Chapter 3
Chapter I: Safety – The Road from Loneliness to Fullness in Being Alone
There was a time when my identification of myself was closely tied to who I was for other people. My existence as such had no meaning. I did not allow myself to be myself, because I had learned that being good meant being for others.
When the need for validation from others went away, I felt a great emptiness and did not feel that I had any worth at all.
The safety I will write about in this book is about maintaining strength within myself. The strength needed to hold the boundaries of my own personality. The strength that will allow me to maintain a sense of my own values and to connect them with new experiences.
But strength like this needs fuel. For a long time I did not know where mine was hiding. The emptiness that flooded me when validation disappeared was only one side of what I felt. Underneath it was something louder, something I had learned not to touch: anger. Without anger there is no strength to hold any boundary, so before I can write about safety, I have to write about it.
With anger it was different, though the result was similar. It also flooded me, but I was taught to crush it inward instead of letting it flow. I could not get angry. I could not express anger through action. I could not be aggressive. These were unwritten but very clear rules of my childhood. Thanks to these permissions to allow myself aggression, which came only much later, I was able to learn to express anger assertively, as a tool, not as an outburst. At first, however, my expression of anger went inward: I was angry at myself. Because of that I stopped liking and respecting myself. Respecting what I felt. Later I expressed this anger outwardly. I am grateful to my parents for experiencing this anger of mine and still staying with me. The pendulum had to swing to the extreme in order to finally come back to the middle.
The body has automatisms whose job is to save life. I call them traumas stored in the body. I feel that they are also traumas stored in my family's genes: my reactions to stress, to external evaluation, to a lack of financial security. Also to unconventional action, to everything that comes from the voice of the essence of self rather than from a safe, familiar pattern.
These side walls, which I will write about in the next chapter, we build through getting to know ourselves. And getting to know ourselves comes, unfortunately, mainly through pain. The energy of safety gives us the safety to befriend pain. By feeling my energy and focusing on keeping the inner abdominal muscles lightly tensed, I can experience and observe my surroundings despite emotional pain.
The energy of safety, which we use to build the walls, gives us the strength to set boundaries for others and for ourselves. Anger appears thanks to released aggression. Getting to know oneself comes through expressing anger. Thanks to anger I can return to love toward myself and others.
Repressing anger means not allowing yourself to create this energy in the pelvis. Our awareness is busy pushing anger down. If something unpleasant happens to us, an energy of opposition is released in us, but we (taught that anger is bad) automatically block these emotions, because we have been taught that we should not express them. The energy in the pelvis arises, and we are focused on not letting it flood us. Because earlier this anger always spilled over and we hurt those close to us. We devote a great deal of our energy to not being bad to others, and as a result we become bad to ourselves.
Now, when I hold this anger with my muscles, I can direct it. When it forms properly, it lifts energy to the chest, neck and head. When I hold anger back, I am like a balloon in the wind. Wherever something blows, that's where I'll fly.
If I learn to produce anger in the pelvis, the next step I need to learn is building the walls. Because there were no walls, every moment of producing energy at the bottom of the container was tied to the energy spilling all over the body and being thrown outward, uncontrolled, at those close to me.
