The Importance of Safety, Connection & Self-Regard

Oct 7

A collage by Margeaux. The background is white with black hand drawn stars. There are different objects throughout signifying safety, connection, and self-regard: a flip cell phone; a hand reaching out; a mirror; a pack of lifesavers, a head with a white sheer cloth over top of it with red embroidered flowers, and the words “dream a little dream of me.”

We are all born with the need for safety, connection, and self-regard. In her book The Politics of Trauma, somatic therapist and co-founder of generative somatics, Staci K. Haines, explains how: "We are tracking for safety, adapting to belong, and organizing ourselves to find dignity. We are at our best when we have, and can offer, all three [...] our orientation towards safety, belonging, and dignity as needs is part of our biologies, our identities, our communities, and our lives" (133-4).[1]

When I read Haines’ book, I was given a more capacious definition of trauma, as anything that threatens our sense of safety, connection, and self-regard. Often, when I’m triggered and can’t quite figure out why, I ask myself if I’m feeling like safety, connection, and./or self-regard are feeling threatened — and the answer to that questions helps me uncover which parts of me are activated.

Haines also points out that “trauma and oppression leave safety, belonging, and dignity harmed or unmet. It splits [the three] from each other, so that they are no longer co-supportive. We are then in an unwinnable internal struggle. We are fighting ourselves, because each of these needs are inherent. None can win out over the others” (134). As a preteen, I learnt that in order to receive a sense of safety and connection with my father, I’d have to sacrifice my boundaries and thus my self-regard. To receive connection with others (usually the boys I’d sleep with), I’d have to give up safety and my self-regard. Connection was always the number one priority, and I’d do whatever it would take to achieve that aim, including risking my own life.

Healing occurs when all three core needs can co-exist and be met. I’ve spent the last decade learning, slowly but surely, that my boundaries are not a threat to connection; rather, boundaries enable connection. I have been helping my young part, attach-cry, see that we no longer need to sacrifice our safety in order to feel a sense of belonging. And I’ve been helping my fight part recognize that we can have connection without sacrificing our self-regard. I’m still very much in process, but I wanted to share some more thoughts about each of these three core needs, the ways that trauma pits them against one another, and how we can move towards collaboration between all three.

Safety

As babies, we turn to our caregivers to let us know that we’re safe. When there’s a loud noise, the baby looks first for the caregiver (are you here? will you protect me?) and reads their facial expression and somatic response for information. A smile tells the baby that they’re okay; a frown tells them that there’s something to worry about. When our caregivers are absent or unable to attune to us, and we do not receive the co-regulation we need, we become hypervigilant, always “tracking for safety.”

If our caregivers are the ones we need to be afraid of, our safety mapping gets all messed up. In their book Nurturing Resilience: Helping Clients Move Forward From Developmental Trauma, Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell explain that

“Traumatic experience leaves behind a neurological footprint, a series of breadcrumbs that help us visualize a larger, more complete map of how we navigated and (survived) our early experiences […] Over time, this map becomes the territory within which we understand how to function—it is a constant reference point for new experiences. All of us create these maps, or narratives, about our lives and lived experience. When developmental trauma has occurred, that map, or that narrative, may be organized around the trauma—the trauma is its governing philosophy” (155).

When safety becomes tethered to trauma, we learn to view things that are actually safe as inherently dangerous. If you’ve ever found yourself incredibly activated in a supportive and loving relationship, this is because the wires have been crossed. The safety you feel cannot possibly be safe. We have to create new safety mapping.

Abusive relationships later in life can also mess with our safety mapping. The first time I found myself in a relationship that wasn’t marked by abuse, I was terrified. I knew that I wanted to experience a sense of safety and security in this partnership, and it was so foreign to me that my trauma brain couldn’t stop scanning for possible signs of danger. When no signs were offered to me, obsessive intrusive thoughts would enter: Surely he’ll die young. Something tragic will happen. There’s no way he won’t eventually abandon you. And so, when I tried calling him and it went straight to voice mail, I climbed up the ladder of inference and spent hours spiralling in the story that he must be dead.

Even if you had attuned caregivers, or never experienced an abusive relationship, there may be other threats to your safety. We live in a world of settler colonial state violence, capitalism, systemic racism, rape culture, ableism, and transphobia. The world is inherently unsafe for so many of us — continually threatening the lives of so many through policing, prisons, and policies. As the death of Breonna Taylor made all to evident: even the home, the place we’re taught should be the pinnacle of safety, can become a site for violence and death if you’re a Black person living in America. While I’ve been working hard to heal from the trauma of multiple sexual assaults and intimate partner violence, the reality is that I still live in rape culture.

It may feel like cultivating a sense of safety in this world is a futile task. But there are ways that we can create a sense of safety within ourselves. For what is needed for our healing is our younger, traumatized parts to see that a caring adult is here now. Even if my partner leaves me, I will be here to comfort those inner little ones. And while the world may still be an unsafe place, I’m no longer a child. I’m an adult with skills and resources and autonomy. I have community now. I have me now. And in this way, safety and connection are no longer pitted against one another. I can experience safety because I have learnt how to connect with myself, and because I’ve built supportive connections with others.

