Tag Archives: life

What We Mean When We Say “Safety”

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When people talk about safety, I’m feeling that we usually think of it in very narrow terms, such as the following:

  • Physical harm,
  • Rules,
  • Boundaries,
  • What’s “allowed” and what’s not.

Those things matter, but they’re a baseline and somewhat obvious.

As I’ve been figuring out my path over the past few years and sort myself out, I’ve realized there’s a much deeper nuance we might be tippy toeing around. We know it’s there, we just don’t bring it to the forefront of thought.

I’d like to talk about safety especially in the context of belonging — I’m talking about something broader and quieter. Something most of us feel instinctively but rarely name.

Safety is what allows a person to stay.

Safety Is Not the Absence of Harm

Safety isn’t just the absence of violence or overt cruelty.

A room can be technically “safe” and still feel hostile.

A group can follow every rule and still make people shrink.

A space can say everyone is welcome and quietly punish those who test that claim.

Real safety isn’t about what doesn’t happen.

It’s about what does.

What People Are Scanning for When They Enter a Space

When someone walks into a room — especially someone who has been marginalized, traumatized, or repeatedly excluded — they are scanning constantly. I know I do, subconsciously, asking questions like:

  • Am I welcome here, or merely tolerated?
  • What happens if I say the wrong thing?
  • Will I be ignored, corrected, mocked, or dismissed?
  • Who seems relaxed, and who seems guarded?
  • Is attention given freely, or does it come with a cost?
  • What happens when someone is vulnerable?
  • Do people stay consistent, or do rules change depending on who you are?

This isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.

People learn very early what it costs them to be visible.

Safety Is Predictability

One of the most important and underrated components of safety is consistency.

People feel safer when:

  • responses are predictable
  • kindness isn’t revoked without explanation
  • boundaries are clear and stable
  • feedback doesn’t come wrapped in shame
  • affection doesn’t suddenly disappear

You don’t have to be perfect to be safe. but I propose you do have to be reliable.

Inconsistent warmth is one of the fastest ways to make a space feel unsafe.

Holding Space Is an Active Practice

We often talk about “holding space” as if it’s passive. It’s not.

Holding space means:

  • letting others take time without rushing them
  • allowing discomfort without trying to fix it
  • resisting the urge to center yourself
  • noticing who hasn’t spoken — and why
  • not punishing people for being careful
  • not demanding performance as proof of belonging

Holding space doesn’t mean lowering standards or abandoning boundaries.

It means enforcing them without humiliation.

Safety Is About Not Making People Earn Their Right to Be There

Many spaces claim to be inclusive but quietly expect newcomers to prove themselves.

To be confident enough. Interesting enough. Resilient enough. Easy enough.

That’s not safety — that’s audition culture.

Safety exists when people don’t have to minimize themselves, overperform, or apologize for taking up space just to remain welcome.

Why Safety Comes Before Belonging

Belonging is often framed as something people should choose. I have argued in previous posts that choosing belonging requires safety first.

Without safety:

  • the nervous system stays alert
  • risk feels dangerous instead of exciting
  • connection feels temporary
  • withdrawal feels like self-protection

People don’t fail to belong because they lack courage.

They struggle because safety hasn’t been established yet.

What It Looks Like to Create Safety

Creating safety doesn’t require special training or perfection. It looks like:

  • saying hello and meaning it
  • following through on what you offer
  • being clear instead of clever
  • naming mistakes without shaming
  • staying curious instead of defensive
  • noticing power dynamics instead of pretending they don’t exist

Most of all, it looks like showing up the same way tomorrow as you did today.

Consider that safety Is an Invitation to Stay

When safety is present, something subtle changes.

  • People breathe differently.
  • They stop scanning exits.
  • They take small risks.
  • They stay five minutes longer.
  • That’s how belonging begins.
  • Not with declarations.
  • Not with slogans.
  • But with consistency, care, and the quiet signal:

You’re okay here. You don’t have to disappear.

A Final Thought

If you run a group, host a space, lead a team, or simply care about community, here’s a question worth sitting with:

What does someone have to do in your space to remain welcome?

The answer will tell you more about safety than any mission statement ever could.

Cracking the Code on Belonging

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For most of my life, people told me I needed to choose belonging.

  • “Put yourself out there.”
  • “Find your people.”
  • “Claim your space.”

And I believed this overly simplified messaging and even tried it on for size.

No matter how hard I tried, belonging always felt fragile. Conditional. Like something I could lose without warning.

For a long time, I assumed the problem was me. It wasn’t.

I’m sharing this as a celebration, not for sympathy, but for those who may be wondering the same thing in their life, that have lived a different truth, with a similar outcome.

As a child, I moved schools constantly, not because I was difficult—but because of circumstance. New cities, new systems, adults making decisions doing their best without understanding what instability does to a child despite their own similar experiences.

