Transitions: Finding Safety Again

Learning to Feel Safe Again

A Transition Toward the Quiet Strength Within

“You know what the dream is? It’s being attracted to someone who makes you feel safe.”

-- [Joanne] Nobody Wants This (Netflix, Season 2)

That line stopped me. I was just watching the trailer on Netflix, half-distracted, until those words landed… and I felt the ache of recognition. Because that was it. That was what I had. That was the dream I didn’t even realize I had been living.

It has been over three years since my husband passed. Some might wonder why I am still writing about him. Have I not moved on? Am I stuck in my grief? Is this even healthy?

My answer is that it is, in many ways, very healthy. Research into grief now recognises that keeping a meaningful connection with someone we’ve lost, what grief scholars call continuing bonds, can support adaptation, identity, and growth rather than signify being stuck (Field and Filanosky, 2010).

It is healthy to remember your loved one often. It is healthy to reflect on how they shaped your life, even if that reflection brings a sense of absence or longing. And it is healthy to consider how their memory or the impact they had on you can be integrated into your current life, transformed into a source of guidance, strength, or inspiration, in whatever way that looks for you now.

Learning What “Forever” Really Means

I never really believed in “forever.” Growing up in the late 1970s and 80s, I watched marriages around me end, friends’ parents separating, couples starting over. It was something new for our generation to see so openly, and it quietly shaped my sense of what was realistic. The social landscape was shifting: women were gaining the rights and independence to leave marriages that had once trapped them, and with that came a cultural redefinition of what partnership and permanence meant.

Then, as a young adult, I saw many of my friends marry and have children in their early twenties. Most of those marriages didn’t last. It wasn’t that I was ready for children at that age, I wasn’t but watching people I cared about try to navigate so much, so young, reinforced the idea that relationships could be deeply meaningful and still not endure.

People grow. Sometimes they grow apart. Staying together at any cost didn’t seem healthy, even if walking away was often judged as “taking the easy way out.”

And yet, I tried. I tried to make relationships work, even when it meant losing pieces of myself to keep the peace, even when it meant bending around someone else’s self-absorption. I told myself I didn’t want to be part of the statistics, that I didn’t believe in “easy divorces.” But I learned that staying too long with someone who makes you doubt your worth can be far harder than leaving.

So, I stopped expecting permanence. Not because I didn’t believe in love, but because I had learned that love without safety isn’t love at all.

Finding Safety

Then I met my husband - though, to be precise, we were never officially married. He had been married in the past, and neither had any real interest in a wedding. We considered the relationship itself to be our marriage. We never really discussed it and often laughed when others wondered about our “path.” We were content in our marriage as it was, trusted each other completely, and knew that we were in it together for the long haul.

The safety I felt with him changed everything I believed about what love could be.

There were no games, no insecurities, no jealousy.

Just trust.

Kindness.

Steadiness.

I was safe, in my feelings, in his presence, in the quiet knowing that I could simply be myself.

It’s hard to explain what that kind of safety feels like until you’ve known it.

It isn’t dramatic or exciting.

It’s the opposite, a calmness that softens the edges of everything else.

It’s a deep exhale.

But that calm didn’t erase excitement; it made it possible.

It meant that the joy of being together was never shadowed by doubt or fear.

I still looked forward to seeing him, to sharing everything, a story from the day, a quiet meal, a laugh over something only we found funny.

Safety didn’t dull the spark; it made the connection feel more real, because it was built on trust instead of uncertainty.

There were so many small ways that safety showed itself. The simple weight of his hand resting on mine could quiet my mind completely, even when nothing in particular was wrong. We both believed that love was something you showed, not just said, and we tried to teach that to our children.

Even during his illness, when he could no longer do many of the things he once had, he still found ways to take care of us. I remember him telling the kids that he would make sure to set the PVR to record my shows, “so Maman doesn’t miss them,” he said. It was something he could do from the sofa, but it was more than that. It was his way of saying, I see you, I know what matters to you, and I still want to make life gentler for you.

That was the essence of who he was: love expressed quietly, consistently, even in the smallest acts.

