It takes a lot of courage to go off-the-beaten-path and explore new things in life.
Some of us decide to get out of the comfort zone and take charge of our lives. For these people, playing safe is a sign of cowardice.
Human nature is such that most of us end up sticking to our comfort zones.
Be it expressing your feelings or starting something, the fear of failing holds some people back for taking risks.
First, exposure teaches us that anxiety does not last indefinitely or get worse and worse, but eventually either decreases or plateaus.
Second, our urges to avoid or perform safety behaviors also decrease with repeated exposure practice.
Third, exposure helps us see that our feared outcomes are unlikely to happen and that even if they do occur, we can tolerate this.
Alternatively, in cases where it is impossible to know whether our feared outcomes occurred we learn that we can tolerate this uncertainty.
Indeed, exposure therapy works in large part because it helps us build muscles for better tolerating both distress and uncertainty.
Do Safety Behaviors Need to be Eliminated All at Once?
Feeling safe in relationships, most especially in intimate relationships, is essential.
If you don’t feel safe and are always walking on eggshells, not only are you always anxious, but it can back up on you—you periodically get resentful and blow up—or you adopt the martyr role and eventually burnout.
More importantly, you are never getting what you truly need—never have a place where you can be yourself, give up that anxiety or those masks that you wear and lean into a relationship where you feel cared for and loved, and accepted.
I
think wanting out is one of the most risky things a person can undertake. You are literally packaging your existence and sending it off hoping that things will work out on the foreign shore.
You are uprooting your life and transplanting it in new soil. How do you know that the stars will miraculously align (in the nebulous realm of visas)? How do you know you’ll even like life there once the dust settles? It’s a high risk/high reward venture.
I’m a cynical person by nature and I always try to talk myself out of wanting out. I review the meandering scroll which is my list of things that could go wrong as I seek to dissuade myself.
Yet I always return to that tattered fortune cookie piece of paper in my back pocket that that says “WHAT IF”.
These two words gnaw at my bones in the dark hours of the night. “WHAT IF”. No two words has led to greater discovery and adventure, no two words has led to greater dismay and shipwreck.
If you find your s
But what actually creates that sense of safety varies from person to person. What we need most often reflects what we didn’t get in our childhoods, the wounds that still remain. Here are some of the common, often interrelated, needs:
Acceptance
If you grew up in a family where anger was constant, where you felt always criticized, where parents or others were volatile, where you felt micromanaged, you may be wired to be anxious around such strong emotions and become hypervigilant.
You might have learned to “be good” or to shut down to avoid feeling attacked, and these ways of coping can continue into adulthood.
Most sadly, if you are still spending much of your energy building a life that keeps others at bay, you may never have an opportunity to discover who you truly are.
Exposure therapy is highly effective in treating anxiety disorders and in helping patients regain control of their lives, rather than letting their anxiety control them.
While most exposure therapists agree that eliminating safety behaviors is crucial in order for treatment to be successful, some argue that gradually fading safety behaviors over time, rather than removing them all at once, could help make exposure therapy more palatable.
After all, the idea of intentionally seeking out the thing that you fear most can be hard to swallow, even for the bravest among us.
Yet, it remains unclear whether the benefits of allowing patients to utilize safety behaviors early on in treatment with the goal of eventually fading them outweigh the cons of doing so.
There’s a difference between being a risk-taker and being reckless.
When we take on these moves, it’s with precision, forethought, savings, and lots of organization.
We rolled the dice on a lot of things, but everything that we could possibly control, we had pinned down. We considered what we would do in worst-case scenarios. I had to learn this the hard way. There will always be that “what if” feeling.
I wonder what life would be like if I had stayed in my career path. I miss my clients, coworkers, and that feeling of being competent at something I loved. I would probably be in a position of power by now. You will always wonder about the choices you didn’t make.
If you’re remarkable, then it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable.
Nobody gets unanimous praise – ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed.
Criticism comes to those who stand out.