By the time I was twelve, I had already learned an unspoken lesson: Connections don’t last.

At one school, I was told—publicly—that belonging was a choice. That if I didn’t feel like I belonged, that was on me.

The message was simple: Try harder.

What I felt wasn’t motivation. It was shame, because being told to choose belonging doesn’t work when your body doesn’t feel safe enough to try.

Here’s what we don’t say often enough:

  • Belonging isn’t confidence.
  • It isn’t charisma.
  • It isn’t effort – although I think it does require effort

Belonging requires safety.

Belonging, for me, meant feeling welcome and connected without minimizing myself or apologizing for taking up space.

Without safety, the nervous system won’t cooperate—no matter how much you want connection.

While my story comes from relationships, this pattern shows up everywhere—in workplaces, families, communities, and classrooms—anywhere people are told to “belong” without first being made safe.

So instead of belonging, I adapted.

I learned to scan rooms. To read people quickly. To become independent early.

Those skills looked impressive. They helped me succeed, but they weren’t belonging.

They were survival.

From the outside, I appeared capable and self-sufficient.

Inside, I was armored.

Independence wasn’t freedom—it was protection. Love, when it appeared, felt temporary and withdrawable.

So I learned not to get too comfortable.


When Everything Shifted at Once

There wasn’t one breakthrough moment, but there was a period when several sources of stability shifted at the same time—and my old strategies stopped working.

A long-term relationship was ending; at the same time, another important relationship felt suddenly uncertain.

What mattered wasn’t the details—it was the impact.

I found myself in a familiar place:

  • not feeling safe,
  • not feeling secure,
  • bracing for abandonment.

The fear underneath it wasn’t new.

It was fear of abandonment—the belief that closeness is temporary, that stability doesn’t last, and that eventually you’ll be left managing on your own.

For the first time, I couldn’t think my way out of it. I couldn’t independence my way through it, and that’s when I had to face something important:

  • This fear wasn’t irrational.
  • It was learned.

This is where therapy stopped being optional, not to eliminate the fear—but to understand it.

That fear wasn’t weakness. It was adaptation.

Once I stopped treating it as something shameful, something surprising happened.

I stayed with it. and people stayed too. Not everyone, not perfectly, but enough.

They didn’t withdraw when I hesitated. They didn’t punish me for being guarded. They didn’t disappear when things got uncomfortable.

They were consistent and consistency taught my nervous system something it had never learned:

I don’t have to disappear to survive this.

That realization didn’t fix everything, but it gave me a foothold.

The Mirror Shift

In therapy, I learned a metaphor that reframed my relationships: mirrors.

Some people hold small mirrors. They can only see part of you—the part that fits their worldview.

Others hold larger mirrors. They have the capacity to see more of you, including the complicated parts.

Understanding this freed me from chasing belonging where it wasn’t possible—and allowed me to invest where I was actually being seen.

Belonging as Practice

Here’s the idea that changed my life:

Belonging isn’t something you find. It’s something you practice—once safety exists.

Not by performing, not by proving, not by demanding space; but by arriving less guarded, by staying present, by taking up space without apology.

Over time, the room doesn’t grant permission.

It recognizes you.


Belonging Reconsidered

I still have old reflexes. Healing isn’t linear, but I no longer live in survival mode.

I no longer confuse independence with isolation, and I no longer chase belonging where it can’t exist.

The blackout curtain burned down.

What remains is light—sometimes steady, sometimes flickering—but real.

So if you’ve struggled with belonging, I want you to hear this clearly:

Nothing was wrong with you.

If belonging felt impossible, it may not have been absent—it may have been unsafe.

We tell people to “put themselves out there,” to “choose belonging,” without asking a more important question:

Is this space actually safe enough for someone to belong?

So I’ll leave you with this:

Where in your life have you been told to belong—without being made safe?
What would it take—in your relationships, your workplace, your community—to make belonging possible?

I have many wonderful people in my life in both my personal and work life who have seen me and have provided that space, and I’ve seen a generational shift has been amazing.

Learning to live with anxiety

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I live with anxiety.

It’s something that I really didn’t have an understanding of until I considered that I may be living with it, researched it, and the pandemic, plus some brewing personal situations that I needed to resolve was really the impetus for me figuring it out.

I think, when people think about anxiety, they think of the stereotypical suburban housewife in the 80s and earlier, taking Valium, not able to cope with things; which does a real disservice to women and stigmatizes what anxiety is, and how it can be treated.

We’ve come a long way since then and while mental health is still misunderstood, the treatments, compassion and care that exists today versus what I’ve seen friends go through, say, in the 80s is night and day.

NOTE: This blog entry discusses my mental health journey and while aspects here might help you, I am not a mental health expert and I advise you that if any of what I have written resonates with you, do consider speaking with a therapist.

