Black Indigenous People of Color + Safety + Security + Felt Safety
What does it mean to feel safe?
When viewed through the Polyvagal lens, I think of how our environment impacts our nervous system. After a conversation with a colleague who is a neurodiverse woman and POC, I realized how my own privilege as a middle-class white woman deeply influenced how I thought about and answered this question. Our first reaction is often to view the world through our own eyes, our own experience, race, and privilege. If I can acknowledge this unique lens, my subsequent review, in theory, can be more flexible, wider. To widen the lens is to become curious about what it means to feel safe for other populations.
Before yesterday, when thinking of safety, I was mostly thinking of felt safety. Does an individual feel seen, heard, known? Is there space and understanding for someone to be as they truly are? These questions spring from a combination of my personal experiences and my experience as a mother raising a neurodivergent person. When we have felt safety, we are in a regulated state, or in polyvagal terms, a ventral vagal state. This is the foundation of our physical health. Our autonomic nervous system influences how our hearts beat, how we breathe, how we digest food, and how we sleep. In order to have felt safety we must first have physical safety.
Safety is defined as “the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk or injury.” It implies a benevolent parent, person or agency with power is creating safety, protection. I think of animals and how they guard their young. Guarding + protection=safety.
Security is defined as “the state of being free from danger or threat”. So, in this case, there is no protector, only the protected. I think of a video game, with an invented world, where once you arrive at this level you have no predators. It doesn’t seem real or have the possibility of becoming reality. But then, I think about powerful white men, I think of 45, and how it appears that he, they, live in this video game reality here on earth. Who is the predator to this population?
What does safety, security, and felt safety mean for BIPOC in America? How can this group of people find felt safety when they have yet to find physical safety let alone security? Who protects them from danger, risk, and injury? What imaginary world exists where they need no protectors, because they have no predators? How far away from felt safety is this part of our country when oppression, racism, and whitewashed history pervades all policy, news, publications, entertainment, and power?
What’s more is that safety comes in levels. One level of safety is built upon another. Protection from a threat can create safety. Removal of a threat can create security. But felt safety is up to the nervous system. Our vagus nerve, or soul nerve, as author Resmaa Menakem lovingly calls it, determines if we feel safe or not through a process called neuroception. The vagus nerve senses our environment using afferent neurons(information travels from body to brain instead of brain to body) to decide if we are safe or not. This is unconscious, immediate, and is a part of every moment of our life.
Current and recent research on single-event trauma is uncovering data that trauma influences genetic codes for several generations. The trauma that slaves endured lives in the DNA of slave ancestors. The trauma of the genocide of Indigenous People lives in their DNA. Every single micro and macro aggression that BIPOC have endured, lives inside of their bodies. They inherit their ancestors’ traumas when they are conceived and growing in their mothers’ wombs, and then they are born into an unsafe and insecure climate. Us white folks have our own inherited trauma: the trauma of colonialism and the memories of the brutalization that Europeans committed against each other for centuries. This lives in our bodies too, along with the moral injury of White Supremacy.
A child’s home life is a vital factor in creating safety and shaping their nervous system, but when the larger culture outside of their home includes systemic racism and oppression, the safety and security they may have at home doesn’t stay with them when they aren’t there. In America, it isn't even possible to create a home free from the larger toxic culture because it leaks in through entertainment, the news, and systems of power. The lived trauma of every generation is embedded into their DNA. The condition of one’s own life shapes the nervous system and influences one’s ability to feel safe, even if there is protection from threat, or if the threat has been removed entirely. Felt safety is created; it isn't inherent.
When protection appears, or threat is removed, felt safety takes time, healing, reparations, unraveling. This work happens in the presence of security. Protection is necessary to heal trauma. One cannot heal and protect oneself at the same time. The roots of trauma can only be untangled while someone is watching the door for predators. Felt safety in America is a privilege for white folks. We must change this. We need to create a circle of security for transformation and healing in our country. Safety can be on the horizon if we dismantle racism at every level of policy and power. Felt safety can and should be a birthright for every human on this beautiful planet. It's important that we understand how our race, gender and neurodiversity impact which level of safety we are striving for. We are not born into the same safe space, not yet. We can do better; we must do better.