Dangerous Safety

How genuine safety dissolves both personal and systemic control (Breaking Open: Part 5)

This series emerges from conversations with friends and Claude AI, drawing deeply from the wisdom of David J Temple's CosmoErotic Humanism, Rob Burbea's Soulmaking Dharma, Steve March's Aletheia Unfolding, Daniel P Brown's attachment theory work, John Churchill's Planetary Dharma, and many insights from Jill Nephew. While their teachings light the path, any limitations in expressing their ideas are my own.

The Nature of Safety

Think about how a wound heals. We clean it, protect it, and then - remarkably - it heals itself. The body knows exactly what to do. Our role is simply to create conditions where natural healing can occur.

The same principle applies to psychological and spiritual healing. Safety isn't just supportive of healing - it IS healing.¹ When we feel safe enough, our nervous system relaxes, our protective patterns unwind, and our natural intelligence reemerges. Without safety, we stay locked in the technological attunement, endlessly managing and controlling our experience rather than allowing it to transform.

Real safety isn't just physical security or comfortable circumstances. It's the safety to experience whatever arises - our emotions, sensations, desires, fears. It's the safety to exist without having to earn love or prove our worth. This kind of safety is extraordinarily rare in our culture.

Most of us experience only conditional safety - safe as long as we stay within certain bounds, maintain certain achievements, keep certain parts of ourselves hidden. This conditional safety keeps us dependent on external circumstances and stuck in compensatory patterns. We may intellectually understand our patterns, even develop techniques to manage them better, but without sufficient safety, we can't actually let them unfold.

From Breakdown to Understanding

I discovered this truth through my own breakdown, as I shared in the first piece in this series. What looked like a collapse of functioning was actually my system finally feeling safe enough to let go of its protective patterns. For six months, I lived in a state of profound insecurity and disorientation. Basic decisions became impossible, social connection was overwhelming, and shame immobilized me almost completely. I could barely work, couldn't socialize, and found myself profoundly withdrawn. While others worried from a distance, not knowing how to help, I was consumed by waves of anxiety, confusion, and deep insecurity.

The loss of speech, will, and basic capacity was indeed a failure - but a necessary one. My compensatory strategies and defensive patterns were finally breaking down. And then, when something in me was finally ready to let go, everything shifted. What emerged wasn't just relief but a fundamental recognition: I was, in truth, welcome in this universe. The shame that had lived in my body for so long dissolved in the recognition of being fundamentally loved, fundamentally safe. What had felt like pure collapse revealed itself as a movement of grace, an unfolding that continues to reshape my relationship with life in fundamental ways. Looking back, I'm filled with gratitude for what appeared to be breaking my life but was actually breaking me open.

This is where attachment theory offers crucial insight. Secure attachment means feeling safe enough to explore, to make mistakes, to show our vulnerability. When we're securely attached, we can face difficult experiences without becoming overwhelmed because we trust in a fundamental okayness beneath the difficulty. When we feel securely held - by a therapist, a spiritual practice, a community, or ultimately by reality itself - our system naturally and helplessly begins to unwind its protective patterns.

This truth about safety isn't just personal - it points to something fundamental about how transformation happens at every scale. When we understand how safety enables healing in individual nervous systems, we begin to see how it might transform our collective systems as well.

The Revolutionary Implications

Creating this safety is both simpler and more revolutionary than we might think. Simple because it's not about adding something new but about removing obstacles to what's natural. Revolutionary because true safety threatens the entire structure of compensation and control that our culture is built on.

Safety builds on itself. Each experience of being safely held, of having our experience welcomed exactly as it is, becomes a resource we can draw on. Individual practices like meditation or somatic work aren't about achieving special states but about creating enough space to feel what we've been avoiding. Relationships provide experiences of being seen and accepted exactly as we are - not where anything goes, but where our fundamental worth and value isn't in question.

The role of community can't be overstated. We need environments where safety is built into the culture, where vulnerability is welcomed, where being human isn't treated as a problem to be solved. This isn't just personal work - it's cultural work. Our current culture systematically generates conditions of unsafety, keeping us insecure and constantly striving to earn worth through achievement or consumption.

This is why creating genuine safety is inherently revolutionary. A person who feels fundamentally safe - safe to feel their emotions, safe to express their truth, safe to exist without proving their worth - threatens the systems of control that depend on our chronic insecurity. The more we cultivate unconditional safety, the less surface area systems of control and coercion have to influence us.

A Vision for Transformation

The lack of genuine safety ripples through every level of our lives. The parent who can't tolerate uncertainty controls their child's every move. The manager who feels perpetually unsafe demands constant updates and micromanages their team. The nation that feels threatened builds walls and weapons. But there's hope in this understanding. Once we recognize that safety itself is healing, we can focus on creating conditions that support genuine transformation.

The multiple crises we face - ecological, social, political - aren't separate from our crisis of safety. A culture built on chronic insecurity can't generate the wisdom and creativity needed to meet complex problems. Instead, it keeps reaching for technological fixes, for more control, for solutions that ultimately just make things worse.

The kind of change that's needed now spreads not through force but through invitation. Not through control but through creation of space. Not through achievement but through allowing. Each person who discovers real safety becomes a refuge for others. Each relationship based on genuine safety creates ripples through the cultural field. Each community that prioritizes safety over performance demonstrates what's possible.

The future of our species may well depend on our ability to create this kind of safety at scale. Not because safety itself solves all problems, but because only when we feel safe enough can we access the wisdom and love needed to transform our challenges. This is how we move from the technological attunement to the poetic, from chronic insecurity to natural intelligence, from the living dead to genuine aliveness.

Like a wound that knows how to heal when given the right conditions, our individual and collective healing awaits only the safety to unfold. In that unfolding, we remember not just what it means to be human, but what it means to be alive.

Next in the Series

The Future Breaking Through

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together

1. For more on the view that safety is healing I’d recommend the book ‘The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships’ by Bonnie Badenoch.