how to feel safe moving my business entirely online. In learned to feel safe in my wonderful cocoon of a space when we finished converting half our garage into a bedroom/office/bathing sanctuary for me in September 2020. I created rituals and routines that wore deep grooves into my days, grooves whose predictability and snugness kept this fledgling feeling of safety on track.
It was hard. And it worked like gangbusters. In the three years since the one-two punch of my injury and the pandemic, I experienced more healing in my relationship with myself & my body, with my needs & feelings, with my creativity & my spirituality, with my partners & loved ones than I had previously thought possible. I fully came home to myself for the first time of my life.
It felt wonderful. Until it started to feel too small, too squeezy. Until I slowly started to realize I wasn’t meant to stay there.
Last week I wrote about change: how creating change is both what we’re made for, AND how change is fundamentally threatening to a traumatized nervous system. That newsletter included the following sentence:
It’s possible to be so focused on safety, on staying small and the same so life feels manageable and predictable, that we forget that we’re not here to remain an acorn, a caterpillar. We’re not here to stay put. We’re here to change and grow and become.
Beginning in the fall, I started to feel restless, itchy for something new. It slowly started to dawn on me that the small, predictable, cozy life I had built since my injury had maybe fulfilled its purpose, and that it might be time for something different, something more. I was simultaneously bored, and also terrified about attempting to put more on my plate. My accident strongly reinforced the trauma-fueled notion that taking risks, especially physical risks, would have devastating consequences, and was best avoided entirely.
Our being isn’t ever a singular thing. Each of us is in fact a community of parts, and we’re always negotiating between the parts of ourselves that have vastly different needs. For three years I prioritized the needs of the part of me that desperately needed to feel safe. I did such a good job of it, in fact, that the part of me that is untouched by trauma, the part that longs to explore and experiment, the part that thrives on curiosity and stimulation started to get itchy to stretch its legs.
I named my trauma repair membership1 Safe Haven because its purpose was to help members become a safe haven for themselves, so they could be a safe haven for each other. Feeling a sense of safety in our relationships in our early childhood is what makes experimentation and exploration possible: a toddler will wander and explore away from their caregiver until an invisible inner thread tugs them back to their caregiver for safety. Once they're reconnected with that sense of safety, they're free to wander and discover again. Through repetition, the child learns that they can count on returning to this sense of safety, and that enables them to wander further and further afield, until one day they don't need to come back again because they are their own secure base.
For trauma survivors, having never had that crucial initial relationship to our caregivers as a secure base, rebuilding a sense of safety is both laborious and necessary. We can be so invested in our efforts to feel safe and become our own secure base that we forget that solely feeling safe was never meant to be the end goal: it was always meant to be a place to start from, to wander away from. Yes, of course, we needed to build that safe haven. But we were never meant to remain there. We were always meant for more.
More can be such a small thing. I’ve been so fearful of overextending myself that even the thought of going for regular short walks has felt overwhelming for most of the last three years. It’s not only been hard to go out walking, it’s been scary to admit that I want to walk regularly.
Going for a walk on the day of the anniversary of my accident is the kind of small big deal that lasting, sustainable change is made of. It felt good to go outside, to move my body. It felt good to notice that my body wanted to move, a testament to all the ground, metaphorical if not literal, that I covered since the accident.
Spring is already happening here in Central Texas. The leaf buds are ripening on my neighbor’s peach tree; I noticed the cleavers are out in the wet, shaded places. The Carolina chickadees are back to delight us with their sweet, slightly mournful song.
The purpose of building that safe, secure base for myself was always to, one day, wander back out again. This healing pause was always meant to lead to more exploration and growth. I’ve learned to move more slowly now, both of necessity and also by choice. I can come back to safety whenever I need to.
Right after I take another little exploratory stroll around the neighborhood.
🌈 I loved the concept of “mental health mosey” from at blackforager on Insta and this reel captures the mood of my own little walks.
🌈 This post by
resonates deeply, and is really a companion piece to today's newsletter.
🌈 Speaking of
, her latest Substack newsletter also hit home, and inspired these journal pages.
🌈 Lots of truth bombs & mic drops on the topic of attachment and relationships on this episode of Glennon Doyle’s podcast.
🌈 A book that completely and irrevocably changed my life forever.
🌈 Loved this conversation with
on the blessings and complexities of land ownership.🌈 Hugely crushing on this track by The Midnight that’s like 1987 in a bottle.
I closed the doors to the membership in December 2021.
This is all so beautiful, so resonant, so comforting and supportive to read. Thank you for sharing -- and for creating something from what I shared. It feels like a gift to see from afar. <3
This resonates so so deeply. Having broken a femur in a bicycle accident in the midst of the pandemic was the worst and the best thing that happened to me. A similar journey of building myself a safe haven, and now stretching my legs and trusting myself that it is ok to go out there. Thank you for sharing your experience.