Feeling under threat is the simplest, the strongest and the most affecting of the feelings in us. It can take away our ability to sleep, or to sleep peacefully, and its symptoms can appear plainly in our bodies. It is not confined to fear either: it runs on into anxiety, into anger, and into a wide spectrum of emotions that psychology has studied and documented.
And as simple as this feeling is, it is also deep and firmly set in us, and its effect passes beyond the body to the thoughts we carry. In this theme we will try to broadcast the opposite agenda to threat: to write about safety every day. To write about how protected the place we are in is - at least now - so that no one can assault us. To write that we are safe from those who were once a danger and a threat to us, who hit us and hurt us one day, and who cannot hurt us any more. To write about what reached us when we were small and had no protection, and how we are out of its reach today, and strong. We document that, and we broadcast it into the brain every day.
Write: "I am safe, the world is safe, I am in safety" - and then contemplate the safety you are living in.
Paul Gilbert defined threat in just these terms: a spectrum of many emotions that shows itself differently from person to person. Gilbert is the founder of compassion-focused therapy, one of the newest schools of psychotherapy and among the most research-based.