Amanda Stern: Why Trying to Feel Safe Never Works

Have you ever wondered why, despite your best efforts, feeling truly safe seems elusive? Amanda Stern explores this question by drawing on the seminal ideas of Donald Winnicott, one of the foremost British Psychoanalysts and Paediatricians. You'll find a link to the full article, after the selected excerpts, at the end.

"In 1974, near the end of his life, the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott published a paper with a revelatory thesis: the thing you're most afraid will happen has already happened."

"He didn't mean it metaphorically. He meant it literally. The actual catastrophe we've organized our entire lives around avoiding—annihilation, rejection, abandonment—already occurred. The things we spend our lives haunted by; we’ve already survived. Winnicott called this "the fear of breakdown.""

"He noticed that some of his patients lived in a state of constant dread, anticipating some future catastrophe that would shatter them completely. These weren't people with specific phobias or manageable anxieties. They were people who felt perpetually on the edge of something terrible, something nameless, something that would unmake them if it ever arrived."

"The usual therapeutic approach would be to help them see that their fear is disproportionate, that the catastrophe probably won't happen, that they're safe now. But Winnicott realized something his patients couldn’t see: They were afraid of a past event they'd survived but lacked conscious awareness of that experience. They were simply too young."

"Here's how it works: Something overwhelming happens to you in early childhood, a rupture in care, a shocking betrayal in a familiar routine; a profound aloneness, or a psychic abandonment. But when you're an infant or a very young child, you don't yet have the ego structure to experience it as an event. You don't have language for it. You don't have a self that’s cohesive enough to say, "this is happening to me." So, the experience doesn't get metabolized, doesn't get integrated into your narrative, doesn't become part of your conscious memory."

"But it happened. Your body knows it happened. Your nervous system organized around it. And now, decades later, you're living in terror of experiencing what you've already survived."

"The fear is your psyche trying to bring the unprocessed experience into consciousness. You're not anticipating a future breakdown, you're trying to finally have the breakdown that got interrupted before you were capable of having it."

"You can't be afraid of a feeling you've never encountered. If you've never experienced profound abandonment, you wouldn't recognize it as something to fear. The fact that you know this particular catastrophe is something to organize your entire life around avoiding means some part of you has already touched it." 

"For those of us who panic and have anxiety, this not only reframes, it explodes, avoidance. We do all we can to dodge the feelings we fear we can’t live through, without understanding we’ve already lived through them before. Taken logically, this is evidence that feelings cannot kill us—since we’ve felt it before and never died. This insight of Winnicott’s, and Tift’s (and many others) repositions terror from something new and annihilating to something we’ve already known but never processed."

"What we’re afraid we won’t survive, we’ve actually already survived. This makes it instantly less terrifying."

"If you've spent years afraid of "falling apart" or "losing it completely" or "not being able to handle it," you might assume you're anticipating some future collapse. But what if you're actually trying to consciously experience a collapse that already happened? What if your anxiety is your psyche's attempt to finally, properly, have the breakdown that occurred before you had the developmental capacity to have it?"

"If you're trying to prevent a future breakdown, you organize your life around avoidance and control. You eliminate triggers. You build elaborate safety systems. You never let yourself get too close to the edge because the edge is where the catastrophe lives."

"But if you're trying to consciously experience a past breakdown, the work is different. The work is allowing yourself to finally feel what you've been avoiding feeling. Not because you're masochistic or because suffering is noble, but because the only way through is through. The catastrophe has to be experienced to be metabolized."

"You have to be there for it. You have to have the ego structure to experience it as an event that happened to a self. And then, and only then, can it become part of your history rather than your eternal present."

"This is deeply uncomfortable because it suggests that what you need is not safety but encounter. Not re-traumatization, but slow and conscious contact with what you've been fleeing. Tift would say: you already know this feeling. The fear is proof that you know it. The work is choosing to feel it again, but this time with your adult capacity to metabolize it."

"This doesn't mean seeking out suffering or manufacturing crises. It means recognizing that the fear itself is a kind of door. The catastrophe you're anticipating isn't out there in your future, it's in your past, trying to become conscious."

"Many people are terrified of abandonment, and some meticulously manage every relationship to prevent being left. They may not realize they’re trying to finally, consciously experience being left by their father when they were two, or the death of their mother at four – experiences they lived through but didn’t process because they were too young to metabolize it as 'this is happening to me.'"

"The relief this concept offers is profound: if it already happened and you survived it, then you know you can survive it. The breakdown you're terrified of isn't actually a breakdown, it's a breaking through. It's bringing into consciousness what was always there, waiting to be felt.

The fear of breakdown is actually the fear of finally, properly experiencing what already broke you. And the only way to stop being haunted by it is to turn around and look at it directly."

"Which means the catastrophe you've been avoiding your whole life isn't coming. It's already here. It's been here the whole time, waiting for you to be strong enough to feel it. And if you're afraid of it, if you can name it, if you recognize its particular shape, then you've already felt it once. The work now is feeling it again, but this time as someone who can bear it."

"Avoidance is suffering. The feeling itself is your relief."

Link to Amanda Stern's full article is here.