Your one true safe space
It's not created by other people.
Dear voyagers,
Though I researched it extensively ahead of time, I didn’t really know what going off Lexapro after 8 years would feel like. No amount of consulting with doctors or Googling could pave the way for what I think of as my 2024 “hero’s journey.”1
It has not been easy. Though I spend a full year titrating down on the medication, the last step (from 2.5 mg to zero) has been by far the hardest. It started with physical discomfort including severe stomach distress. Much harder has been the emotional rollercoaster.2
I’ve been forced to grow as I go. I’ve shortened my health to-do list to a single entry.3 My other to-do lists, too. I spend my time at work on what matters most and police myself when it comes to my priority list. There are times in life you need to focus, and I am in one of them.
Turns out Lexapro is great at paving over life’s bumps. Without Lexapro, the news that my close friend’s amazing dog — a dog I’ve cared for like my own — is about to die hits me harder than it would have otherwise, unexpected pain in my throat and chest for days. A week later, I find out that an old friend has inoperable cancer. The grief explodes in my body. Lexparo would have helped me compartmentalize the news, pushing it down and moving forward. Instead, I cried more tears in one week than years before combined. The tears are the visible part of the iceberg. Invisible to the human eye is the internal pain, the mountain of ice below the water’s surface.
Here’s the paradox: To improve your health and regulate your nervous system, you must build internal safety and security4. But how can you do that in a life filled with unpredictable grief icebergs, stress icebergs, fear icebergs? How can you build your own real safe space?
The stuff of self-help books since time immemorial
Building internal safety is something that every self-help guru talks about but very few actually seem to unlock.5 Since my current journey requires me to augment my past approaches (reading novels, meditating, writing, building community, mindfulness) with new ones, I wanted to share some of my latest front-of-mind frameworks I’m employing as I build my own internal safety:
The Jungian concept of shadow work is a framework that helps a person connect with their unconscious “shadow” self — the parts they push away as their conscious mind perceives them to be negative.
Dr. John Sarno’s concept of TMS is a framework that helps a person understand that their avoidance of unconscious negative emotions (similar to Jung’s shadow self) is causing them physical pain.
Internal family systems is a framework that helps a person decode their daily internal experience by making sense of their “parts” like The Problem-Solver, The Firefighter, The Caregiver, The Distractor, and more.
Activities I’m doing to support this support
Journal Speak helps give voice to unconscious negative emotions in order to defang them
Clinical somatics helps connect minds to body and vice versa through a certain series of quiet movements done slowly to relax hypertonic muscles
Belly breathing exercises send messages of safety to the brain via the body, helping especially women like me who have held stress in a clenched stomach (a free version of this exercise can be found in the tools tab of How We Feel)
Polyvagal exercises like the Basic Exercise, Salamander, and Sphinx help people move their nervous system from stressed or shut down to relaxed, calm, and functional
Recent Recommends
Podcasts
Internal Family Systems on The Cure for Chronic Pain
Dr James Hollis: How to Find Your True Purpose on Huberman Lab
Why Not Asking For What You Want is Holding You Back on Lenny’s Podcast
Books
When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Maté M.D.
The Pain Relief Secret: How to Retrain Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, and Overcome Chronic Pain by Sarah Warren
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
I’d love to hear in the comments from any of you voyagers who are also learning to build your own internal safe space — what practices do you use? What’s working? What isn’t? I really would love to know.
Note that hero’s journey does not mean I am a hero (far from it). The hero’s journey is a story template described by Jospeh Campbell in 1949. Building off the work of Carl Jung, Campbell described the narrative pattern repeated in many stories and myths over time. What makes me feel as though I am on a hero’s journey is how challenging yet transformative these experiences have been, and continue to be.
A very special thank you to my husband for his patience in dealing with my unpredictable mood for the past 82 days — way to stick with me, Michael.
You regulate your nervous system by understanding — by knowing — that you are safe in the world.
I know why they always talk about it — it’s foundational! Plus it sounds so simple. The reality is much more complex. Most writers don’t understand how to connect the dots in a tangible way (this is why most self-help books haven’t really helped me). It reminds me of the old maxim: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Sure, go ahead and use lots of words to describe an internal experience, but until the reader feels it themselves, they are dancing about architecture.
I really love your essays
I really appreciate this post. I've been working on this so much over the last few years. My therapist asked me, years ago, how my life would change if I trusted myself -- and the question rocked my world. I'd never considered that so much of my anxiety was linked to an underlying feeling of being unsafe. Your exploration of how creating safety for yourself is a hero's journey is giving me so much to think about. Thank you!