The Revolutionary Act of Becoming Safe
Reclaiming Your Right to Be Human in a Machine World
My favorite line from this essay: “We're not machines designed for productivity, but animals designed for connection.”
Something I’ve realized recently is how mammalian we are, but how we’ve become disconnected from our love of physical touch, largely because it feels unsafe. Most dogs LOVE being rubbed, patted, touched, scratched, etc. But when a dog has gone through a trauma, they’ll shy away from that. What if we’re the same? What if we don’t feel safe to receive the love and care we most deeply want?
That would leave a lot of people feeling profoundly alone.
How the Wound Happens
There's something broken about a world where feeling safe in your own body is a revolutionary act. Yet here we are, living in a culture that has systematically trained us to abandon ourselves from childhood. We've been conditioned to believe that our worth comes from what we produce, how much we achieve, and how well we can manage everyone else's emotions, while completely ignoring our needs.
I know this intimately because I lived it. As a child, I learned that safety meant caring for my mom. Talking about parents and trauma can be ripe with misinterpretation. The key is not to blame our parents or to resent them. I am only grateful for my mom’s parenting. She sacrificed so much for me, and gave me all the love she had to give. The challenge isn’t that she didn’t care, but that she was human, and still in the midst of her own healing journey.
When I was born, my mom was 19. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I was 19, my ability to regulate my emotions—let alone be aware of them—sucked. My mom may have even been better at it than I was. But, she too was young, and dealing with her own challenges, including a breakup with my dad when I was only eight months old.
So, despite having a good support system, because my mom didn’t have a partner, sometimes I ended up being her person by default. That connection required me to learn how to caretake her emotions from a young age. Again, no blame here. But, when my mom was going through a challenging moment, I felt like she wasn’t able to care for me. So, I learned unconsciously that if I could help her feel better, then she would be able to take care of me again.
My childish instincts believed that the alternative was to lose my caretaker, and risk death. As children, we rely intrinsically on our parents, so when they’re not present with us, physically or emotionally, our child-instincts freak out. So, I had a choice: I could care for her, or I could be alone.
Safety = Sacrifice.
Connection = Self-abandonment.
Because of this, I became hyper-sensitive to the emotional states of those around me. I unintentionally became a master empath. And, despite becoming fluent in the language of other people's needs, I never learned how to meet my own.
What I didn't understand then—what none of us understand when we're small and just trying to survive—is that the patterns we learn as children become the blueprint for every relationship we'll ever have. We carry our childhood survival strategies into our adult lives, unconsciously recreating the same dynamics that wounded us in the first place. We become adults who feel guilty for having needs, who apologize for taking up space, who exhaust ourselves trying to be everything to everyone while feeling fundamentally alone in our own existence.
This aloneness—this profound sense of isolation that I carried, and that my clients carry—isn't an accident. It's the natural consequence of a lifetime spent disconnected from your own inner world. When you learn that it’s not safe to put yourself first, then your feelings don't matter, your truth becomes inconvenient, and your very existence needs to be earned through service to others… So, of course you feel alone. You've abandoned yourself so thoroughly that there's no one home when you finally turn inward.
The good news is that the healing can come. Today, through years of hard work, I’ve built a level of safety inside myself that allows for me to come from a place of relative wholeness compared to how I was when I was younger. This means that I can treasure the relationships I have, including the one with my mom, without carrying resentment.
The Wound Lives in Relationship, So the Healing Must Too
Here's what I've learned through years of my own healing and thousands of hours sitting with others in their pain: the traditional therapeutic model, for all its good intentions, often perpetuates the very wounding it seeks to heal. When we make healing transactional—fifty minutes, same time every week, don't contact me between sessions—we're essentially saying, "Your healing is convenient when it fits my schedule." For someone whose original wound was learning that their needs were inconvenient, this can feel like being abandoned all over again.
The healing I offer is different because, at its core, it's relational. It's built on the understanding that you learned to abandon yourself in relationship, so you must learn to come home to yourself in relationship too. My clients don't pay me by the hour because healing doesn't happen on a schedule. They invest in a container—a living, breathing relationship where their wholeness becomes part of my life's work.
This isn't about me being available 24/7 or having no boundaries. It's about creating a relationship that can hold the fullness of the human experience. Sometimes healing looks like a two-hour phone call when you're having a breakthrough. Sometimes it's permission to lie on the ground and feel your feelings without having to perform. Sometimes it's a spontaneous dance party, because joy is medicine too. At it’s core, my work is about connection: to self, to each other, and to Life. When there is genuine connection, the door to healing opens. It’s that simple.
Within this container, I bring everything I've learned about creating safety—not just emotional safety, but the deep, cellular safety that allows your nervous system to finally exhale. I use Internal Family Systems work to help the wounded parts of you come out of hiding. I offer somatic practices that reconnect you with your body's wisdom. I hold space for the spiritual dimensions of healing because trauma isn't just psychological—it's a soul wound that requires soul medicine.
But perhaps most importantly, I bring my own highly attuned sensitivity—what I call empathic-ness rather than empathy. I can feel the emotions inside you, often before you can name them yourself. For people who've been cut off from their own inner world, this becomes a bridge back to their own experience. Through my nervous system, you can begin to attune to your own.
