What is it like to not be safe? Here’s 31 signs that you might be affected by lack of safety
Not feeling safe is more common than you realise. You might not know that you don’t feel fully safe or that what you’re really seeking though your goals and actions in the world is deeper levels of safety.
There’s a few reason’s for this:
1. It’s pretty common to get stuck at the symptom level rather than enquire into the root cause.
For example, when you have a headache, you might seek to alleviate the headache by taking paracetamol, but you might not enquire further to understand what is causing the headache. It could be dehydration, postural misalignment, stress-related, caffeine withdrawal, tiredness or something else that really needs attention.
2. You may make an assumption or hold a belief about why you’re experiencing something.
For example, in my late 20’s, I assumed that my loneliness was because there was something wrong with me because everyone else seemed to be making it work. I didn’t understand that it was complex symptom resulting from my own experience of lack of safety.
3. You have never contemplated how safe you feel in the world and/or you haven’t tied together how feeling unsafe now or in your earlier life is contributing to your current experience.
To help you start joining the dots, here’s my list of 31 signs that a lack of safety might be impacting your life.
If you recognise one or more these signs within yourself as you read this list, please be kind and compassionate with yourself. This is an exercise in awareness and a starting point to understand why you might be experiencing these things in your life so that they can be healed and transformed.
31 signs of lack of safety
1. You are lonely.
Even if you have people around you, you have no real sense of home and belonging in the world. No one really knows you. You don’t feel known or truly seen or that you really matter. You might not even really know yourself so you are lonely within yourself.
2. You are isolated.
You might not trust people enough to let anyone close to you. You might have very few people in your life or you might have several or many people in your life but you keep them at a distance.
3. Your life lacks intimacy and connection because you don’t trust others.
You worry that people might hurt or betray you or you avoid the awkwardness or risk of being vulnerable.
4. You are guarded or wary.
You always have walls up. You are suspicious of what others want from you. You may walk on eggshells around other people.
5. You are constantly or regularly evaluating your environment for danger or risk of harm. In psychological terms, this is called hypervigilance and it might be happening outside of your conscious awareness.
You may even avoid people, places or situations because of pre-assessed everything that could go wrong or be unenjoyable.
6. You get triggered into fight, flight or freeze responses.
You are regularly angered or defensive. You might want to run away from events, situations or people, even ones that you want to experience or be in relationship with. You might show up and suddenly find yourself wanting to escape.
Or you might go into a deer in headlights kind of response, where you freeze, go blank, can’t think, become empty.
You might not know why any of these things happen.
7. You feel exhausted.
Lack of safety is hard on the body and adrenals because you are regularly in a state of fight/flight/freeze and hypervigilance.
8. You need a lot of approval, praise and attention from other people to feel okay.
9. You latch on to other people whether it’s a best friend or the one you hope will be “the one” because you feel better with them than when you are by yourself.
10. You make others happy at the cost of your own needs or happiness
You are more focused on the other person’s happiness than your own so you say yes when you want to say no. You worry if you say no or how you really feel or what you really want that they might abandon, reject or lash out at you or you’ll have to put up with them being in a bad mood.
11. You avoid conflict.
Any sign of conflict can send you into a freak out or panic, or you find yourself ready to defend yourself, or ready to escape the person or do anything you can to avoid the conflict.
12. You experience false safety.
Your essential needs are met – housing, job, friends, money in the bank, but you experience a sense of deadness and not really shining. You don’t take risks to grow or evolve. You don’t try new things. You have the same routine week in and week out. You stay in your comfort zone. There’s a blahness about your life. It might not feel bad but it doesn’t feel good either.
13. You are unable to realise and manifest your dreams and you’re not sure why.
14. You over-work, work too hard or are busy all the time and it’s not driven by joy or your inner authority.
15. You are always trying to make things perfect and you fear getting things wrong and making mistakes, especially in a public setting.
16. You worry a lot, secretly, out loud or unconsciously.
17. You go from relationship to relationship or spending a lot of time with friends or people even by an extrovert’s standards so you avoid spending time on your own.
18. You doubt your self and your intuition. You may find yourself overriding your gut instinct and then regretting it later.
19. You breathe shallow or lightly and hold your breath at times.
20. You hold back your self-expression and hide who you really are. You know you are doing this if you feel inauthentic and not quite yourself around people. You may even clearly sense that you are a wearing a mask or hiding behind a façade.
21. Life feels like a constant struggle or battle or just not going in your favour.
22. You feel misunderstood a lot, like no one gets you or understands you.
23. You experience panic or episodes of anxiety.
24. You feel like everyone else is better than you or something is wrong with you.
25. You don’t feel your body or that you are fully in your body.
It’s like your life force is off floating around you or somewhere else or that you’re empty or spacey.
26. You are often not fully present in your body or your life.
You want to be somewhere else other than where you are. You may even be fixated on a time in the future when you won’t be where you are or things will be better. You might zone out a lot.
27. You over-think and you live more in your head than in your body.
You make decisions from your head rather than from you inner authority, which usually comes through your body. Your style of authority (decision-making) depends upon your particular Human Design but it’s not usually in your head.
28. You experience stress or chronic stress regularly, over long periods of time or in repeating patterns.
29. You don’t know your own feelings or needs.
You have trouble naming your feelings and your needs. You don’t know what you really want.
30. You are often indecisive.
You have trouble making decisions on big or small things. You um and ah alot and put off making a decision until the last minute. You might look to others to tell you what you should do.
31. You are always planning ahead.
You don’t trust the flow or unfolding of life. Having an empty calendar or not having a plan feels terrifying.
As you come to the end of this article, I invite you to take a full breath in and a big slow exhale out. Feel your feet on the ground and the seat beneath you supporting you. You may have had some new insights or realisations or confirmations of things you already suspected. The important thing to know right now is that there is an intelligence inside every adaptive behaviour and the ones listed here were compensating for lack of safety and trying to help you.
Feel free to share any thoughts in the comments below or email me directly if you would like to share privately. I’d love to hear from you.
In my next article I will continue my exploration of the subject of safety and talk about why there isn’t enough safety in the world.
With love,
Kym x
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