Last year I participated in a group book study, which accompanied video teaching for a book called “Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't” by Drs. Henry Cloud & John Townsend. A few chapters in, I started developing an over sensitivity to the word “Safe”. My first personal revelatory reaction during the study was, “Oh my gosh, I’m not a safe person.” But as the study continued, my next thought was, “Oh my gosh, no one is safe.”
It felt like the time that Oprah gave away cars and said, “You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car…” but my dialogue was, “I’m unsafe, and you’re unsafe, and you’re unsafe…” Everything and everyone felt unsafe, including me. So my heart got out my 2 setting, mental label maker and went to work.
A few years back I shared what I thought was an empowering meme on social media that said, “you can be a victim or you can be a victor but you can’t be both”. I was determined that I would never be labeled “victim” because given the choice, I thought the choice was pretty clear.
In navigating my unsafe world, I went to see a counselor. I was struggling with some relationships that I had labeled unsafe but I didn’t know how to deal with these relationships still existing on some minuet level in my life.
The relationships that were damaged were with individuals that I would still see regularly in my community and neighbourhood. I didn’t know how to interact after my icing sequence had already been fully engaged.
I had gone from deeply loving, to being deeply hurt, to feeling like I had very poor judgment and didn’t know how to just become, descriptively, “somebody I run into” from our interactions. I massively doubted my own sense of judgment and could not navigate anything in between safe and unsafe.
The counselor told me that not all levels of the relationship were unsafe. She likened my “relationship breakup” to a custody issue in a divorce. Divorcing parents deeming a relationship unsafe doesn’t mean that a person can be labeled as “unsafe” on all levels. An unfit husband doesn’t necessarily make an unfit parent. One label does not fit all.
But this did not fit my paradigm. I quoted the meme, I told her I would not be a victim and she corrected me. She said it wasn’t OR, but it was an AND. That I had been a victim of something, AND I was also going to be okay. I could be both.
It took a lot of time for me to stop mentally labeling people and experiences as “unsafe”. My take away of the study was not to become the ultimate judge of all people deemed “safe” and “unsafe”, but to recognize there are both traits in all of us. And traits don’t have to become labels.
So putting down my mental label maker, I tried to figure out what I needed to learn and determined how I wanted my heart to evolve from pain.
And this was the first step in trying to transition from OR to AND.