"Safe place"

My third therapist is pleasant and more focused than the last who had to leave for personal reasons. She asked: Is there a place where you feel safe?  This is a standard thing, apparently, in EMDR work (a type of therapy often used in longer-term or complex trauma) because there is a preparation/stabilisation phase before activating traumatic material. The therapist wants to know whether your nervous system can access even a small calm/safe state or resource to help you return to the present, regulate distress, and close sessions safely.

When the second therapist had asked me this question, I thought about of my tent. There, I don't expect to be attacked although I did once camp with someone whose locked car was attacked by a thief breaking a window right next to him as he slept. In my tent, there are no demands, no pressure, no jobs besides those tasks I bring with me.

Camping at the place in Devon that has sometimes felt for like a sanctuary, I am immersed in nature: the hoot of three kinds of owl at night, crickets chirruping in the day, the calls of birds at dawn, the scurrying of small creatures in the undergrowth.  But recently, I went to an event there where the grass was long, the host had Lyme disease for the fourth time, though was perfectly sanguine about it.  Still, I had picked a more public tent pitch than usual and felt exposed. The thermometer hit 40 degrees and the tent, in full sun, was uninhabitable all day.

Camping elsewhere, recently I wasn't given a choice of pitch and rather than being tucked away in my choice of corner beside a hedge I again felt exposed, in my little pocket of vulnerable polyester, to the gaze of strangers in fortress-like campervans, 

In yet another site this year I was attacked through the night by seagulls pecking at the fabric, which at first felt remarkably like someone banging violently on the tent. So, no, my tent doesn't feel all that safe anymore.

So when the third therapist asked this question about a safe location, I considered the tent but this time, rejected it.

The  next thing that came to mind was the memory of a particular dance. Actually, it wasn't even the dance I remembered, it was the embrace as a place of safety.  Place is important considering the next question she asked. It was a sense of safety in the embrace at a moment of stillness and connection. The safety came I think from this sense of being held, not just literally, but in some sense, relationally, yet outside time, meaning, impossibly, except for in that very moment.  How, then, that sense of safety could persist across time is puzzling.

The person embracing I don't know particularly well. In fact I was surprised this came to mind at all. I didn't mention it to the therapist because how can you describe a dance embrace with someone you don't really know and that you experienced once, as a place of safety? 

There was no invitation I was aware of from that dancer again for a year which, despite all my experience of, knowledge about and confidence in "not taking things personally" caused other issues that I sat upon, hard. So had I been asked me to think consciously and rationally about a safe place, rather than intuitively, which is where a lot of therapy work seems to happen, for that reason that embrace was about the very last place I would have suggested. 

I realised later perhaps it is precisely that kind of embodied safety, especially a kind of relational safety that could be so key to this work. On calm, rational reflection, would I choose that embrace, that moment held outside of time as my safe place now? No, because I still distrust a sense of safety that stands in relation to a person, even in a memory, even when the sense of safety was more to do with the embrace, the moment, the embodied sense, than the character and traits of the person it belonged to. Is that a mistake, that rational choice over the intuitive one? I'm not sure.

So I said no, there was no place of safety.  At the time, I had forgotten about floating. Floating in the empty lido at Droitwich on that journey, during the strange week of dissociation and disconnection that led me, unexpectedly to Wilderness Tango for the first time, became a later reference point for safety.
 It's apparently a common motif for people in this context.

The therapist asked if, instead, I had a person.  Considering the nature of my experiences, this was never likely.   But I considered two friends who had come to my aid last month when they didn't need to, who had never harmed me, or caused me to shrink back.  But people are fickle and people change, especially beyond the context of one particular moment. I didn't want to hang my hat there. So I said, no, I couldn't think of anyone either.

What about in fiction or films? she said, but I thought: No.  They just don't feel real enough.

I had done some work with Internal Family Systems on my own. One identifies often  "parts" of yourself. that are really behaviour, thought or I supposed even physical patterns that evolve to serve particular situations. I am not sure how you are supposed to do it, but I imagined my parts as people with obviously dominant characteristics.  These patterns can get stuck and loop or trigger when they don't need to, preventing a healthy evolution.  I have, for example, unsurprisingly a  strong "watcher" or vigilant part.

I hadn't read too much about IFS because I hadn't wanted to influence my experiencing of it. Several of my own "parts" stand in relation to something like an outdoor fire circle. At the focal point of this fire was a centred, grounded, wise part who I was surprised to eventually understand was also a part of me. Apparently it is the core self. I wasn't sure if this was what the therapist wanted or rather something outside of me. She asked about the colour of this part, the relevance of which I haven't yet explored.

At this point, I realised I had no safe place, nor person.  Since my body, this mandatory housing I inhabit, had let me down or alarmed me repeatedly over the last year, that  didn't feel safe either.  

In the next session the therapaist realised that nature for me is a great solace and counselled not to underestimate that power. My backyard is a small, north facing area of small stones on concrete but over the last few years about a hundred species have decided, upon my scattering wild seed I find in late summer, to make this place their home. It might sound mawkish to say I greet my plants, each time I come home or leave home but I do have some sort of communing with them, much like anyone who walks around a garden. Dad's first enthusiasm, on my arriving at their house, was for me to accompany him on a walk around his garden so he could point out the changes.

So I acknowledge the plants, which I do not consider "mine". I see them, stop and pause, notice them, give them my attention, recall their changes, consider what they might need, whether they are starting to be thuggish or failing to thrive.  As I see their changes and what they are doing and drink in their beauty, really, the miracle of their existence, what they have come from, the specific site in which a seed became a plant, I will also hear the buzz of an insect or the soft brush of a bird's wing in the undergrowth. These things give me a profound sense of peace and pleasure and presence, which I suppose is a kind of safety.