Connection

We were never meant to be solo creatures in the world. Humans lived in communities for 100,000 generations before capitalism came and sold us the myth of the individual. And the truth is that we’re biologically wired for connection. Remember that baby looking for the caregiver to assess danger? Well that baby needs to feel a sense of attunement and connection in order to regulate its feelings. Before we learn how to self-regulate, we learn the magic of co-regulation.[2]

The Polyvagal Theory proposes that before our autonomic nervous system moves to fight or flight, it first looks for connection. If there is no one around to connect with, then we move into sympathetic activation. And if we have enough experiences where no one is there to soothe us or connect with us, we move automatically into fight or flight. Without the experience of co-regulation, we never learn how to self-regulate. We might instead develop a faux window of tolerance, where we employ different survival resources that make us feel a false sense of safety in often paradoxical ways.

One example of this is my use of substances as a teenager. Because my home and my world were inherently unsafe, I was living in a constant state of sympathetic activation (fight or flight) or dorsal vagal parasympathetic activation (freeze or collapse). In order to feel a sense of regulation, I used substances to help numb my feelings. These substances also enabled me to connect with others through dissociation. They were my main method of managing unbearable feelings and exerting a sense of control.

Kain and Terrell describe how “This ability to move toward internal regulation is critical to our ability as humans to process our environment and distinguish between real and perceived threats, allowing us to develop impulse control and self-control” (21). When I look back at my younger self, they had zero impulse control, zero self-control, and no ability to distinguish between real and perceived threats. To the rest of the world, I looked like pure death drive. But in reality, I desperately wanted to live. I’ve always been oriented towards connection.

Self-Regard

Self-regard (or dignity as Haines calls it) might not feel like as important a need as safety and connection. But it is a vital life force. I remember reading the book.Deaths of Despair by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, which describes how deaths of despair (suicide, overdose, and liver disease) amongst white, working-class men are on the rise, despite the decline in mortality rates across America. Case and Deaton trace these deaths, in large part, to the loss of jobs across working-class communities. I paused on these words: “Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. It is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of pride, and of self-respect that […] brings on despair, not just or even primarily the loss of money” (8).

I think about my father here. When I was born, our family still existed in the middle class. But we slowly, and then quickly, became part of the working-class poor. I know that my father felt immense shame about our class status, and strived to keep it hidden from our neighbours in the suburbs. In order to make up for this shame, he placed his self-regard in my brother and I. As long as we were perceived as successful good kids, then he would be seen as a good father, and all would be well.

Unfortunately, I didn’t always adhere to his image of the good child. I wanted to dye my hair and pierce my face. It didn’t matter that I managed to get straight As (while managing substance addiction) or that I did all of the cooking and cleaning and chores in the house. What mattered was what the world perceived. And with pink hair and an eyebrow ring, I was seen as a failure.

My father’s lack of self-regard had an immense impact on me. I have hated myself for as long as I can remember. And this self-hatred took the form of subsisting off of whatever crumbs another human being would give me. I didn’t believe that I was worthy of anything more because that’s what I’d learnt. I didn’t believe that I had anything of value to offer the world. This meant that I’d always put the needs of others before my own. I learnt to not have any boundaries. I lived in a perpetual spiral of shame: my needs were “too much,” I was “too much.”

Without self-regard, I couldn’t see that safety and connection were my birthright — and that trauma, caused by systemic oppression, had made me believe otherwise. Learning about misogyny and ableism and capitalism helped me realize that the problem was never me. Rather, the problem was — and is — the world that we’re living in. I’ve been cultivating a practice of giving that shame back, like it’s a ball I’m holding in my hands. It’s not mine to hold. And so I hand it back.

Reuniting the Three

Bringing these three core needs back into relation has required some pretty major work with my parts, as each part holds a different investment in safety, connection, and self-regard. My attach-cry part, my youngest part, only cares about connection. My fight part wants us to have self-regard and will sacrifice connection in order to ensure that we never give up our boundaries again. My flight and freeze parts do not believe that safety is ever possible. And submit is exhausted by the internal battle between everyone else.

I’ve spent a lot of time giving these younger parts the experiences that they missed. I show fight that connection doesn’t mean the absence of self-regard by showing up, as my adult self, and hearing its needs while holding attach-cry. Fight doesn’t need to be the sole party protecting my inner child anymore. When dissociation takes over or the intrusive thoughts return, I tend to my flight and freeze parts by pointing them to signs of safety in the present.

If the language of parts doesn’t resonate with you, you can think about your inner children or teenagers. What did they need? What experiences are they missing? Did 7-year old you know what safety felt like? If not, how might you attune to that part of you now? Can you hold them and tell them that you’re here? Did 15-year old you get to feel like they belonged? If not, could you take them out on a date where you do whatever they want, no questions asked?

The reality is that we can’t depend on others to give us what we need. And even if we’re lucky enough to have people in our life that offer us safety, connection, and self-regard, at some point we must learn how to offer those things to ourselves. We have to be the adult that we didn’t get to have.

If you’re interested in learning more about parts work, you can download part 1 of my webinar series “Carrying Ourselves Home: Getting to Know Our Parts.”

And if you’d like to support me in making my blog open access for everyone, you can subscribe to my patreon.

Wanna make sure that you never miss a blog post? Sign up for my newsletter below!