Finding Inner Safety

The Key to Healing, Thriving, and Overcoming Burnout

Dr. Nerina Ramlakhan

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780857089236
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857089243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

FINDING INNER SAFETY

FIND SAFETY, SECURITY AND PEACE IN THE MODERN WORLD.

When we work hard, sometimes we put our mental health on the backburner. Stress, a lack of sleep and other factors can quickly lead to burnout. How can we balance our goals with a peaceful lifestyle?

Replace stress, burnout and surviving with resilience, energy-optimisation and thriving.

With expert guidance from international author and speaker Dr. Nerina Ramlakhan, you'll learn how to use quick, manageable solutions to make a profound difference to your mindset, energy levels and subsequent productivity. In plain language everybody can understand, Finding Inner Safety will help readers:

• Learn why we're constantly on the lookout for threats
• Come to terms with the actual dangers we face
• Understand the key principles of safety science and strategies for feeling safer and more secure
• Realise the wisdom we can draw from the natural world around us
• Make choices that help us thrive, rather than merely survive

To lead a peaceful and fulfilling lifestyle, finding safety and security from within yourself is an essential first step. Finding Inner Safety provides practical knowledge, insight, and methods to help you unwind from our modern world in a deeper sense, both at home and at work, without asking you to give up on your ambitious goals.

Part One
The Illusion of Safety

Habituation to Survival

1
What Does Feeling Safe Mean?

‘If you want to improve the world, start by making people feel safer.’

—Stephen Porges

Stuck in Unhelpful Patterns

Over the years, people have come to me because they can't sleep, they are exhausted and have no energy, they feel anxious, restless, or they're just plain unhappy. Sometimes they've been signed off work – they've had a breakdown or burnt out. I met many people like this when I worked at the psychiatric clinic for 10 years.

Whatever it is that's brought them to me, they've got to a point where things are just not working for them anymore. Occasionally, they want something different, often they don't know that something different is possible.

Usually, they'd been stuck on a treadmill, caught up in patterns of behaviour and unhelpful cycles that they just couldn't change until they hit a point where they had to stop. Often, they didn't even realize how bad they were feeling. Many years ago, I worked with a senior trader and his team of 80 traders in a Japanese investment bank. He'd given me a 20-minute slot at 7 a.m. in one of their team meetings to speak to his team about stress. Perhaps a crazy gig but back then, at the start of my speaking career, I was pretty much saying ‘yes’ to everything. I said yes to this piece of work, not really realizing how challenging it would be. We were in a large boardroom around a long oval table, and I was at one end of the table. Even at 7 a.m., they were a noisy bunch and the energy in the room felt discordant and a bit chaotic. Fifty traders eating breakfast and fuelling up on energy drinks and caffeine for the work that lay ahead of them. Young, bright, and sparky, they didn't really want to listen to me talking about burnout. I gave them all a stress questionnaire to complete and they laughingly boasted about their scores. The head trader proudly shared his score, the highest in the room, of 85 (the scores shouldn't be higher than 35). He said to me ‘I feel fine’. He looked like death, his skin covered in eczema and very overweight. I came away from the session feeling deflated. I found out a month later that he'd had a breakdown and was in a psychiatric clinic.

Sometimes we choose to ignore the symptoms. It doesn't feel safe to acknowledge them. We just keep going until we can't anymore. I know I used to do this and usually I'd get sick as soon as I stopped. Does this ring bells with you too?

This is no longer my pattern, and I am able to work with so many people who are ready to do things in a different way. We work with each other. I show them some ways out of these patterns – resets if you like – and things start to change. The changes take place within them and outside of them. Most of them can't go back to their old patterns but sometimes a few do. They can't find the resources/willpower/energy/reasons to do it differently and end up eventually in a version of the same place.

But many do shift and change.

They find their voice, speak up, refusing to do life in that way anymore.

They leave the relationship or challenge the status quo.

They leave the job.

They move house or state or country.

They ask for help.

This is finding safety.

When You Don't Know if You Feel Safe or Not

The thing about safety is that we might not even realize that we have it or that we don't have it.

The way I see it is that there are four options:

1. Consciously safe – I feel safe and I'm aware of this.
2. Unconsciously safe – I feel safe but I don't realize this. All is well in my world and I'm not giving it too much thought.
3. Consciously unsafe – I don't feel safe. This doesn't feel good.
4. Unconsciously unsafe – not feeling safe and not even realizing it. Numbed out. Habituated to survival.

It's confusing, isn't it? Do you have an idea where you might be in this mix? And we can feel a combination of the four different states at any given time.

The body is wise – it wants to keep us safe for our survival. Sometimes this means not being able to feel because whatever we've experienced is simply too big, it would overwhelm us. So, we learn to shut down, numb out, freeze the feelings out. I will tell you more about this in the next chapter when we look at the workings of the nervous system and how it protects us from threat.

But first, let me ask you, how are you feeling right now? Are you feeling safe or unsafe?

The process of growing, healing, learning, and evolving is moving through states of safety in an ever-deepening spiral (Figure 1.1) in which we move from unconsciously unsafe (not knowing) to consciously unsafe (an uncomfortable awareness, discomfort with life) to unconsciously safe (feeling good and not even realizing it) to consciously safe (I am safe and I know it!). We become more adept at spotting our patterns, our symptoms, the energy states that give us more information about where we are on this spiral. This knowing can be so reassuring; we don't have to move to medicate or pathologize it. We simply know that we're going through another stage of our persona growth and evolution, and we get better with sitting in the discomfort of it and resourcing ourselves with the right tools. And I'm here to help you with this!

Figure 1.1 The spiral journey of finding inner safety.

Unconsciously Unsafe

Here we have no self-awareness. We don't realize that what we are feeling is unsafe because we haven't allowed ourselves to pause. Maybe life hasn't made us stop and feel. This is a sort of blissful ignorance.

We might numb out with:

• Food
• Catch-up TV and Netflix
• Work
• Sex
• Prescription medication
• Exercise
• Alcohol
• Drugs
• Obsessive busyness
• Work (even if we hate what we're doing)
• Social media
• Obsessive control over our environment
• Perfectionism
• Self-harming.

We might also ‘numb’ out with excessive preoccupation with how we are or aren't sleeping. This is often what brings people to my door. They can't

• get to sleep;
• stay asleep;
• get enough sleep;
• stop waking up at night;
• stop grinding their teeth;
• stop the thoughts at night; and
• stop crying out in their sleep.

Because they don't feel safe. (And don't forget, we sleep when we feel safe.)

When we're unconsciously unsafe we stay stuck in unhappy situations – at work, at home, in our relationships. We don't speak out. We hold ourselves tight. We grind our teeth. We live in hypervigilance without even realizi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Message from the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Lost and Found
• Introduction: Why Feeling Safe Matters
• Part One: The Illusion of Safety
• Part Two: When the Nervous System Is Nervous
• Part Three: Nature Cures
• Part Four: Doing the Real Work (of Finding Inner Safety)
• Epilogue: Return Home
• About the Author
• Bibliography
• End User License Agreement