In the current environment we see today, the word “safety” seems to be going through a bit of renaissance and, perhaps, a redefining. “We must keep everyone safe,” scream the headlines. Meanwhile, all around us there are signs of danger.
We are asked to stay at home for safety’s sake, both our own and others. However, at other times people are setting fire to cities and storming government buildings to protest historical inequality, alleged police brutality, or possibly fraudulent elections. It seems as though both ends of the political spectrum have become threats to safety in some form or fashion.
In our children’s lives, this can create upheaval and a loss of what safety means in their lives. As people begin to feel unsafe constantly in their lives, they become conditioned to see threats in ever growing situations typically leading to difficulty in regulating their anxious responses, with usually common features including:
- Increased attention to threat
- Failure to discriminate between threat and safety
- Increased avoidance
- Heightened reactivity to unpredictable threats
- Overestimation of threat significance and likelihood
- Maladaptive behavioral and cognitive control
Any combination of these features can begin to change the way any of us view the world. Is it a safe place where I can dream and grow or is it a scary place where danger or disease could be lurking behind any corner?
It seems fairly obvious that a person who feels they have to be attentive at all times to possible threat is not going to be focusing on possible future accomplishments to the extent they could.
In her work with traumatized patients Dr. Sandra Bloom began to identify four different domains of safety: physical, moral, social, and psychological. She spells these ideas out in her book Creating Sanctuary and in various places discussing her group’s idea of “Sanctuary”. These ideas are also prominent in her group curriculum called S.E.L.F. , which stands for Safety, Emotions, Loss, and Future.
The idea of Physical Safety as spelled out by Bloom in her work is fairly straight forward. Obviously, a main component of physical safety is one’s own ability to not harm others but it is also very steeped in helping people rebuild their ability to proactively address their own safety.
Bloom’s idea of physical safety also includes a person learning to take more control of their own physical well-being instead of feeling at its mercy. One is expected to begin taking control of one’s health and decision-making regarding their physical health and setting more appropriate boundaries with others around them.
The idea of moral safety is somewhat more vague but still important to a person’s safety in Bloom’s view. The ability of a person to see abuses of power and call them out or the ability of people in power to not use their power in abusive ways is paramount to a person’s or a family’s safety in this view (Bloom, pp.129,256). If one is able to freely wield power without consequence, the idea of moral safety is moot.
People often see safety as merely being free from physical harm, while this view sees the other dimensions as both equally important and equally able to create anxiety for a person, especially a child who has seen power abused in front of them, whether at home, school, or on the television or Internet.
It would also seem that a parent needs to be just as concerned with their child’s safety in this dimension as any other. As always, this is not to say that you as a parent are not able to use power as you see fit, it is to say that one must be careful as to how this power is used so as not to create a sense within your child that “might makes right.”
In our next article, we will explore the social and emotional dimensions of safety. Please drop us an email if there are any other ideas you would like to see discussed on the site.