no such thing as safe people

on making birthday plans and hoping for a phoenix

Sunday is my birthday and I bought myself a present. I’ll get to that in a second. I’ve been thinking about how I want to spend it and with whom. What I want the most is to be with people who love me, with whom I feel really safe. 

In my last email I talked about safe people and unsafe people, which wasn’t really fair. No person is one hundred percent unsafe or one hundred percent safe, just like no person is all good or all bad. We all contain shades of both. But cult thinking doesn’t deal in shades of grey and my brain still loves binaries. It can be hard for me to hold both sometimes. 

During the year of my life that I worked with a cult leader, I told myself she was safe and good, that she didn’t know about all those bad things happening in her organisation. She was so kind to me and for a brief period she was all I had for support. She would take my call whenever I needed her, no matter what time. It was impossible to imagine that in her there also lived a dangerous criminal. But the truth is she was that too. 

My story is mine. It is always going to bend inward, toward what feels true to me. To those who’ve harmed me and been harmed BY me, it will seem to bend outward, toward blame and condemnation. It will not feel true to them. It will probably seem like I’m giving myself a hall pass. The story will always be missing something for the characters in my writing because that’s what memoir is: one person’s story. 

Faced with pushback on last week’s writing, I defaulted into an old pattern: fawning. Most people know about the fight-flight-freeze response but in my cult recovery classes I learned about a fourth mechanism that works even better for me, something I’ve been doing my whole life: fawning i.e. romancing the bear i.e. making it love you so it can’t hurt you.

Fawning is a trauma response that I’ve used my whole life to keep me safe. It’s contorting my words and actions to please others, being overly apologetic and nice when someone is being unkind to me or trying to control me. "Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others," wrote therapist Pete Walker, who created the concept known as The Fourth R.

I could’ve frozen, stopped writing and hoped to be forgotten, which I considered. I could’ve fled, deleted the whole thing and pretended it never happened. I could’ve fought, defending my actions and trying to make myself right, which honestly, isn’t something I’m even able to do when I am caught in a trauma response, my head pulsing painfully and my body coursing with fear. The bear is very real for me. It may seem like just words, but to me the possibility of death is a clear and present danger. My body does not know the difference between bears and sharp words. In this case I chose to fawn because that is what I know from childhood works the best. 

I took full responsibility and promised to do better, which I absolutely meant and I absolutely can. It wasn’t untrue. In order for change to happen, responsibility can’t be one-sided, and one-sided responsibility was my whole childhood.

Of my five siblings I was the most obedient child in our family, doting on our patriarch and being the best rule follower I could be, or at least making it appear so. As a teenager I once learned to play a Tori Amos song on the piano called Father Lucifer. It was a beautiful piece of music and my dad loved it. He wanted to learn it too and asked me if I would share the score with him. Music was one thing we had in common. It was a weak sort of glue holding our relationship together but it was what we had. Problem was the first line went, 

Father Lucifer, you never looked so sane.
How the Lizzies, how's your Jesus Christ been hanging?

That lyric was not going to fly with my father, a man who spent thirty years on the road as a missionary of the Plymouth Brethren, recruiting new souls to be born again in the name of Christ Our Lord. It would’ve been like handing him a live grenade. So I photocopied the sheet music, whited out all the lyrics and renamed it Precious Things, then recopied the edited version before handing it back to him. Catastrophic problem solved.

This has been my life: editing myself down to a version best suited to get me in the least amount of trouble. Fawning all over people so they don’t get mad at me, and being whatever anyone asks me to be. 

I had to offer myself some grace for falling into that old pattern, and see that I can fawn if I need to while still taking responsibility for my part, and letting others be responsible for theirs. 

Breakups are messy and hurting people inevitably treat each other badly, whether it’s friendships, loverships, marriages, or business partnerships. It’s chaotic and confusing for everyone. Let’s not even talk about “conscious uncoupling”—I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit. In any case, this most recent writing started an unwinnable cat fight about who is safe and who is not, who is responsible and for what, a shit fight over who hurt who. The five car pileup of people I hurt wanted me to remind me that I hurt them, which I did. They were right about that.

I don’t have uncoupling figured out, but before I got my Ph.D in asshole conversion therapy I also earned a master’s degree in giving people grace. Today I choose to give myself and others grace to piece together the wreckage in our own time and in our own way. More than anything I am wracked with grief for the people I’ve lost, which is enough to carry on its own. I want to blame everything on myself because if it’s all my fault then it might be within my control to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. 

But that is of course well beyond my purview. The only way I know to truly protect myself is to learn how to be in a healthy relationship, starting with my relationship to myself, which brings me to my birthday present. 

I made a new friend. 

She is strong and beautiful and has smooth translucent skin to rival my own. I feel pretty certain this new friend will play an integral role in my healing in the coming years. Her name is Peace Train. 

I found her on Facebook marketplace and it was love at first sight. The first time I tossed her over my shoulder and nudged her onto my roof rack was like a homecoming. Welcome home, baby. You are me are going to have so many adventures together. 

“Peace Train is an old soul who is familiar with all the lakes of the north,” her former owner told me. I don’t know where she will take me, but I know we are going somewhere wonderful. 

I’m not sure what I’ll do for my birthday but I know that I will involve a picturesque country location, my children and our new canoe. Those are relationships that are safe and supportive, and in the depth of my pain and my grief they remind me that no matter how hard it gets, I have that and it is good. 

One of the hardest and most beautiful things about leaving a cult, a controlling relationship or high-control group is that you have to rediscover who you are without the beliefs you once held and the people you once loved. It is overwhelming and scary and requires a lot of bravery. I’ve had to face things about myself that I don’t like very much. I’ve had to watch my life go up in flames and own that while there may have been others who helped me gather the wood and chop the kindling, it was me who lit the match. 

I really don’t know what will rise from the ashes yet. I wrestle with doubt every single day, wondering if I’m doing the wrong things. But when I flip that canoe off my head and sink my paddle into the water, I have hope that someday, maybe years from now, I will look back on this time in my life and say, “Damn, woman. You were so fckn brave.”