Consider being in a situation that involves someone else where your mind is racing trying to figure out all the angles, possibilities and outcomes of the situation in advance so you’re prepared to get through any variant of the situation – a perpetual what if machine.

You’re nervous about saying the right thing in the right way because it’s super important to you, you have often been misunderstood in life, so you want to make sure you’re heard and understood. It consumes you and takes up valuable cycles you could be using to focus on other things in your life.

You become irritable, emotional – you want to do the right thing- you want to do the right thing for yourself, you also want to be considerate and do the right thing for the person you need to talk with and open up to, but you can’t because you’re trying to find the perfect way to meet your needs, their needs, to be sensitive to the other person and true to yourself.

You agonize over it.
You beat yourself up.

At least, in how anxiety has been showing up for me, this has been a common scenario. I recognize that anxiety shows up in a multitude of different ways for different people. Overcoming and learning to live with anxiety is a unique journey for everyone.

There are a few approaches I figured out for myself that seemed to work

  • I write it out as it helps to get out of your head – a theme – and allows me to collect and organize thoughts. I can spin so hard, its very hard to keep thoughts organized.
  • I talk to others to get out of my head – starting to see a theme? Mainly because I have the sense to say, “I need help!”. I know I’m stuck inside, and need to check in with someone else who is outside the situation to get a reality check, to be challenged and ultimately to help stop that spinning so I could do what I needed to do – which was to talk the person I really needed to.
  • In some situations I’m able to talk directly to the person, which really is how it should be, but it’s not as smooth as it really should be, and even in those moments, when talking things out, my head can be spinning hard.

That spinning is not kind, it will pull in other baggage, and it’s very hard to dig out. I knew that if I talked directly to the person involved about the situation I’m spinning about, it’s not going to be pretty. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

In all honesty, no matter how weird or meandering or even ugly the path to the resolution to the situation you’re in is, dealing with it straight up is actually better. The people that can and do see past your baggage will be the ones that will help you figure things out and support you in seeing through your anxiety and triggers.

The character of Anxiety in Inside Out 2, a recent movie from Disney-Pixar, anthropomorphizes a great representation of anxiety. I really feel that if I had this story growing up, it may have given me some good food for thought or at least planted a seed where I could have realized earlier what was happening and lessened the impact on my life.

I’m not going to talk here about how I was able to connect the dots that lead to me learning how to mitigate my anxiety as it did involve some unconventional methods. The parts I will talk about are

  • it did involve looking at situations that were triggering me. At the time I was dealing with triggers constantly going off from multiple sources – I am surprised I kept it together. For me, this was typically the starting point for where anxiety starts for a given situation.
  • I had the sense to take the time to understand why I was triggered – what in my past is trying to inform me that I’m in some form of “danger zone”? This part of my looking inward journey was huge and I had to build courage to go there and face my interpretation of the past, and heal from it. I had to go back and deal with my past.
  • I spent time with my therapist to talk through what I was seeing and experiencing.
  • Most importantly, I have some amazing family around me who gave me:
    • a safe space for me to be able to deal with whatever I was dealing with in real time as things came up,
    • while they called me on my shit, it was clear they had my back and loved me and stood for me being a better Iain, and they were invested in being part of my life just as I wanted them in my life,
    • the space to make mistakes and learn from them,
    • reminders that I was worthy of that support and love,
    • a voice, that would be listened to, where I felt heard, and people took the time to understand me and what I was dealing with,
    • where I could get reassurance and learn to trust that reassurance,
    • where I could express emotion and not feel locked up, that i was wrong for just feeling and expressing that emotion – that my emotions are real and valid,
    • challenged me in a good thought provoking way – during that whole period I was constantly hearing “Get out of your head, Iain”,
    • giving me the love and respect that I really needed to get through such a weird space that I happened to get into, that I needed to dig out of.

While only I could do the work, having that support network was what I really needed to sort myself out. Definitely a gift the universe has given me.

Today, I can say my mind is the quietest it has ever been, ever. I cringe thinking about the times it lead to awkward and explosive situations. I’m not comfortable with it, and all I can do is accept that it happened and where required clean it up. learn from it and be a better person.

Anxiety has shaped my life for an incredibly long time. I can go back to my childhood where it started. I have no idea if it’s something that I’m predispositioned towards or a learned behaviour – I suspect a combination of both.

I certainly recognize what I went through, and the situations that made me a pro at the spin and keeping things to myself. My strong independent streak because I couldn’t rely on or didn’t even have the support I should have had when I was younger, and keeping things to myself as a result, among other things, all this adds up, and I am not surprised at how this turned out. It was a perfect storm.

I am proud of the man I’ve become, I’m proud of the hard work I’ve done on myself to be a better human. The true me has always been upbeat, personable, hardworking, someone who wants to do the right thing, make the world a better place and an introvert-leaning ambivert willing to look inwards,

The people that matter, I know, are also proud of me. I would not be where I am without them.