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Safety.
Nigel Wellings. 2002.

The Dalai Lama often repeats the truism that we all, friend and foe alike, seek happiness. Part of this happiness is to experience safety in a world that is plainly not safe. Even in our materially bubble wrapped European culture we continue to feel unhappy, to feel anxiety, because we can not wholly exclude the reality that our lives are dangerously intruded upon by external and internal circumstances that are entirely beyond our control.

Hardly surprising then is the preoccupation of both psychotherapists and psychotherapy students with the issue of safety and the valuing of establishing and maintaining safety within the therapeutic and teaching environment. All psychotherapists and psychotherapy students recognise safety as an essential element in the relationship between therapist and patient and teacher and student. Safety, along with, I would suggest, honesty, emotional and intellectual integrity and also generosity and humour, are qualities that may be rightly expected within both the therapeutic and teaching settings.

However, this being so, why is it that both patients and students in all organisations continually and habitually complain that they do not feel safe and further more hold the expectation that they could and should feel differently and that the responsibility for this is other than their own?

My own answer to this is that the issue of safety is an existential cornerstone of human life and as such constellates important issues concerning our psychological and spiritual development. Simply put: however much we all want safety it is frequently denied to us and this then requires us to adapt to the frustration of our deep seated desire to be safe. In the face of this unpalatable fact we have but two options; we can either deny it and continue to act as if safety could be guaranteed if we could only get the circumstances right or accept it, facing up to the certainty that any safety felt is inevitably transient. The first defensive move we might call the "desert island" option and the second and more accepting, the "reality" option.

The Desert Island Option.
Firstly we need to recognise an entirely appropriate and professional duty of care that should exist between therapists and patients and teachers and students and which must be there even in the light of all that follows in this article. As I have said above there are specific qualities that can and have been drawn up which typify this care and set not only an acceptable bottom line but also a realistic top line. Carl Rogers, certainly a kind and humane man, gives us a good example of these in his "core conditions" necessary for practicing his brand of psychotherapy, "unconditional positive regard" being perhaps the most well know of them. So for example, while we as patients and students should expect that which we have paid for should be delivered fully within the bounds of any existing agreements and that, further more, the agreements are honoured entirely professionally, as set out by each therapists and organisations codes of ethics and good practice, we, none the less, can not realistically expect that this will deliver a continually anxiety free environment.

And why should we? The truth is that both the pursuits of psychotherapy and psychotherapy education are full of anxiety because by their very nature they require us to face that which is repressed by the ego because it has been previously felt as initially unbearable. Any peering into the realm of the shadow inevitably will generate anxiety and the greater and deeper our insight into the underworld of the human soul the greater and deeper the fear as we approach the forbidden gate. Indeed, given that the emotions of anxiety and fear are not only perfectly natural but also necessary because they alert us to threats to the self, it would be deeply worrying and a sign of serious psychological damage and developmental arrest if psychotherapy and training did not sometimes arouse the most extreme discomfort, vulnerability and uncertainty.

Some of us, having to face such anxiety, will unconsciously resort to defences that make the anxieties more bearable. This is to take the desert island option that seems to promise safety by hiding away. It is in this defensive closure that we create and offer or yearn for and hope to inhabit a level of care that promises no bad feelings will occur. That how ever dark the shadow it will not frighten us and however demanding the training we will always be immediately confident in achieving it. This type of care we all have a distant memory of and probably an unsatisfied longing for because it is exactly the level of care that we can rightfully expect as an infant and which only entirely diminishes as we approach adolescence and adulthood. Yearning for this and being angry and protesting when it is inevitably not forth coming is to be trapped within the archetypal world of the infant, a world that we now as adults are as barred from. Indeed, as we have seen from our studies of the psychology of the first months of life, the experience of frustration and subsequent disappointment are the building blocks of the maturing ego. That the ability to withstand anxiety makes ego strong and flexible, creating the adaptability necessary to survive. It is a hard fact that suffering and the necessity to adapt and the dawning of consciousness are all inextricably linked.

