TRAUMA DAYS: HOTEL
Chasing Safety
On my desk I have a little corner of me: a round desk lamp with a bobble hat which is in the shape of the human brain (of course), a picture of a lovely view from a stoney window out to see, a chalk coaster with a Land Rover Defender image on it and a quote from Joseph Goldstein that brings me right to where I need to be:
“If I look for a problem, I can’t find it”
When I first read that. I thought I’d misread it. Surely, if you look for a problem with something, you do find it. But this is the point. We can choose to flip how we see things. So, I tried it out. I looked at what I thought was a problem in my head and then thought about making a conscious effort to see the difficulties. I was distracted. It wouldn’t happen. Every time I looked for a sense of agitation or concern, this other more responsive voice just counterbalanced each element with something less worrisome about the issue, more relaxed, even opportunistic. Positively chipper?!.. But I hadn’t really done anything! I’d literally just read that quote and sat with it for a bit. It is absolutely bizarre, but each and every time I feel myself about to start stressing about something, I read that phrase again or say it to myself and my brain just slips a gear and I can’t seem to get worked up. It doesn’t change the situation, but it opens me up to working with it – that it’s something to work with and through, not something that has to paralyse me and stress me out. It’s odd.
I’m very grateful for it and I’ve love to ask Joseph Goldstein why I’ve had this experience. I’m going to ask you- if you have something similar, will you tell me?
As a naturally inquisitive nerd, unpacking this has been fun. A recent podcast from BeingWell with the awesome Rick (who I interviewed in the pandemic) and Forest Hanson talked about how we tend to seem that security comes from the outside, from the external environment. This is fairly understandable, given that we tend to see safety as something that is physical and that comes from the conditions around us or from the way in which we are treated.
[At this point I am really tempted to embark on my Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” rant, insofar as the fact that the annoying triangle image has nothing to do with the original text and that over decades the theory has been oversimplified and under-evidenced and now detracts and distracts thinkers from the true nature of what the human brain is capable of. But, I'll leave that there for now -but please, if anyone actually would like to hear more of my rant it would be an utter privilege to oblige. By the same token, if you prefer not to be subjected to my rant, then please note that casually mentioning to me the phrase ‘Maslow’ or ‘hierarchy of needs’ comes at great cost to one’s own psychological safety: of mine, of yours, of those in the room, and possibly of those simply in earshot. Thanks.]
Back to seeing safety as external. It is most obviously true that we can gain a sense of safety from the outside in. The fact that we have an Emergency Response sector at all is a case in point: we need others to address risk and threat and danger on the public’s behalf, so as to render society ‘safe’. What is more, within Emergency Service work, there are also conditions, processes and infrastructures that provide a framework of safety within which officers and staff work, in order to provide that public safety. We know from police and military trauma research that within an organisation, feeling psychologically safe with peers and line managers can help minimise trauma impact from those external threats, coming from the outside world.
Working with those in occupations which involve a lot of trauma exposure has been a real privilege over the past 10 years. One of the moments that never fails to encourage me in some of the harder training deliveries I have offered is that moment when trainees realise that right ‘now’ they have permission to feel safe enough. The difference that makes to trust and communication, to open mindedness and thinking about others, to positive intentions and a sense of meaningfulness in what they do is quite astounding. Without that sense of safety, trauma resilience training simply does not work.
If we look at this dynamic in the training room; the careful planning of the environment (the type of room, the location, the layout, the visual cues and resources) plus the training material itself (with its imagery, educational content and verbal cues), combined with the experienced approach of the selected trainers (and their mannerisms, communication skills and authenticity) the general vibe enables trainees to safely explore that which can be difficult and to master the cognitive skills to help contextualise their future experiences healthily.
What is more, we now have recent evidence from neuroscience that tagging uncomfortable memories with a felt sense of the situation being over (and therefore rendered safe) within an hour of recall enables our brains to create our own internal resource for safety.
This is actually a really big deal. This shows us very clearly that there is an internalised sense of safety that the brain can establish with just a moment of deliberate effort on our behalf.
So, why is this so important for those of us who work in Emergency Response? It is becoming more well known that working with repeated trauma exposure and threat perception can physically change the human brain: its connectivity, its density, its volume, its activation and its atrophy. We also now know that the brain can physically tag a sense of safety to the memories of that which it has found difficult. We know from decades of research that neuroplasticity (rewiring the brain) is perfectly within reach of most of us.
All we need is the impetus to try it. We need to wire for safety to be able to handle the threat.
