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"Survival" (survival-bad) is about being in danger and being alert for that danger.
"Safety" as a concept implies an absence of danger whilst providing nothing that is positively nourishing. Focus on safety will not lead to feeling safe.
"Thriving" (survival-goodor Thrive) is the real opposite of survival, and is about positively identifying and engaging with anything that will enhance your life and nourish and support you.
Survive vs. Thrive (or survival-bad vs survival-good) are two very different experiential states with very different qualities of attention. Both are survival messages and given high priority by your nervous system.
Just as the ringing of a fire alarm in a building is near-impossible to ignore, survival meaning in the nervous system is also given priority over non-survival meanings. Most people (if not everyone) reading this will immediately think of "danger" survival – the awareness of a potentially mortal threat. Like the extremely unlikely scenario I’m walking through the market square in Norwich and see a real live sabre-tooth tiger!
If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.
Lao Tzu
This view is reflected in every single diagram I have ever seen that attempts to describe the autonomic nervous system, as if there is only safety or danger. But the fact is that "safety" is only recognisable by its signs and tokens, and is not a thing in itself. Safety is the "opposite" to danger and does not exist except as an opposite. Just like the modern medical definition of health, safety is "an absence of danger". For all animals and for our hunter-gatherer ancestors who evolved the modern human nervous system, safety was – and is – relative. There is never absolute 100% safety. Rather, "safety" is a neutral "safe-enough" state. To a child, safety is represented by parents who are themselves
not activated (i.e. who do not expect imminent danger) and furthermore
have sufficient for their needs – practical and emotional support, food, water, shelter, warmth or shade, and an expectation that this will continue into the near-enough future; and
are focussed on that abundant "safe-enough" and are responding to it.
Their (subliminal) response is detected by the child and recognised as a sign that everything is as it should be
So for a child to recognise "safety", the supportive adults must also be recognising "safety" so that their body language and nervous systems and tone of voice are signalling "safety". The child recognises all is well because it sees signs of everyday normality in the behaviour of adults around it. Adults also use the same reference point – noting the behaviours and body language of other adults. That adult recognition of "safety" is at its best a recognition that the world is beautiful, bountiful, friendly, supportive, and other things besides. It is only possible to "see" these things if we feel safe-enough to look for them, and it is only by looking for them that we can feel safe-enough. The transition from looking for danger through to to recognising and then orienting towards the goodness of the world is the beginning of self-calibration.
Safety is not the absence of threat – it is the presence of connections
Dr Gabor Maté
The mere fact of danger having passed is insufficient for a nervous system that has two survival-critical axes –
survival of and from danger and
survival by having clear signs of things that are not only "not-dangerous", but that generate a sympathetic feeling of appreciation, gratitude, enjoyment, awe, satiation, beauty, of being supported or held, of being connected to what we love.
So rather than "safety vs. danger" I have come to prefer the polarity of "survival-good vs. survival-bad" or "survive vs. thrive". The idea of safety is inadequate. If I am looking for safety, it is because I believe I am in danger, and am grasping at straws. If I am truly safe, I would not normally think of it as safety unless I remembered the presence of danger. Recognising the internal qualitative feeling of safety is different, being a marker of transition from "just" survival to something else that has an intrinsically optimistic quality.
Therefore there is a three-phase process of returning to safety. First, when in danger we look for an end to the danger. Next we look to make sure we are safe (but are actually still looking to make sure the danger has gone). Whether conscious or not, there is a point in that transition which contains a question along the lines of "what am I aware of that tells me all is well?" Only then it is possible to begin tolook beyond (transcend) the polarity of danger and safety and engage with something else where there is no thought of safety or danger – because we feel safe enough to be interested in something else!
All of these survival-critical states of danger-safety-thriving (including transition states) are associated with specific ranges of physiology, which in turn have specific ranges of qualitative interoceptive sensation and mental-emotional presence.
For a hunter-gatherer who lives in a permanently slightly-unsafe environment, a constant focus on possible danger would be exhausting, and result in insufficient attention being given to the more positive things that also bring safety – food, companionship, social coherence, water, somewhere to sleep, etc. This kind of environment that is mostly safe demands a different kind of attention from the one typical of modern forms of attention. It requires some non-zero level of attentive engagement, because a living landscape is less predictable than a human-built environment. I can predict the qualitative nature of a carpet and the lack of autonomous motion of a chair. I know basic needs like water are available permanently from taps. This kind of predictable and unchallenging environment is unstimulating to the nervous system. Neither does the built environment or the other man-made objects strewn around in it have any intrinsic rhythm or resonance that can be tuned into to identify subliminal cues, so instead of the environment we tend to tune into people instead. The tuned-outness places us in a particular sensory state that is actually very close to a survival-danger state, and so survival-arousal happens far too quickly and easily. This also eventually gives an illusion that humans float round in a nothingness, separate from the physical world we inhabit. The separation allows us to treat the whole world as a manipulable object that has equivalent or even less status than a slave – instead of the I/Thou reverence that is seen in peoples who still live embedded (as just another life-form) within a living ecosystem-landscape. This is further explained by...