The mistake of seeming to offer "perfect" care has actually had a long history at CTP and ironically has possibly contributed to its large success over twenty one years of training. My own attraction to CTP was like that of many others in that I was drawn to its seeming friendliness and warmth. Subsequently, as both a supervisor and teacher of its courses for many years I have continued to noticed the intense desire within students to "come home" and this almost always implies a coming home from a world that is seen as brutal, overly intellectual and hierarchally demanding. What is seen as offered in its stead is a place where the anxieties of the world may be put aside and all will be safe and so it is not really surprising that when this idealised and seductively soothing breast is also found to contain terrifying masculine qualities that we become alarmed, disenchanted and protesting. However, most psychotherapist will readily recognise that it is exactly at such a time when an idealisation dies and is perforce replaced with a more complex and ambivalent experience that the light of consciousness dawns.

The Reality Option
However if we can accept the above analysis then some very interesting doors begin to open. The reality is that while we can create some safety and can avoid some anxieties, we can not do this all the time, and therefore sometimes we will feel afraid and unsafe. And as we have already seen this is not a bad thing, having to adapt to optimal frustration is part of the individuation process and it is this that moves us from "baby black and whites" to "grown up greys", even if it takes most of our life to achieve.

Further more part of this individuation process is having to give up believing that if we feel bad it is someone else's responsibility to make us feel better. Once we leave the emotional world of the child parent relationship we arrive in a world where our emotions and feelings are entirely our own and therefore we alone have the power to change them if we are unhappy with them. This requires us to be the adult we already are. Although this is easy to say and is obviously true most of us simply do not really believe it let alone act upon it. Just think for one moment how quickly we say that someone made us feel something. Tom makes me angry. Dick makes me happy. And Harry leaves me entirely indifferent. Actually it is not Tom who makes me angry, to be accurate, it is my own emotional response to Tom that is experienced as anger. While Tom is the stimuli it is myself who brings to that stimuli what ever my emotion is. By accepting that it is my responsibility alone opens the possibility of experiencing Tom differently even if he and what he does remains the same.

Of course our society finds such a high degree of personal responsibility very difficult. We all live in a blame culture that longs for and encourages the seeking out of others to make responsible for emotions we find difficult to bare. Psychotherapy has sadly also fallen into this illusion by trying to create a national complaints procedures that seem to have forgotten that "acting out", that is the unconscious displacement via projection of emotions and behaviours from one place and time in life to another, is a common event and while emotionally compelling does not necessarily reflect factual truth. And perhaps even more ubiquitously, the sad tendency to blame parents and siblings for all life's ills while forgetting that we do not enter this vale of tears simply as blank sheets to be then marked by others. This is not to say there is no causal connection between what one person does to another and the resulting emotional experience of that act but rather, if we wish to take control of our lives and have the power to effect appropriate change then this will entail giving up blame and becoming entirely responsible for ourselves. Thus if I feel unsafe, even if the environment itself is lacking in appropriate boundaries, as an adult who is capable of adaption and personal responsibility I will find ways to make it as safe as I can for myself. This may mean addressing the failings of the environment if possible, of changing the external circumstances, but since this is often impossible the real freedom comes with the ability to simply adapt emotionally and accept reality as it is and not as the infant within would have it. Even if we can not carpet the entire world so to protect our feet from thorns, we can wear shoes.

Transpersonal Safety
So what would a transpersonal perspective on the issue of safety look like? The archetypal hero's journey is essentially a process in which the hero is required to sacrifice his known and familiar self each time life requires him to descend again into the underworld so to be born anew. The passage from infancy to adulthood must be the amongst the most stunning of such transformations and it certainly requires an enormity of sacrifice. The controversial Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche described in his book "Shambhala, the path of the sacred warrior", the process of separation from our mother and father as being necessary for psychological development. He says, "In that journey through life, human beings must overcome the neurotic attachment of being a child-of-somebody". (p.91.) Ken Wilber takes this idea much further in his "Spectrum of Consciousness" model and differentiates between pre-personal, personal and trans-personal mental states and behaviours. He makes it explicitly clear that the pre-personal stages, typified by the psychology of infantile dependency, within a magical world, are entirely different from the trans-personal stages that are initially accessed by the existentially bleak realisation that we are alone in the world and must now be responsible for ourselves. Let us look more closely at these three broad stages and their impact on understanding safety.

Pre-personal level safety
As already suggested, as an infant we come into the world expecting to be held in the absolutely safe arms of our mother and also with the ability to adapt to the frustration of this expectation when it inevitably occurs. As an adult though this desire for perfect care lingers and at times of stress may cause us to regress back to an infantile or childish level of expectation which can never be properly or fully met now we are adult. Further more, if this hunger has not been sufficiently answered in infancy and childhood, as an adult we may continue to unknowingly search for it. An example of this is found in the unconscious motivation of some to become involved with spirituality. What we look for in this instance is not really a teaching that dissolves the separate sense of self but a place where we may regain a symbiotic union with our absent parent.

