Day 8 - Safety behaviour

A month-long writing challenge exploring the theme of "Being Myself"

This is the latest instalment of the 21 day writing challenge I’m doing with Megan Macedo, where I write a piece in response to a prompt (unseen by the reader) every day. I’ll be drip-feeding all my pieces here over the next month or so. I hope the series provides food for thought. Thank you for being here.

A few months after having my second baby, I realised that I’d stopped breathing, or thereabouts. I was holding my breath a lot of the time, when I did breathe it was shallow and my body felt like it was continuously bracing against the possibility of something. My anxiety didn’t feel hugely high, but looking back there were a good deal of stresses: I had a tiny baby and a school aged child at home all the time, because we were living through a pandemic. I didn’t know then that we were near the end of Covid times, but the isolation and lack of external support must have had an effect on me

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A few years later I was sitting in a Zoom session with a psychotherapist who was explaining what safety behaviours were to me: things we do to give us a short-term sense of reassurance but that actually serve to reinforce our fear in the longer term. Someone is afraid of going in an elevator so they stop completely, which teaches their brain that there really is something to fear, or at least never gives it a chance to disprove the fear. The body and the mind never learn that, even if the elevator did break down and they got stuck for a while, they would survive.

A few more years later and I’m sitting in a Zoom session with a psychotherapist explaining safety behaviours to one of my children, who is going through their own iteration of anxiety. I have got over being depressed about having passed on my failures and struggles to my children, and instead it feels humbling, emotional and weirdly useful to go through the basics of anxiety, how it manifests in the body, the ways in it limits us if we believe everything our brain is telling us.

My child asks me some other reasons why someone might go to a therapist, what other things people are afraid of. I try and give her child-friendly answers: snakes, spiders, public speaking. I think, as I often do as I continue to try to live with anxiety, of a line from a poem by Roger Keyes:

every one of us has to find
a way to live with fear.

Safety behaviours can be about what we’re avoiding but they can also be additive in nature, like needing to carry a bottle of water at all times or needing to count to ten before you walk through a door. I had some classic health anxiety safety behaviours like feeling compulsions to check and re-check sensations/areas of my body and constantly researching symptoms (in case you didn’t know, googling symptoms on the internet does not lead to peace of mind). But there were also many more minor things that I hadn’t noticed I had begun to do and not do, like saying no to work opportunities or social events that might be tiring because I thought I was “protecting my energy levels.” I found it hard to do nice things like book a holiday abroad because of the expense and the risk that after spending that much money we might not enjoy it, or it would be hard or stressful at times.

I was afraid to take risks or feel anything more intense in my body because my body equated discomfort with threat. I had forgotten that it’s possible to feel exhausted and exhilarated, busy and alive. I’ve started to try and experiment with bigger ranges of “risk” in areas completely unrelated to health, and it seems to help. Again I’m struck by the strange connections between things, by the way we hold back in one area and the growth stops in another.

I wonder why, those years ago, my new-mother mind and body was so afraid to take a long breath, or to keep breathing. Did it think that if it kept my breaths short I would be ready to deal with any minor stress or major catastrophe, that holding my breath and keeping my body on guard would mean I was better prepared?

I feel safer to breathe slowly, calmly, fully now. I have been practising. My brain knows I can tolerate uncomfortable things but my body needs lots of reminders. I suspect it will forget without the practice, so the invitation is to keep living in a particular way, keep asking myself honestly what's needed, keep the doors of possbility open.