We often think of safety as something that comes from the outside. We feel safe when our relationships are secure, when our home is calm, when our finances are stable, when the people around us are predictable and when life is going according to plan. And, of course, these things matter. It is difficult to feel safe when we are living in circumstances that are genuinely threatening or unstable.
But there is another kind of safety that is much more personal and, in many ways, much more important for healing. It is the sense of safety we experience inside ourselves. It is the feeling that we can stay present when something is difficult, that we can tolerate uncomfortable emotions, that we can listen to what our body is telling us and that we can trust ourselves to respond when life becomes challenging.
For people who have experienced trauma, chronic stress or difficult relationships, this internal sense of safety can be surprisingly difficult to access. Even when everything around us is relatively calm, the body may continue to behave as though something is about to go wrong. Building safety from the inside out begins with understanding why this happens.
Safety is more than knowing that you are safe
One of the most confusing experiences for someone who has lived with trauma or chronic emotional stress is knowing intellectually that they are safe while not actually feeling safe.
You might be sitting in your living room with nothing particularly wrong, yet your body is tense. You might be with someone you love and still find yourself scanning their face for signs that they are unhappy with you. You might have created a peaceful life but discover that, when things become quiet, your mind starts looking for something to worry about. This is because safety is not simply an idea. It is also a physiological experience.
Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory describes the autonomic nervous system as continuously responding to cues from the body and the environment, influencing whether we move towards connection, mobilisation or protection. Deb Dana has translated this work into accessible practices for understanding our nervous-system states and developing greater awareness of how we move between them. This gives us a different way of understanding anxiety, hypervigilance and emotional reactivity. Sometimes your body isn’t reacting to what is happening right now. It is reacting to what it has learned might happen.
Trauma can teach the body to expect danger
When we experience overwhelming or repeated stress, particularly when we are young and don’t have the resources to escape or make sense of what is happening, our nervous system adapts. It learns what to watch for. It learns what a change in someone’s voice might mean. It learns what silence might mean. It learns when to become small, when to become invisible, when to fight back and when to leave. It may learn that being independent is safer than relying on other people, or that keeping everyone else happy is the best way to prevent conflict.
These adaptations can be extraordinarily intelligent. They are ways of surviving experiences that once felt too big, too unpredictable or too painful to process. The difficulty comes when the danger has passed but the nervous system has not yet learned that it has passed.
Bessel van der Kolk’s work has explored how trauma can leave people feeling chronically unsafe in their bodies, with changes in arousal, attention, emotional regulation and the ability to connect with others. He emphasises the importance of helping people experience their bodies as places they can inhabit rather than places they need to escape from. This is why building inner safety isn’t about convincing yourself that nothing bad will ever happen. It is about developing the capacity to meet what happens without immediately losing your sense of yourself.
Start by noticing what safety feels like
If you have spent a long time living in survival mode, you may be much more familiar with the feeling of danger than the feeling of safety. You may know what anxiety feels like. You may know what happens when you become overwhelmed, when you shut down or when you start overthinking. But you may not have spent much time noticing the subtle physical experiences associated with being settled and connected. This is why one of the simplest places to begin is by becoming curious about moments when you feel even slightly okay.
Perhaps it is sitting in the garden with a cup of tea. Perhaps it is walking somewhere familiar. Perhaps it is hearing a particular piece of music, spending time with an animal or talking to someone who makes you feel understood. Perhaps it is the feeling of getting into bed at the end of the day. You don’t need to manufacture a profound sense of peace. Start with moments of enough safety. Notice what happens in your breathing. Notice your shoulders. Notice your jaw. Notice whether your stomach softens. Notice whether you feel more present in the room. These small experiences matter because the nervous system learns through experience, not simply through explanation.
Regulation is not about being calm all the time
There is a risk in talking about nervous-system regulation that we turn it into another form of self-improvement. We start believing that we should always be calm, grounded and regulated, and then feel like we have failed when we become anxious, angry or overwhelmed. But regulation does not mean never becoming activated.
A healthy nervous system is not one that remains perfectly calm regardless of what happens. It is one that can move between different states and return towards balance. Sometimes we need energy, action and mobilisation. Sometimes we need rest. Sometimes we need connection. The goal is flexibility rather than permanent calm.
