Safety, as we commonly speak of it, feels like something solid—something we can find, build, or secure. But what if safety isn’t a place or even a state… but a perception? A neuroception—one that shifts moment by moment based on internal cues and external stimuli?
If that’s true, then is safety ever truly real? Or is it an illusion born from the mind’s desire to control the uncontrollable?
Our nervous systems crave predictability. Certainty. Control. These longings emerge from the animal brain, from our evolutionary wiring to survive. But the paradox is: there is no true certainty. Everything is an unknown, except now. This breath. This heartbeat.
We build constructs—plans, routines, identities—to create the illusion of safety. But what we are really doing is managing fear: fear of pain, loss, change, vulnerability. The very fears that make us feel “unsafe” are often built upon the scaffolding of wanting—to hold onto what feels good, to avoid what doesn’t. Pleasure-seeking and discomfort-avoiding, just as any organism would for survival.
And yet, here’s the crux of the reflection:
When do we shift from seeking safety outside ourselves to anchoring within?
As infants, our safety is externalized—it has to be. We co-regulate through caregivers. But maturation is the gradual turning inward. At some point, the safest place becomes not the arms of another, but the breath within our own body. In his book Breath, James Nestor says the only truly predictable thing is the inhale and the exhale. The breath becomes the internal tether to the present.
So what if safety isn’t about being safe from anything—but about being connected to self as we’re experiencing everything?
Maybe the real liberation comes not from achieving safety, but from releasing the demand for it to look a certain way.
And this brings us to our work—
As play therapists, how do we hold this paradox?
We enter the room each day with children and families who are navigating this very question—Am I safe?—even if they don’t have the words to ask it. And they don’t just mean physically safe, but emotionally, relationally, energetically.
They are asking with their nervous systems. With their behavior. With their silence. With their play.
What we offer them is not “safety” in the conventional sense. We can’t promise certainty or eliminate the unknown. What we offer instead is finding one’s own safety within. Not control, not certainty… but capacity. Inner anchoring. A deepening relationship with the totality of our experience.
We model what it looks like to anchor inward.
We breathe.
We move.
We regulate ourselves.
And slowly, through our presence, we help children stop outsourcing their safety to the unpredictable world outside. We help them discover an inner compass—one built not on controlling what happens, but on trusting their ability to meet whatever does.
We’re not here to create perfect safety.
We’re here to help children cultivate a deeper relationship with themselves—
To attach to self.
To stay with their breath.
To find resilience in presence.
That is the real gift.
And perhaps, the real healing.
