Stop Waiting to Feel Safe to Heal: Why Building Capacity Matters More

You don’t need to feel safe first.

This is a trap I see a lot of people fall into, especially women who have done certain kinds of somatic healing, trauma healing, or nervous system work.

And I get it.

When I first started exploring deep trauma and old wounds in my own body and life, I needed to create more safety in my body before I had the capacity to fully meet and metabolize what was there.

Safety matters.

But just like anything else, “safety” can become another strategy for avoiding the very thing that needs to be met.

Another way we stay stuck.

Another way we hold ourselves back from living what we say matters.

When “feeling safe” becomes the goal, we miss out on life.

3 common pitfalls when we make feeling safe a prerequisite for living:

1. We wait to feel completely safe before we move toward what scares us.

We tell ourselves:

I need to feel safer first.

I need to regulate more first.

I need to heal this before I can do that.

I need to feel confident before I put myself out there.

So we wait.

We wait to have the hard conversation.

We wait to set the boundary.

We wait to leave the situation.

We wait to take the risk.

We wait to feel the grief, anger, fear, or intensity in our bodies.

And so we stay stuck.

2. We start to believe we are fragile.

This is where somatic healing can sometimes go sideways.

We become so focused on avoiding activation, discomfort, or dysregulation that we start interpreting any intensity in the body as a sign that something is wrong.

That discomfort means stop.

That fear means you aren’t ready.

That activation means you need more healing.

That difficult emotion means something needs to be fixed before you can move forward.

And suddenly, instead of building capacity, we’re organizing our lives around avoiding discomfort.

We keep preparing instead of living.

We keep regulating instead of participating.

We keep trying to get to some imagined state where nothing feels hard.

But being able to feel uncomfortable is part of being fully alive.

You are going to feel fear.

You are going to feel grief.

You are going to feel anger.

You are going to feel uncertainty.

You are going to feel intensity.

The goal isn’t to eliminate those experiences. It’s to become more capable of meeting them and to gain what you are meant to gain from them.

3. We make our definition of safety too small.

Oftentimes, when I work with clients who are stuck on the safety piece, I have them explore what safety means to them. And so often they discover they don’t really know what safety feels like in their bodies. They just have an idea of it in their mind.

And so many times they get to be surprised when suddenly they arrive (sometimes what feels to them like the first time) at a sense of safety that is real. That is true. That is tangible in their flesh and bones. 

And you guessed it…..it doesn’t come first. It comes through going into the thing they thought they needed to feel safer in order to feel.

Sometimes the real feeling of safety comes after we enter what once felt unsafe.

After we finally allow ourselves to feel the grief.

The rage.

The fear.

The Truth.

The hate.

The intensity we’ve spent years avoiding.

When we actually meet those experiences as BODY instead of endlessly thinking about them, something can change.

We discover:

I can feel this.

I can stay with myself here.

I can move through this.

I can respond instead of react.

I can handle more than I thought I could.

And that creates something deeper than the temporary relief of feeling safe.

It creates trust.

Trust in your body.

Trust in your ability to feel.

Trust in your ability to respond.

Trust that you can meet what life brings you with an unwavering sense of self.

That is a very different kind of safety.

So....maybe you don’t need more safety. Maybe you need more capacity.

This is where my approach to somatic healing starts to differ from the idea that we need to continually calm, regulate, or soothe ourselves before we can move forward.

Sometimes we do need to slow down.

Sometimes we absolutely need more support.

Sometimes it’s not the time to go into the hard thing.

But sometimes the next step isn’t more safety.

It’s capacity.

It’s courage.

It’s daring to enter into relationship with what is here.

It’s learning how to stay connected to yourself while something uncomfortable is happening.

It’s discovering that you are far more capable of meeting life than you’ve been taught to believe.

Because freedom doesn’t come from creating a life where you never feel activated, uncomfortable, uncertain, or afraid.

Freedom comes from knowing you can meet yourself when those things happen.

You don’t have to wait until you feel safe to live.

Of course, take this all with a big old grain of salt. 🙃

Safety matters.

Support matters.

Your body has limits.

And if you’re working with significant trauma, there are absolutely times when slowing down and creating more stability is the right move. I’m not suggesting that you override yourself, force yourself through fear, or use “courage” as another way to abandon your body’s needs.

I’m talking about something different.

I’m talking about the people who have been healing for years.

The people who have done the therapy.

Read the books.

Taken the courses.

Learned about their nervous system.

Learned how to regulate.

And yet they’re still waiting for the moment when they finally feel safe enough to actually live.

I see the pain of endlessly circling your healing without ever stepping into your life.

The cost of the never-ending self-improvement project.

And I also see what becomes possible when we stop making feeling safe the prerequisite for living.

Instead of asking:

“How do I make myself feel safe enough to do this?”

We can begin asking:

“What if I build capacity by meeting the thing that feels hard?”

This is where I believe so much of our freedom lives.

Not in creating a life where nothing challenges us.

But in becoming more capable of meeting what life brings.

Your body is not just something that needs to be calmed down, fixed, or protected from discomfort.

Your body is a source of capacity.

And when you build that capacity, you don’t have to wait until you feel perfectly safe to move toward the life you want.

You can move.

You can feel.

You can respond.

You can take up space.

You can meet what comes.

That is embodied freedom.

If you’d like to learn more about my work, go here. :)

If you’d like to explore this on your own, I’ve got a great little mini-course here. Use coupon code SUMMER to get it for only $25🙏