Do you have “safe people” in your life? If you’re reading this as an email, use the comment feature and let me know.
What is a safe person? Let’s answer that with a few real-life examples of what having a safe person looks like:
“I CAN get on the highway, but only if my partner is with me.”
“When my partner has to go out for even a little while, my anxiety goes through the roof because I’m afraid to be alone.”
“Whenever I feel really anxious I call my girlfriend and she talks me through it.”
Do any of these sound familiar to you?
We designate safe people based on the false assumption that they can rescue us, shield us, protect us, or otherwise intervene to keep us safe or alive when we panic or feel anxious or afraid. We think that our safe people somehow make us … safer. We see them as potential rescuers so we attach their presence and participation as conditions for doing anything that might trigger our threat response.
We expect our safe people - often those closest to us in life - to come and save us. That’s what support is, right?
Here’s bad news. Nobody is coming to SAVE you.
Before you hit the unsubscribe button, let me explain.
This has nothing to do with our safe people. In most cases, they’d be happy to save us. They love us, care for us, and want to support us. If they really did have to save us, they would. But they’re not coming to save us simply because we never actually need saving. We call it saving, but what our safe people are doing is soothing.
Soothing and saving are not the same things. You just have them confused at the moment. When a non-anxious person is feeling badly, they also want to feel better and be supported. But they are asking to be soothed, not saved. They feel bad, but they do not act as if this is an emergency. Soothing in that case is a nice thing. Dare I say an emotional luxury of sort. But not an absolute requirement.
For people like us, we want to be soothed too, but we see our state as predictive of some disaster so we mistakenly think that being soothed gets us out of danger. Same process. Totally different interpretation that leads us to demand that we be saved and to engineer our lives around that requirement in many cases.
Accept that nobody is coming to save you. Because you never need actual saving. You’re asking for soothing. Which is nice, but also not terribly productive when we see it as a condition for being OK.
And now that I think of it, this topic needs more discussion, so let’s do that tomorrow.
58. Nobody Is Coming To Save You