Personal level safety
Again as already suggested, what follows the pre-personal stage is the emergence of a self that can contain anxiety and so effectively is making, at least, some of its own safety. Taking personal responsibility for our own emotions is key here. The personal level also is defined by our dependency upon one person broadening into appropriate adult dependency upon a wider group in which each helps the others. The level of care and safety that either a psychotherapist or a psychotherapy training organisation offers should be at this level. While there is a real desire to look after the patients or students best interests it is also recognised that this will never be perfect and that every body is responsible in their own way for the whole arrangement to work. However this type of safety, born out of a culture of mutual care, still can not always answer all our needs, and how ever good and consistent it may be it is still vulnerable to all the vicissitudes of life which in a single moment may remind us how fragile our little lives are.

Trans-personal level safety
This is essentially very simple but extraordinarily difficult to achieve if it is to be real. In short, trans-personal safety is found in resting in our divine nature which is never changing. Knowing and accepting that everything else in the world is impermanent and transitory, taking refuge in that which is indestructible is an act of sanity. What is important to emphasise here is the necessary abandonment of the magical belief of the infant which believes that by simply wanting it the world may be changed in such a way that we will feel better. The trans-personal perspective on this emerges and grows from the personal level which realises all change starts from changing one self, that we alone are in charge of our immortal souls. Once we do this we are then emotionally prepared for the most radical "cure" of all and may start upon a trans-personal path to freedom.

Knowing these distinctions must necessarily make us more discriminating of belief systems that promise us the possibility of finally achieving immanent or transcendent states of consciousness that deliver us from suffering. If they do this by offering a world view that aims to exclude our existential vulnerability to everything we can not control, (and that basically amounts to almost everything), the chances are that they are mistaking earlier infantile, pre-personal, states of consciousness with later trans-personal ones. It matters not a jot whether we are Christians, Buddhists or fervent fans of the New Age, none of these will take away aging, illness and death. If a system believes it can, (and some do: "if you are in accord with the transpersonal you will not get ill"), they are then probably committing the "pre/trans fallacy" that Ken Wilber has so usefully articulated.

The fallacy is to confuse beliefs, ideals and states of consciousness that properly belong to infancy, that is are pre-personal, with truly trans-personal states and the understanding that arises from them. So for instance the fallacy is committed when either a therapist or a training or a patient or a student, confuse the (impossible) offer or desire for perfect care and safety with the mountain like stability of spiritual realisation. Perfect care, including safety, is properly part of the desire of the tiny infant and as such is pre-personal. This is different from the ability to be mindfully present with what ever our experience is, mountain like, safe or not, caring or not, which is trans-personal. Pre-personal requires a mummy to make it all alright, trans-personal requires the acceptance of personal responsibility that opens the way for us making everything alright for ourselves. The bottom line is that there is no safety in this world that will not change. In the light of this insight the only safety is the ability to accept impermanence and work on achieving the realisation that will set us free of the dependency on anything other that our own "already, always" enlightened nature. Certainly a very tall order but none the less a desirable one.

Finally, so that this piece does not begin to seem too self dependent, too much emphasising insight over compassion, we must not forget Maitri and the vows of the Buddhasattvas. While it remains true that no one can finally guarantee how we feel except ourselves this does not mean that we should create a world where we narcissistically only seek our own liberation. Most spiritual paths remind us that the work on one self should be accompanied by generating compassion for others. If in our absolute nature there are no divisions between any of us then as we approach this realisation at times may come intimations of it in the sensing of the universality of our human experience. We all suffer, we all want to be happy and sometimes we can express the most extraordinary and simple beauty and be gracious, joyous and giving. We can also be funny. Perhaps, as such writers as C. G. Jung and Michael Washburn suggest, the pre-personal longing for total experience is an infantile intimation of what is only possible spiritually. That our expectation for safety is not pathological in itself but only when it becomes fixated upon objects that can never satisfy it. That once this is realised the pain of feeling unsafe becomes a symbol, speaking of the longing for trans-personal experience. A suffering that is entirely desirable because it points towards the basic open ground of our awakened nature.