The Value of Safety

A few years ago I worked with a coach on identifying my values. We made lists of different qualities and ranked them in order of importance – top 10 whittled down to top 3. I was very surprised when Safety came up as my top value. I had always thought of myself as pretty adventurous. I was a freelance singer for many years, which meant living from gig to gig, unsure where my next pay cheque was coming from. I traveled around the world, mostly on my own, to sing or work on cultural projects. And I was practiced at pushing myself out of my comfort zone – feeling the fear and doing it anyway – a major part of any performer’s life. 

So how could Safety be my top value? I thanked the coach and inwardly dismissed it. Other values appealed to my ego much more – Authenticity, Kindness, Courage – so I adopted those instead and tried to forget that Safety had ever come up.

But it wouldn’t go away. Something about it kept niggling at the back of my mind and would not be ignored. 

A value is not simply something you like. You can give value to many different things, mostly related to your immediate needs, which come and go connected to your circumstances. If I’m cooking I can value a frying pan, if I’m shopping I can value my credit card, if I’m reading I can value quiet. These are not values. Values are deeper than immediate needs. Values speak to the person you aspire to be and the qualities you recall when making decisions. If Safety is a value, then I would have to choose it every time I’m called upon to take an action. 

So I started to wonder what it would mean to think about Safety as a value I could choose rather than an answer to a need? The implication is that by choosing Safety I’d be choosing a pretty limited kind of life, full of the kind of “health and safety” directives that govern every aspect of public life in the UK, which is what I’d reacted to with the coach in the first place. It sounded pretty dull to me and maybe that’s what you think too.

The first thing would be to find a definition of Safety I could get on board with. All the definitions I found online were about the absence of something else – risk, danger, loss, injury, threat – but nothing on the tangible quality of Safety itself. So that left a pretty open space for my own exploration.

As a practicing therapist, coach, trainer and project leader, working with hundreds of people of all ages around the globe in vastly different life situations, there were plenty of people I could ask. Without knowing exactly what it is, it is nevertheless clear to me that everyone needs a level of Safety to be able to operate successfully in the world. Safety is the primary need of all people, whether they consciously know it or not, hardwired into the human brain and nervous system from womb to tomb. This need transcends culture, gender, religion, nationality and race. It shows up in boardrooms and classrooms, dining rooms and locker rooms, professionally, personally and socially. Safety dictates health outcomes, educational attainment  and financial success. It is promised by governments, drives elections and writes policy. Although sometimes guaranteed it can be easily and suddenly taken away – a shadow in a dark alley, the raising of a voice, a new law targeting a particular identity group, a declaration of war. The idea of Safety for one group can and has and is being used as an excuse to take away the Safety of another. The need for Safety connects us as a species and drives our behaviour. Because feeling safe or not feeling safe is the foundation of every other life experience and can be the difference between stagnation and flourishing, conflict and peace. 

Notice that I say “feeling” safe, not “being” safe. We’re getting closer to a definition here. Being safe depends on external things like physical location, other people and world events, which are largely out of our control. Feeling safe is a tangible, personal experience which happens in the body and mind.  Of course the two things are closely linked, but I have been with people living in a tent in a temporary refugee camp who had a strong sense of internalised Safety and others who felt deep anxiety sitting in my comfortable therapy room. The outside world is therefore only part of the equation. 

So what is that feeling? Before we go there let’s take a moment to look at what can get in the way of feeling it. For humans the ability to feel safe at any given moment is related as much to what may have happened in the past as what is happening right now. If you’ve been through difficult life circumstances or life threatening experiences, especially as a young person, this can seriously impact your ability to feel safe any time and anywhere afterwards.

We call this trauma. 

If you have trauma trapped in your nervous system the idea of “choosing” to feel safe seems as impossible as flying to the moon and back in an afternoon. Trauma is like a coiled spring sitting in the centre of your body, generating a vibration of threat whether the outside world is physically safe or not. Trauma actually closes down choice making centres of the brain. It takes away the ability to respond to events as the body mobilises itself to react defensively. It’s a kind of hyper-consciousness designed to overcome or escape threat and keep you alive until it passes. Those who want power understand this well, which is why control is effectively gained by the undermining of Safety. More on this later.

So how does this relate to the idea of Safety as a value? Both being and feeling safe seems so out of our control. There are real, imagined and remembered threats everywhere. Surely the safest thing is to stay home and avoid risks? But it turns out this isn’t good for us either. During the global pandemic of 2020/21 much of the world experimented with this and the result is a global mental health crisis instead. Arguably people feel less safe now than they did before they stayed home. 

What is the feeling they are missing? Acclaimed Canadian trauma therapist Gabor Mate tells us that “Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection”. I believe that this connection is first and foremost with yourself. Many of us have lost real connection with ourselves due to our addiction to external things. Instead this is a directing of attention inwards to the physical experience of existing inside your body. That physical connection to your actual bone, muscle and blood is the gateway to an inner emotional and psychological calm managed by the rest and digest function of your autonomic nervous system, which can switch off the vibrating signal of trauma and bring peace. Practiced over time and as the connection strengthens, there develops a trust and knowing of yourself you can feel deeply throughout all the levels of your being. This to me is Safety. This to me is your real home.

The second type of connection we need as humans is the connection to others. Although other people can often be the source of threat, the right other people are also a wonderful source of Safety. We’re hard wired to need other people. The presence of those we love and trust – human or animal – can switch on those same calming systems. If you can’t connect into your body on your own, someone else can help you get there. Safe relationships are also a kind of home. 

The third connection is to this wonderful planet we inhabit. Planet Earth is not just a backdrop to our activities, she is a living, breathing entity of her own. It is well documented that connection to nature has a calming affect on the nervous system, but safety also comes from feeling part of something bigger than ourselves – a community, a tribe, a nation, a place. As human animals we need to feel part of this wider web of existence, a link into something that brings meaning and gives us a purpose for living. This interlinking network of human and natural systems is our wider home and safety comes by feeling that there is somewhere we belong. 

So this connectedness is a definition of Safety that I can get on board with. Which brings me back to values. What I’ve learned through my work is that one of the most powerful things you can do on this planet is to provide enough Safety through your presence to help another human reconnect to their own sense of self. To choose Safety as a top value means to cultivate enough presence and connectedness in yourself to allow others to find themselves when they are with you. And this to me is a radical act because it requires a level of personal responsibility and awareness that only comes from really confronting the discomfort of all the things that can take that connected feeling away.

I believe that this internal feeling of Safety is the first step towards living a more exciting and purposeful life. Instead of wrapping yourself up in cotton wool and retreating from the world, this feeling of Safety can give you the confidence you need to dare to take your next small step towards a brighter tomorrow. 

If we were all to find value in that feeling, both for ourselves and for others, our world would be a vastly different place.