Presence: The Antidote to a World of Extraction
What we're really talking about here is presence—not as a spiritual concept or meditation technique, but as a lived reality. Presence is what Anthony de Mello described as moment-by-moment contact with reality. It's not the chatter of the mind or the stories we tell ourselves about our experience. It's the raw, immediate aliveness that exists in your senses, in your body, in the space between thoughts.
For most people, presence doesn't feel safe. And why would it? If your nervous system is constantly activated by unresolved trauma, if your body holds memories of moments when being present meant being hurt, then of course you'll live in your head, planning and worrying and trying to control what comes next.
The path back to presence requires making the present moment safe again. This means welcoming back all the parts of yourself you've exiled—the angry parts, the needy parts, the parts that feel too much or want too much or dream too big. It means developing an inner union: the marriage of your inner masculine (what is right, focused, disciplined) with your inner feminine (what feels good, intuitive, flowing). It’s about becoming your own parents—mother and father to your inner child.
This isn't just personal healing—it's political. In a world designed to extract your life force through your wounds, becoming whole is a revolutionary act. When you're no longer running from your own pain, you stop participating in the collective game of hot potato where wounded people wound other people. When you're connected to your own truth, you become impossible to manipulate. When you feel safe in your own skin, you stop looking for external validation and start creating from your authentic power.
The Long Road Home
I won't lie to you: this work isn't for the faint of heart. It demands everything—your willingness to feel what you've spent a lifetime avoiding, your courage to disappoint people who've grown comfortable with your self-abandonment, your faith that there's something worth recovering beneath all the adaptive strategies you've built.
My clients often ask me how long this takes, and I tell them the truth: a lifetime. But here's what I've witnessed again and again—people see profound shifts in the first few weeks of our work together. When someone finally experiences unconditional positive regard, when they're held in a relationship that doesn't need them to be different, something fundamental shifts. The nervous system begins to remember what safety feels like.
From there, the work deepens. We excavate the stories you've been telling yourself about who you are and what's possible. We tend to the wounded child inside you who's been waiting decades for someone to notice their pain. We rebuild your relationship with your body, with your intuition, with the quiet voice inside you that knows exactly what you need.
Eventually—usually after a year or two of consistent work—something beautiful happens. The healing becomes sustainable. You develop your own internal resources for staying present with difficult emotions. You learn to trust your own knowing. You start making choices from love rather than fear.
And then the real adventure begins. Because once you're no longer using all your energy to manage your trauma, you're free to discover what you're actually here to do. You realize that your sensitivity isn't a weakness—it's a superpower. Your deep feeling isn't too much—it's exactly what the world needs. Your vision for a better world isn't naive—it's the medicine you're here to offer.
What Life Looks Like on the Other Side
On the other side of this work, life becomes remarkably ordinary—and that's the miracle. You wake up in the morning and check in with yourself before checking your phone. You feel your feelings without drowning in them or pushing them away.
You say "no" to things that don't align with your truth, and you say "yes" to opportunities that light you up, even when they scare you. You have disagreements with people you love without wondering if the relationship will survive. You trust your body's signals about who feels safe and who doesn't. You stop performing your life and start living it.
The hypervigilance softens into presence. The constant inner critic becomes a wise inner voice. You discover that you're not too much or too little—you're exactly enough.
And perhaps most surprisingly, you realize that your sensitivity, which you once saw as a burden, has become your greatest gift to the world.
Creating the World We Actually Want to Live In
This is why I do this work. Not just for the individual healing, though that matters immensely. I do this work because I believe we're in the process of birthing a new world, and that world needs people who are awake, aware, and unafraid of their own power.
Every person who breaks the cycle of trauma in their family line is changing the future. Every person who learns to stay present with their pain instead of passing it on is healing the collective wound. Every person who chooses love over fear, connection over control, presence over performance is casting a vote for the world we actually want to live in.
When more people feel safe, everything changes. We stop electing leaders who exploit our fears. We stop participating in systems that require our disconnection. We start creating from our wholeness instead of our wounds.
This isn't just therapy or coaching—it's preparation for the great work of our time: learning how to be human in a world that's forgotten what that means. It's remembering that we're not machines designed for productivity, but animals designed for connection. It's reclaiming our birthright to feel safe, loved, and profoundly at home in our own lives.
The revolution begins in your nervous system. It starts with the radical act of coming home to yourself. And from that place of inner safety, you become unstoppable in your mission to create more safety for everyone else.
An Invitation
If you've read this far, something inside you is resonating. Maybe you recognize yourself in these words. Maybe you're tired of feeling alone in a world full of people. Maybe you're ready to stop performing your life and start actually living it.
The question isn't whether you're ready for this work—the question is whether the world is ready for who you'll become when you're no longer afraid of your own aliveness.
I made an assessment to help you see where you’re at in your own relational healing journey. You can download it here!
The revolution begins with you.
Blessings,
Faolan
Here are a few ways you can support my work and stay connected:
🍓 Become a paid subscriber to get access to exclusive meditations and group calls.
🌀 Book a 1:1 coaching discovery call
🌍 Join an upcoming retreat (next one is Sept 2025 in Massachusetts)
📚 Read my first book Why Live? The Beautiful and Painful Mess of Learning to Love Life
💬 Invite me to speak or facilitate at your event or organization
To explore more, visit www.faolan.com
