Finding Safety

Sitting in the sauna I realized how like my room it is – a lot of wood, dark, safe….safe? My room exists deep inside the body’s brain, away from the prying hands and minds and penises of others. It is inaccessible to the world, a refuge with an endless staircase and a locked door. I smiled when I heard a voice from one of the other parts saying “how safe can it be if it’s not real?” because I had an answer immediately – I know my room, the floorboards, the window, the rug, the bedposts…I know it intimately and love it and am free to feel in it. How much more “real” is that than someone who never sits mindfully in their physical room? Doesn’t know the feel of the bedspread or the smell of the dresser drawers? My room is real. And it is safe.

But in the sauna, I began to question the meaning of ‘safe.’ I felt safe in the sauna. I knew no one would be coming to join me, or even ask me a question. My sauna time has always been my time, alone unless I invited someone, uninterrupted, sacred. But I stepped out of the sauna onto the little deck with privacy fence my brother built me and thought about the possibilities of intrusion. It would be possible for marauders to storm this sauna and rape me. It would be possible, but quite unlikely. Does this make it safe? Just because nothing bad has happened should I afford myself the luxury of feeling safe in an actual physical place?

I returned to the dimly lit warmth of the sauna, throwing some water on the rocks. I sat on the bench and let the steam roll over my body, at first feeling almost cold until it wrapped around me completely. I could hear the blood pulsing in my ears. I felt safe. Undeniably safe. There are no rules here in the sauna about access – it is simply my space and because it is removed from the house and he doesn’t like sauna then I am safe. I tried to imagine the same feeling in my room in the house, where rules about access apply and have been ignored. Could I feel safe there? Should I feel safe there? Marauders are no more likely to storm my home than they are my sauna. But I share that space with him. And despite the fact that some of us enjoy his company I am not sure I do. I have laid in his arms before and drawn comfort. I have gone to him for assurances and to make sense of difficult and confusing thoughts. Yet he is not my husband and this body I share is his wife and I don’t like it. I feel like I have no say, and that is a huge trigger.

I don’t ever want to experience sex again.

I don’t know if my feelings of safety in the sauna were an illusion. If I can’t feel safe in my sauna, in my room, in my home, then is it an illusion to feel safe in my ‘real’ room in the mind? What really is safe? I can’t think of any place that is truly safe – any place at all could be breached and this body could be ravaged. How do other people feel safe? I know when Rae and Amanda are in the classroom, they don’t think of these things, they assume they are safe and they feel safe and they don’t even question it. In fact, they operate under the assumption that they are to provide a safe environment for the children – physical and emotional. Not only do they feel safe they are providers of safety.

The walls of my room, my ‘real’ room in the mind, have not yet dissolved, but I am not as sure of their realness and protection as I once was. So much has changed. I am so much more an inhabitant of the body, my feelings accessible to the rest of them, their thoughts and feelings seeping through my walls. The poison called shame travels like blood through the body’s veins, the sadness and rage and pain like air in the lungs. I felt safe in the sauna, even knowing I was not absolutely safe. Is that how people live? Is that as safe as it gets?