As humans, we are innately safety-conscious.
Even a child who touches a hot stove knows not to make that mistake again.
When presented with a life-threatening situation, our fight-or-flight responses kick in whether we want them to or not.
Our bodies and minds want to keep our bodies and minds safe.
This isn’t a bad thing. It’s why the human race has endured for ages.
But it can be a bad thing when it comes to emotional safety.
Consider the young man whose heart was broken by a fiancée who threw her newly purchased engagement ring into the river. When he asked her why, she never responded. She just … left.
A year later, the man begins dating, but every promising relationship falls short. He knows he can’t bring himself to be vulnerable with anyone new, and he has a sneaky suspicion that he’s really not over his last love yet. But isn’t dating the way to get over her?
If this young man would only take a moment to view himself from a 30,000-foot level he’d see that his efforts at dating are just a pacifier for his pain. He wants the safety he once had with his fiancée, but he fears being hurt just as deeply again. So he unwittingly works against himself and stays in the shallow end of the dating pool, never revealing enough of himself to allow anyone to truly get to know him.
It’s a story he tells himself that has hundreds of permutations in all of our lives: “Because X happened to me in the past and resulted in Y, I’m never going to let X happen to me again.”
Ultimately, those kinds of stories just make us miserable, and they have an unfortunate way of creating terrible cycles of repeating history.
Where in your life are you seeking safety? What do you fear happening the most? These are key questions to ask if you want to know why a certain relationship might be failing.
Leave a Reply