Deb Dana’s work is particularly useful here because it encourages us to develop a relationship with our nervous system rather than treating it as something that needs to be controlled. Her approach includes noticing the cues that influence our state and becoming more familiar with what helps us return towards connection and regulation. This changes the question from, “How do I stop feeling anxious?” to, “What is my nervous system experiencing right now, and what might help?” That is a much kinder question.
Build safety through the body
When we have spent years trying to think our way out of emotional difficulties, it can be strange to realise that one of the most important parts of healing may involve paying more attention to the body. This doesn’t have to mean complicated techniques. It can be as simple as slowing down enough to notice your feet on the floor, feeling the support of the chair beneath you, taking a walk, stretching, breathing more slowly or noticing the physical sensations that accompany an emotion.
Van der Kolk has emphasised the importance of body awareness and self-regulation in trauma recovery, including practices involving movement, breath and rhythm. His work suggests that reconnecting with bodily experience can help people develop a greater sense of control and presence. The important thing is not to force yourself to feel something you don’t feel. If paying attention to your body feels overwhelming, frightening or destabilising, it can be appropriate to work with a trauma-informed professional rather than pushing yourself through it. Safety is built through choice.
Your boundaries are part of your nervous system
There is another part of creating internal safety that we sometimes overlook, learning that you are allowed to protect yourself.
If you have learned to ignore your own needs in order to keep other people happy, saying no can initially feel incredibly uncomfortable. Setting a boundary may bring guilt, anxiety or fear of rejection. You may know that the boundary is reasonable and still feel as though you are doing something terribly wrong. This doesn’t necessarily mean the boundary is wrong. It may mean that your nervous system associates self-protection with danger.
Building internal safety can therefore involve learning to trust the signals that tell you when something doesn’t feel right. It can mean becoming more comfortable with disappointing other people. It can mean leaving situations that repeatedly make you feel unsafe rather than spending all your energy trying to regulate yourself enough to tolerate them. Inner safety does not mean learning to feel calm in every environment. Sometimes it means learning that you are allowed to leave.
Connection is part of healing
Although this article is about building safety from the inside out, that doesn’t mean we are supposed to heal entirely by ourselves. Human beings are relational. Our nervous systems are influenced by our relationships, and experiences of safe connection can become an important part of recovery. Van der Kolk has described safe relationships as fundamental to mental health and emphasised the importance of connection and community in trauma recovery.
This means that building inner safety can involve choosing relationships in which you don’t constantly have to monitor yourself. Relationships where you can speak honestly, make mistakes, have boundaries and remain connected even when there is disagreement can gradually challenge the belief that connection requires you to abandon yourself. Sometimes another person’s calm presence gives your nervous system an experience it has struggled to create alone. That isn’t a weakness. It is part of being human.
Safety is built through repetition
The nervous system does not change because we have one powerful insight. It changes through repeated experiences.
Every time you notice anxiety without immediately obeying it, you are creating a new experience. Every time you set a boundary and discover that you can survive someone’s disappointment, you are creating a new experience. Every time you allow yourself to rest without believing you need to earn it, you are creating a new experience.
These moments may seem insignificant, particularly when compared with the scale of the experiences that shaped you. But healing often happens through accumulation.
Little by little, the body begins to learn something different. I can feel this and stay. I can be uncomfortable without being in danger. I can say no. I can ask for help. I can leave. I can rest. I can trust myself.
Perhaps this is what building safety from the inside out ultimately means. It isn’t creating a life where nothing difficult ever happens. It is developing a relationship with yourself in which you know that, whatever happens, you will not abandon yourself in the process.
You may still become anxious. You may still be triggered. You may still have moments when old patterns return. But gradually, the experience of safety becomes less dependent on everything outside you being perfect. You begin to discover that safety is not the absence of uncertainty. It is the growing belief that you can meet uncertainty without losing yourself. And that is something your nervous system can learn.
References
- Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. https://www.scirp.org/reference/referencespapers?referenceid=2897973
- Dana, D. (2020). Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection: 50 Client-Centered Practices. W. W. Norton & Company. https://www.scribd.com/document/757386068/Polyvagal-Exercises-for-Safety-and-Connection-50-Client-Centered-Practices-Norton-Series-on-Interpersonal-Neurobiology-ISBN-0393713857-978-03937
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. https://archive.org/details/polyvagaltheoryn0000porg
- van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. https://ia601604.us.archive.org/35/items/the-body-keeps-the-score-pdf/The-Body-Keeps-the-Score-PDF.pdf
