Learning to feel Safety again
When people imagine therapy, they probably picture conversations. They imagine talking about childhood, grief, trauma or relationships. There has certainly been plenty of that over the last few weeks, but today’s session surprised me. We hardly spoke about any of those things. Instead, my therapist spent much of the hour watching my hands.
It turns out my hands tell a story long before I ever do. Whenever anxiety begins to creep in, one of them drifts towards my face almost without me noticing. I touch my lips, stroke my beard or simply fidget. I’ve done it for so long that it has become part of the background noise of my life. I never stopped to wonder why.
As the session went on, my therapist gently challenged me, bringing me into that familiar anxious place. I could feel it building in my chest, the same sensation I’ve described so many times before, that feeling you get in your solar plexus. Normally my hand would have found its way back to my face, following a path it has probably walked thousands of times, touching my lip, brushing my beard. I try not to show my anxiety.
Instead of leaving it there, he asked me to place that hand over the centre of the anxiety itself.
He didnt want to force me, he asked how I thought it would feel if I did it. Something in me wanted to know the answer, and my hand moved to my chest. The first thing I noticed was how strange it felt. Not wrong, but unfamiliar. It was good, yet uncomfortable. Comforting, yet somehow frightening at the same time. My mind wanted to analyse it, but my body was experiencing something that didn’t fit neatly into words.
Then something happened that caught me completely by surprise.
Without trying to remember anything, I suddenly found myself back with late partner. Not in a vivid flashback where I could see every detail, but in a memory carried by my body rather than my mind. I could feel his hand resting firmly on my chest as he quietly told me, “It’s going to be OK.”
For a moment, my body remembered what safety felt like.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year thinking about thoughts, beliefs and emotions, but this felt different. It wasn’t an idea. It wasn’t me trying to convince myself that everything would be alright. It was something much deeper. Warm, but not warm. Comforting, but not in the way a weighted blanket or a hug is comforting. It was almost as though my nervous system recognised something that had been buried for years.
If you’ve never experienced something like that, it probably sounds rather odd. The truth is, it felt odd to me too, almost unnatural.
Perhaps the strangest part wasn’t the feeling itself, but the reaction that followed. The daemons I’ve written about before – my Anxiety Goblin and Trauma Goblin – didn’t trust it. They became wary. This sensation was unfamiliar, and unfamiliar things have always been treated as potential threats, it was against everything they stand for. It made me realise that when you’ve lived with anxiety for long enough, even peace can feel suspicious.
That thought has stayed with me all afternoon.
I’ve often assumed that healing would feel like relief, that one day the anxiety would simply lift and I’d know everything was getting better. Instead, I’m beginning to wonder whether healing often feels this awkward. Maybe it feels uncomfortable because our minds and bodies have spent so long adapting to survival that safety itself becomes something new to learn.
I don’t think today’s experience happened because I happened to put my hand on my chest. It happened because of the work my therapist has been doing with me over these last few weeks. He created the space where my body felt safe enough to try something different, and when it did, it found a memory that my conscious mind wasn’t looking for.
As I write this, I’m sitting quietly with one hand resting over the place where my anxiety usually lives. I’m not expecting miracles. I’m not trying to make the feeling happen again. I’m simply curious, waiting to see if it changes form, goes away, becomes adictive.
I want to see what happens if I spend a little time here each day. I want to see how my daemons respond. Not by fighting them or trying to silence them, but by allowing them to experience something they seem to have forgotten. Perhaps they need to learn, just as I do, that not every unfamiliar feeling is dangerous.
When I finished therapy, I left feeling something I haven’t felt in a very long time. I was still wary. I was still aware of my anxiety. But underneath it all was a quiet sense of peace.
A few months ago, I wouldn’t have believed those two feelings could exist together.
Today, they did.