The personality trait I learned was a trauma response

and how to rewire your danger-safe cues

I looked around my room, trapped from the furniture that I had accidentally arranged into a barricade. I was rearranging my room for the third time in the three months since moving into a house by myself after my divorce. I was literally stuck in the corner with my bed frame, boxspring, dresser and lamp between me and the door. There was literally no way out. It was a small room and I had been lucky to fit a queen size mattress through the corner into the room at all - but I was convinced that I could rearrange it into multiple configurations, just like I always did. I always found a way, sometimes through sheer force of will.

But this time, I was stuck. I had created a chaotic puzzle for which there was only one solution - to put it all back. I slumped on the floor in defeat. I begrudgingly put each piece of furniture back to its original, and only, configuration. In that moment, I realized how to respect the limitations of myself and the world.

Rearranging my room, putting more holes in the wall, changing my hair colour - all of these were well-known traits of mine. Friends & previous roommates would expect a change in my furniture or my hair colour at least monthly. It was part of who I was - I didn’t realize it was actually a trauma response.

Chaos & change were familiar for me so that’s what my brain-body system was recreating, whether I liked it or not.

It took me a long time to rewire what was familiar to me - and it was wholly necessary. Here’s why.

What we experience in childhood gets coded in our brain as safe, not because it is but because it is familiar. Familiarity becomes equated with safe, even if it objectively isn’t. And because we are naturally drawn to what is familiar, we are always accidentally recreating our childhood environment - until we intentionally aren’t.

We are drawn towards what is familiar because it is predictable - the songs we like the most are the ones we know all the words to. Predictability is the foundation to a felt sense of safety because the body can anticipate what will come - there will be no surprises. This is why people with anxiety rewatch the same shows as a way of self-soothing: the predictability eases the nervous system to feel a felt sense of safety.

This also demonstrates the importance of creating somatic memory as a sign post for your body to return to. A somatic memory is a map that’s created based on our experiences - your pelvis learns to tense taking left turns after a fender bender, your shoulders go up when a notification arrives on your phone after a loved one was in the hospital. Somatic memory is what Bessel van der Kolk meant when he said, “the body keeps score.”

Since our body’s job is to keep us safe and alive, somatic memories act as a guidebook of what to avoid primarily. Avoiding danger is more of a priority than finding safety because it is easier to stave off danger in the first place than try to get out of danger alive. This is why our brains hold onto cringe-y memories; our brain wants to make sure those cringe-y moments don’t happen again so the memories are more salient and easier to access, unfortunately. Since we are attachment based beings and require relationships to survive, those cringe-y moments get coded in our brain as life threatening because rejection for social beings IS life threatening.

Predictability is one of the reasons we drop easily into roles in relationships - when we have a role, we have predictability. In a role, whether daughter, husband, child, spouse, sibling, employee, we have a script to follow. Knowing what is expected of us creates a sense of safety - the emotional equivalent of knowing what to do with your hands at a party. When we have a predictable role with a script to follow, there’s little risk.

(This is why reparenting ourselves and building secure attachment with ourselves is so important - secure inner attachment allows us to take appropriate risk because we trust ourselves to get us through no matter what we experience. We see secure attachment in children on the playground shouting “mom mom mom look see mom look mom you’re not looking”).

When we are faced with unpredictability (like a pandemic, starting a new job, meeting a new friend), our nervous system drops into DEFCON 50 and employs any strategy to keep us safe and alive - by recreating what is familiar. “This has worked before to keep us safe so it should work this time too.”

If what is coded as safe is only coded in such a way because it is familiar, before we concentrate on creating safety, we first have to ask “what is safe”. If we don’t first ask, “what is familiar to me”, in creating safety, we may actually be recreating something unsafe. Let me elaborate.

If feeling safe is unfamiliar - as in, if you don’t have a somatic memory of feeling safe, if feeling safe is UNCOMMON for you, then safety will actually be coded in your brain as unsafe. Not because it is, but just because feeling safe isn’t familiar. We can define safety as our parasympathetic nervous system engaged, trusting in yourself, others and the world that you’ll be protected, your existential needs of belonging, meaning and purpose are met.

When you haven’t experienced safety enough to create a somatic memory, your body has no map to follow because SAFE isn’t yet FAMILIAR. Your brain can accidentally mistaken safe for unsafe, just because it isn’t familiar.

Our job is to create a somatic memory of safety so that safety becomes familiar, so that safety actually feels safe for your body.

We create somatic memory through sensation. The next time you feel yourself encountering a sense of safety, notice:

1. What body sensations are present for you?

2. How do you know it is safety that you feel?

3. Knock on a wall and say out loud, “I feel safe right now.”

The more we connect with safe being safe, the more accurate your body cues can be.