Protect Yourself (1/20/10)

Are You Safe?

The Practice

Protect yourself.

Why?

Safety is a fundamental need.

Our ancient ancestors lived in hazardous, often lethal environments. So they evolved powerful bodily systems for reacting to things that could harm them. This machinery is locked and loaded in your own body today – particularly in your nervous system and hormones – and its job is to keep you alive at any cost.

Therefore, as soon as you feel unsafe, these systems kick into gear, making you fight, flee, or freeze in one way or another. Most of the time, fear trumps everything else. Therefore, if you want to be productive, focused, loving, meditative, creative, or open . . . you’ve got to feel safe. Which means managing the things that could harm you.

How?

The major areas for safety include life and limb, physical health, finances, treatment by others, and treatment by oneself.

This week, pick just one or two of these areas and do what you can to protect yourself in that area. For a good start, check out the suggestions below. The first four are about outer harms, and the last one is about inner ones. You can apply these toward protecting yourself or toward protecting other people.

Life and limb – Make sure the tires on your car have good tread. If you live somewhere unsafe, move if you can; meanwhile, get a dog, good locks, support from neighbors, etc.

Physical health – Eliminate or reduce health risks (e.g., smoking, drugs and alcohol, overweight, no exercise). Eat a sensible balanced diet, with protein at every meal, and take regular vitamins. If you have nagging health problems, get a clear diagnosis and effective treatment; the squeaky wheel gets greased in healthcare systems, so keep speaking up for yourself. If you don’t have good health insurance, get some if possible.

Money – Make a basic plan for retirement that includes the life you want to have along the way (e.g., children, owning your home). Make a budget that supports your plan, and stick to it. Take action to increase your lifetime earnings (e.g., hang tough and go to night school for a few years to finish your college degree).

Treatment by others – [This is a big topic which we’ll explore in future JOTs] Make sure there is no threat of violence (a sad reality in a startling number of homes); if there is, reach out to trusted others, identify potential safe havens, talk to a counselor, and make a plan. Don’t tolerate verbal abuse: speech that is demeaning, threatening, or raging; angry quarrels are one thing, but verbal abuse is another, and most of us know when that line’s been crossed; in a calm and neutral setting like a restaurant, try to make agreements about how you will talk to each other; if the other person still keeps going out of bounds, get a counselor or shrink the relationship to the size that’s safe.

Others can harm us in ways subtler than violence or verbal abuse. If you’re feeling uneasy in a relationship, tell the truth about it to yourself: say the words in your mind, write them down (in a safe place), or talk into a mirror; once they’re said, let them echo inside you: What does the truth feels like? What does it move you to do?

When dealing with mistreatment by others, it is so important to get support from people who care about you.

Treatment by oneself – [Another big topic for future JOTs] Harms can come from the world outside you, such as drunk drivers, layoffs, or people talking behind your back. They can also come from inside you, such as harsh self-criticism, irrational fears, self-doubt, an addiction, or muzzling yourself with others.

People usually focus on harms coming from the world outside. But the greatest harms often come from within. That’s because the world usually affect us only part of the time, but we live with ourselves 24/7; we also tend to have skepticism toward the world, but naïve faith in our own beliefs and attitudes. People routinely treat themselves in judgmental, aliveness-killing, mean, or self-destructive ways that they would never tolerate coming from another person. People say “it’s a jungle out there” – but the real jungle is between the ears.

For example, do you speak to yourself with compassion and encouragement, or with criticism and undermining doubt? Talk back to the inner critic: thank it for sharing (and take action on whatever it says that’s valid), ask if it has anything new to say, and when it doesn’t, tell it to shut up. Do not use a tone inside your mind that you would not use with a dear friend. Have you internalized judgmental, shaming, dismissing attitudes toward you from family members or peers while growing up? Recognize those attitudes (give them a funny name, like The Loudmouth), hold them at arms length, and argue against them; they are not your friend.

Or: are you harming yourself with unreasonable fears . . . of love, of speaking out, of reaching high, of betting on yourself?

Replace self-criticism and unreasonable fears with conscious validation of yourself. Admit it when you do things right, when things go well, when you see something good in yourself. See the world clearly; don’t overestimate the barriers to your success, or underestimate your own abilities and other resources. Don’t lie there on the ground like Gulliver tied down by a hundred threads: stand up for yourself!

Do little experiments where you go against your negative assumptions about yourself and the world, and then take in the good when things turn out well. Develop a growing sense of an inner protector and nurturer that is fiercely honest about you and the world . . . and therefore loyal, protective, reassuring, encouraging, practical, inspired, and hopeful.

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May you be truly safe from both outer and inner harms.