The Science of Safety

Psychologists say that feeling safe with another person isn’t a luxury of love, it’s the foundation of it.

Attachment theory has shown that emotional security in close relationships allows us to regulate stress, explore the world, and even grow as individuals.

In one study, researchers found that simply holding a trusted partner’s hand reduced activity in the brain’s threat-response areas, literally signaling the body to relax (Coan et al., 2006).

When we feel emotionally safe, our physiology responds in kind: heart rate slows, breathing steadies, cortisol drops (Heinrichs et al., 2003; Schwerdtfeger and Rominger, 2024).

Safety in connection is a biological necessity.

Losing Safe

Maybe that’s why losing it feels so disorienting.

When my husband died, I lost far more than the person I loved.

I lost the part of myself that believed the world could be safe.

I had spent my life expecting impermanence, but his love had made me think, just maybe, that this time would be different. That safety could last.

And then it didn’t.

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes from that realization, not just missing the person, but missing how you felt when you were with them.

It’s as though the world tilts again, and every cell in your body remembers that nothing is guaranteed. Once life has shown you that everything can change in an instant, it’s hard to relax into safety again.

Even when things are calm, some part of you stays braced.

Trying to Find It Again

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to find that feeling again, even if it has to come from within myself this time.

In recent years, psychologists like Kristin Neff and Paul Gilbert have helped us understand how compassion connects to our sense of safety. Neff (2011) writes about self-compassion as becoming your own “secure base,” offering yourself the same steady care you would give someone you love. Gilbert’s (2020) research traces compassion back to its evolutionary purpose, to regulate fear and foster connection, showing that when we treat ourselves kindly, we activate the same soothing systems that help us feel safe with others. In grief, that becomes an anchor: a way to recreate, from the inside, the calm and trust that once came from someone else. It’s a way of re-creating internal safety, of learning to self-soothe when external anchors are gone.

I don’t know if I’ve mastered that yet. But sometimes, in small moments, I catch glimpses of it, when I take a deep breath and realize I’m not tense, or when I feel at peace in my own company.

Maybe safety now is something smaller, quieter, harder to define. Not the illusion that life can’t hurt me, but the confidence that I can survive it when it does.

Passing Safety Forward

And in the meantime, I try to make sure my children feel safe, not just in the simple, childhood way of not being afraid of monsters, whatever those may represent, but in the deeper sense of knowing they are loved.

I want them to feel the steady presence of their remaining parent, and to always know how deeply their dad loved them.

Because if safety begins anywhere, it’s in love that endures, not through time, but through memory, through story, through care.

“You know what the dream is? It’s being attracted to someone who makes you feel safe.”

I had that dream. I lived it. And even though it ended far too soon, I carry its shape inside me, the memory of what safe felt like, the reminder that it was real.

Maybe that’s where safety begins again: in remembering that it existed once, and that, in some quiet way, it still lives in me.

Even when they’re gone, the memory of feeling safe in their presence can guide you to find safety within yourself.

 -- Anne TM Konkle, PhD

References

Coan JA, Schaefer HS, Davidson RJ. Lending a hand: social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychol Sci. 2006 Dec;17(12):1032-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x.

Field NP, Filanosky C. Continuing bonds, risk factors for complicated grief, and adjustment to bereavement. Death Stud. 2010 Jan;34(1):1-29. doi: 10.1080/07481180903372269.

Gilbert P. Compassion: From Its Evolution to a Psychotherapy. Front Psychol. 2020 Dec 9;11:586161. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586161.

Heinrichs M, Baumgartner T, Kirschbaum C, Ehlert U. Social support and oxytocin interact to suppress cortisol and subjective responses to psychosocial stress. Biol Psychiatry. 2003 Dec 15;54(12):1389-98. doi: 10.1016/s0006-3223(03)00465-7.

Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. HarperCollins.

Schwerdtfeger AR, Rominger C. The cardiac correlates of feeling safe in everyday life: A Bayesian replication study. Int J Psychophysiol. 2024 Feb;196:112277. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2023.112277. Epub 2023 Dec 6.