Sharing – What does it actually mean to be safe?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. How do we define safety for someone who’s experienced trauma? I’ve been hyper-alert for as long as I can remember, because I grew up having to be alert to other people’s moods and triggers. That wasn’t a disorder; it was survival. So how do I deal with that now?

The other key insight has been that our nervous system is not our enemy, even when it feels like it is! It is actually doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is keep us alive, and alert us that it needs our attention. We are not broken, rather, we are functioning exactly as intended.

https://cptsdfoundation.org/2026/05/21/what-does-it-actually-mean-to-be-safe/

The discussion in the link above is very interesting and one that we aren’t having often enough. We tell survivors that they are safe as adults, but we don’t define what that means, and we don’t acknowledge that some of them definitely are not safe now. All too often, we say it because we expect the person who survived trauma to exhale and rest, they’re safe, without the slightest understanding of how our nervous system actually works.

The logical part of my brain knows that I’m safe. The part that learned how to be hyperalert is busy making sure I stay that way. It never stopped looking for danger. I doubt it ever will. I don’t consider that something wrong with me, but it is something I have had to learn to live with.

My traumatic experiences made me like this, to prevent more trauma.