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WHAT IS SAFETY?
Our nervous systems are designed to detect and immediately respond, neurologically, to perceived danger. The psychotherapist Bonnie Badenoch describes this process:
Stephen Porges coined the world neuroception to talk about how our neurobiological being is genetically wired to detect safety, danger, and threat to life. As information comes into the senses, the meaning-making amygdala and associated circuits make an initial assessment about safety, below the level of consciousness, immediately triggering various neurobiologically adaptive responses. If there is a neuroception of safety, the myelinated branch of the 10th cranial nerve, the ventral vagus, inhibits the fight/flight response of the sympathetic nervous system and allows social engagement/secure attachment to unfold....If there is a neuorception of danger (but no fear for one's life), sympathetic fight-flight responses are automatically activated and social engagement is attenuated. If the situation worsens and the amygdala assesses threat to life, the dorsal vagus (the unmyelinated branch that runs from stomach to brainstem) comes into play and initiates a freeze response-similar to a terrified backyard rodent "playing possum" to avoid being eaten by the family dog. Again, secure attachment is stopped in its tracks." (Being a Brain-Wise Therapist, p.60)
So we are wired to track for, and respond to, safety and threats to survival. But notice the sequence of events in the nervous system that Badenoch describes: environmental information arrives at the senses, is registered by the senses, is then filtered through the amygdala and is assessed according to two categories, "safe" or "unsafe". Then according to the assessed level of threat (none to life-threatening), our nervous system is moved to either allow connection, disconnect in order to fight or flee, or freeze and inhibit all connection. But the pivotal event in this sequence is the assessment of safety.
The question of "what is safety?" is focused in on this assessment, because aside from maybe snakes, "safety" is not strictly pre-defined. More than an objective reality, safety is a neurological category that describes a state of being and relating rather than an object or state out there. If it were actually the latter, you couldn't have any difference among people in terms of what feels safe. Public speaking would be terrifying to everyone, then. But we know that's not true, as some clearly thrive on that exposure (as weird as that is...ahem).
This is not an academic question, either, because to the degree that we can change our definition of safety, we change our internal "f elt sense" of life (from unsafe to safe), and free up energy from defense to be put into connection and creativity. If we feel safe, we are involved in living, rather than only surviving. And this distinction, for folks with ongoing depression and/or anxiety, is pretty critical, because both of those mood states are essentially survival states, based in assessments of danger/threat. Changing those criteria changes everything.
(If this is feeling a tad abstract, there is a personal example at the bottom of this essay.)
This change of safety from an "objective reality" to a (very real) "subjective reality," itself is a vitally different perspective. Our nervous systems tend to be pretty literal. If a neroception is of danger, then it is assumed, at the pre-conscious level, that there really and truly and obviously is a danger. Yet the very sophistication of our brains and minds makes that problematic, to say the least. Because humans can symbolize reality, and represent them as imaginal/conceptual mental objects, and because safety is about how we are related to "the other," that neuroceptive wiring can equally be deployed in relation to an assessment of an idea as to a real lion standing over by the truck. We can be as unsafe with a concept or image (i.e., the amygdala can flash "unsafe" and enact neurological changes to deal with the threat) as a tangible external thing.
So: that's the downside of the relativity of safety. The upside is actually where humans have a capacity for freedom that animals, who lack our neurological sophistication, do not, being that we humans can restructure the rules on what feels (neuroceptively) safe or unsafe, increasing the former and decreasing the latter. And this is not a process of repression, either; this is actually a real and perceivable definition of more and more experience (sensory input, including from what Buddhists call the 6th sense, the mind) becomes tagged by the amygdala as "safe." Which is a huge deal, because the safer we feel (without phoneying up a safety through repression: "Everything is REALLY FINE!") the more we are neurologically allowed to connect and be in relationship, the more we see resources and supports, and the more open we are to experiencing joy and beauty. All of which is rendered moot (or muted) when some experience is tagged "unsafe."
EXAMPLE
Ok, so here is a personal example to try to ground this idea of safety as internally but not externally real:
I've never been fond of grey weather. Maybe there's an underlying susceptibility to low serotonin from my Scandinavian roots; maybe there's association from childhood growing up in the grim winters of Sacramento (low-hanging grey weather for months...). But my mood would often track how many clouds were blocking the sunlight: the more clouds, the more grey within.
But when I was 25, I was traveling in India and found myself walking down a hill from the Dalai Lama's residence, under oppressive grey skies. With all the Buddhism around, maybe there was a contact high, because I found myself very reflective. "What is going on here?  What is triggering all this gloominess?" As I looked, I saw that the grey weather was associated with a felt-sense of being unsafe: too exposed, too little resources, a depressed mood (perhaps chemical in origin, but then interpreted as itself dangerous, liable to deepen and be disabling). As I brought these to awareness-"oh, that's what 'grey weather' apparently means"-I was then able to start working on that connection. I.e., I could ask, using my analytical forebrain (and not just the reactive amygdala), "Well, is that actually true?"
I started checking what my amygdala had learned to tag as "unsafe," and in the process, unlearn and relearn what actually felt safe in the present moment, versus the rules for what was safe that had been built up over my lifetime. And in that change of the rules for assessing "grey weather" as dangerous, my actual experience of grey weather changed, because as I associated it with a sense of safety, my nervous system moved towards openness rather than shut-down, and therefore when I'd experience overcast, I would feel it openly and receptively. Which then goes around and deepens the sense of safety-I felt it and survived, and moreso, thrived!-and then more openness, and then more safety. At the end of which I can say that overcast rarely enacts a feeling of "unsafety," and therefore rarely impacts my mood.
As I've been saying, rewriting of the "rules of safety" is a Really Big Deal!
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