And this is where things get a little bit more tough. Making that decision to try to work with your own brain and to find your own means of internalising what it feels to be safe is not straightforward. There are other influences on our decisions about how to think in this sector. There is the culture. There is a legacy of social conditioning. There are management styles. There also may be a plethora of neurodivergencies yet to be understood. Let alone the untold damage to our sense of agency because of the experiences we have gone through over time.
In the current climate where policing (for example) is under extreme scrutiny, it is so very easy to default to a broader rhetoric is why we shouldn't feel safe in what we do. It is so very easy to look at the institution and see that IT is the reason not to feel safe. It is very easy to look at public opinion and see that THEY are the reason not to feel safe. If we are really honest sometimes blaming others for our lack of safety can actually give us a sense of relief, that this feeling is not our fault. But, this sense of relief is superficial and usually very temporary. It doesn't help us in the long run. By deferring to broad external intangibles, we may unwittingly hand over our sense of agency and our trust in ourselves. This comes at great cost to us.
From my own experience, telling myself that I feel psychologically unsafe “because of” another organisation or entity or group of people only makes me feel more dependent on someone else to come and rescue me. The brutal truth about life is that, a lot of the time, that ‘someone’ never comes. This isn't because people don't care, it's probably more to do with the fact that we cannot see the care when it's right in front of our eyes. We are looking past what is immediately available to us and into the middle distance. No wonder we feel lost when we feel scared.
What I have learnt is that if we could look for safety a little bit more closely to that which is immediately around us (and eventually to that which is already within us), our brains will take that as a far more genuine resource. It's important to note that this doesn't mean that by establishing our own sense of safety we are not deserving of other people's care support or compassion. Nor does it mean that environmental safety doesn't matter. What it does mean is that when we start from within us, we actually will have a far better guide as to what we genuinely need from the outside world (and what we don’t, ‘thank you very much’).
Within this there is a shift: we become active agents in relation to our environment and not victims subjected to it.
So what approach can we take to this?
- Rick and Forrest Hanson make a really good point that feeling physiologically grounded and safe is really important. If our body is giving us biofeedback that we're on shaky ground, it's not easy for us to find regulation. Simply taking a moment to check in with our stress levels and activation is the most basic approach to finding safety in the body and mind. This can be done in any situation -even when we are activated for good reason, allowing the brain to make a mental observation “there is stress here” puts us in the driving seat.
By being able to tune into how we feel we then start trust ourselves.
- In very practical terms, we can help our bodies out by making sure we give them what they need physically to regulate. This can be as simple as including protein in every meal, resisting the habit of bouncing up and down from carbohydrate and caffeine highs and lows and getting enough rest and movement whenever we possibly can.
The chemical messages we can get from a safe body can go far.
- Understanding that our brains’ Default Mode Network typically dominates about 50% of our thinking in any regular day. Increase DMN thinking is also associated with anxiety and depression. Noticing when we are in this mode can enable us to moderate the amount of time we spend on thinking habits that may compromise our feeling of inherent safety (such as seeking external validation, comparing ourselves to other people and planning for what is might happen in the future that we need to guard against). This all comes with the added pressure of our inherent Negativity Bias in the human brain and the environmental conditions of working in Emergency Response.
Training ourselves to catch our own thinking is fundamental to steering towards safety.
- If we do have difficult, challenging or potentially traumatic experiences that we have yet to properly file, it will be harder on the brain to cultivate a sense of safety if there is a sense of alarm that has yet to be addressed. Seeking resources, support or techniques to make sense of difficult experiences and to render them safely over is really important to give our brains the best chance of tapping into and enjoying what it means to be OK.
Resetting the alarm automatically opens us up to the safety we have been without.
Perhaps the most important message we can give our brains and bodies is that what we do is meaningful, that we are safe in our intentions, and because of that, we attract those who share those intentions and therefore grow that net of safety. If we can prime our brain to search for what is of value to us, this can also protect us against the negative impact of default doom scrolling on our devices (which, lets face it, typically have no realistic bearing on how we experience the world in front of us or inside of us). Research also shows that maintaining a sense of what is meaningful in our work can protect us against trauma impact and is therefore a long-term investment in our future safety. Taking just a few seconds after a difficult job or at the end of a day before sleep, to acknowledge what we achieved meant something today reinforces our trust in ourselves, and our intention to keep us and others safe.
Meaningfulness enriches our sense that all is as well as can be expected.
In my mind, we can't get better than that.
Jess x