What It Means to Feel Safe in Your Own Body
When most people think about feeling safe, they think about their circumstances. External things, such as a safe neighborhood, a stable relationship, or a reliable job. However, there’s another kind of safety that doesn’t get talked about nearly as much, one you may not even know you’re missing, and it’s feeling safe in your own body.
For women who have experienced trauma, chronic stress, or environments that never felt secure, this kind of safety is not a given. In fact, for many of them, the body has been a place of alarm for so long that the idea of it being a place of rest feels almost foreign. But feeling safety in your own physical experience—in your own skin, in your own nervous system, in the space you take up in a room—is something everyone should be able to experience.
Hypervigilance is a state of heightened physical and mental alertness where your nervous system keeps you constantly on guard for perceived threats, even when you are safe. This may look like always reading the energy of a room, perpetually tensing your body, or never fully relaxing. You may have trouble sleeping, never feeling fully charged. Your body may flood with adrenaline when someone raises their voice, even before your brain processed what you heard.
Many women I work with have lived like this for so long they’ve stopped noticing it. They call themselves anxious, or Type A, accepting it as their personality, because they’ve never known anything different. But when we start to explore it together, what we often find is simply a nervous system that learned to stay on alert. At some point, the nervous system responded to a threat, and it has been doing that job faithfully ever since, whether the original threat is still present or not.
When safety starts to come back, it’s subtle. It arrives in small moments, and if you don’t know what to look for you may even miss the signs.
It feels like noticing, mid-afternoon, that your shoulders have dropped; like taking a breath that actually reaches the bottom of your lungs; and like sitting in a quiet room and not needing to fill it with something. It feels like moments of just being present in your body, without an agenda.
Being able to sit with your emotions is a huge milestone. Being able to feel something without immediately reaching to manage it or push it down is a large part of being comfortable in your body. Anger you can sit with, sadness you can let move through you, and joy you can receive without bracing for it to be taken away.
And it feels like trusting yourself again. Trusting your read on a situation, noticing what your gut is telling you, and listening to it.
I’m committed to working at the level of the body, not just the mind. Talking about your history and understanding your patterns matters. But the nervous system doesn’t update through understanding alone. It updates through experience. Safety has to be felt, physically, repeatedly, before the system starts to trust it. This is what somatic work does, what EMDR does, and what movement and breath and time in nature can do.
Feeling safe in your body isn’t a destination you arrive at all at once. It’s something that builds quietly, moment by moment, as your nervous system learns that it’s allowed to rest.
Therapist Recommended Reading
Hypervigilant: Why You’re So Alert, Anxious, and Afraid—And How to Reclaim Your Life — Dr. Kim Sage
In this groundbreaking book, clinical psychologist Dr. Kim Sage, a highly vigilant person herself, draws on years of research and work with clients to offer real relief to people who struggle with overthinking, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and fawning. You'll learn how to recognize your unhealthy patterns, regulate your nervous system, and break free from the prison of anxiety.
If This Resonates
If your body has felt like a place of alarm for as long as you can remember, and you’re ready to explore what it might feel like to actually rest in it, I’d love to be part of that work. When you’re ready, you’re welcome to schedule a confidential consultation.
For continued reflections on nervous system healing and emotional wellness, consider subscribing here on Substack and following along on Instagram and Facebook. For therapist-recommended books and resources on somatic healing and body-based recovery, follow my Pinterest for curated recommendations.
With you,
Charlene, LMHC & Trauma-Informed Coach
