Learning Safety After a Lifetime of Survival

Last Updated on 14 May, 2026 by Cara Sutra

Did you feel safe when you were a child? Can you remember the first time you were properly scared? I ask with genuine curiosity, because for as long as I can remember, even through childhood, I lived under an ominous cloud of fear. Until recently, I didn’t know what it felt like to actually feel safe. And even now it’s difficult to fully believe that I am safe, and all of my current life and relationship stability isn’t just some deceptive “calm before the storm” era. Today I’ll be talking about my many years living in fear, the reasons why that was, and the changes which have enabled me to finally feel safer despite my best attempts to stay in the ironic comfort zone of anxiety.

Being raised in fear-based control

I don’t have an earliest memory of feeling scared. It was just always there. My mother joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was 6 months old and my father was persuaded into it soon after, so the religion’s teachings were all I knew growing up.

The fear was about Armageddon. “No-one knows the day or the hour,” so the hypervigilance had to be constant. And it was exhausting. Like living through a war that no-one else in the world knew about. I feel uncomfortable comparing it to a war, because I wasn’t literally in a war zone the way some people in the world are, but my mind and body felt in danger pretty much all the time.

It wasn’t just Armageddon, although that was the main thing. It was also the terrors and menace of the outside “world”, which was anything not part of the Watchtower Society. The world consisted of evil people controlled by Satan, all of them trying to tempt me away from my service and devotion to Jehovah. Everyone who wasn’t a JW was out to get you. Out to draw you away from “the truth.” There was a feeling of real physical threat as well as a spiritual one.

There were three meetings a week to keep my focus on the impending judgement day of doom and, therefore, my need to stay righteous and obedient. Two hours at the Kingdom Hall on a Friday night, another two on Sunday, and an hour of “home Bible study” with a smaller group on Tuesday evenings. Ours was the chosen family and home for the Tuesday meeting, so it happened at our house. On Saturdays and Sundays we would also spend at least an hour or two knocking on doors, preaching to people. On the small island of Jersey this was excruciatingly embarrassing, as it would frequently be teachers or kids I went to school with answering the door. It led to relentless bullying, on top of not celebrating Christmas, birthdays, Halloween or Valentine’s Day, not attending assembly because of the hymns, and sitting out of RE lessons (until for some reason that still evades me, I was allowed to take Christian Theology A-Level in Sixth Form).

At Armageddon, I would face Jehovah, and he would judge whether I lived through to a paradise earth or whether I would be killed in his “divine judgement.” Meanwhile, fire from heaven would rain down all around. The streets would be lined with bodies. Those of us who survived God’s judgement would have the task of cleaning up the destruction. Graphic images in the Watchtower Society’s literature (especially the big red book called Revelation – Its Grand Climax At Hand!) burned into my brain and exacerbated the fear. There was no point focusing on anything fully in “this system of things,” because it was all going to end soon. We just didn’t know exactly when, of course. But it was sure to be soon.

If I had to try and describe that feeling, it would be the brain-piercing sound of a screech. Nails on a blackboard, fork on a plate. Ironically, it’s the type of noise I can’t hear well due to my high frequency deafness. But in my brain, that’s what survival mode felt and sounded like. It’s still the noise that fills my brain whenever I’m in a state of panic, for whatever reason, these days.

On thinking everyone lives in constant fear

It’s taken me this past year of therapy to realise that not everyone lives like I have been. Generally, people don’t live in a constant state of hypervigilance with a cloud of impending doom hanging over their heads. I thought the constant scanning and bracing for disaster was a normal, shared human experience.

I told myself to stop believing in imminent Armageddon many years ago, when I left the religion. But telling yourself to stop believing something you were taught from babyhood isn’t the same as actually stopping. It’s hard to get something that hardwired out of your system, no matter how hard you try, how often you numb with alcohol, or how deep you dig in therapy. Fear was an undeniable part of me, and always found new reasons to exist.

What if people I loved died suddenly. What if I died suddenly, in a grotesquely violent way. How would that impact my sons, my husband? I catch myself kissing my husband goodbye when he goes out and wondering if this might be the last time, because he could crash and die. My son went on his first school trip recently, and I gave him his goodnight cuddle the night before he went, and realised I was wondering if it would be the last one, if his school bus would crash en route and he’d die. What about if a plane dropped out of the sky and landed on our house whilst we all slept? If there’s something to worry about, no matter how outlandish or unlikely, I’ll find it.

Sometimes in therapy I’m like, OH. Doesn’t everyone do this? That’s just a me thing? I really thought it was everyone.

It doesn’t help when the world is genuinely scary

When COVID lockdowns started, I was obviously on high alert. It was like my brain was telling me, “this is it, this is what we’ve been bracing for, it’s Armageddon, finally.” When Putin invaded Ukraine, I packed an emergency evacuation case for my family for when the war came to England and it would be like WW2 again. I grew up in Jersey where all the tourist sites are about the wartime occupation, so I didn’t have to stretch my imagination too hard. They used to test the air raid sirens every now and then as well, which was delightful as you can imagine. I still have a fear-response when I hear that noise in films or when visiting exhibitions.

Currently there’s the whole Iran situation, but this time I didn’t pack an emergency survival suitcase like I did with Russia-Ukraine. Maybe therapy is helping me see things as they really are, rather than my mind always leaping to some imminent apocalypse and the end of the world as we know it. Saying that, I still have to be careful how often I access news apps in a day. I need to make sure I’m in a headspace where I can deal with whatever I’m about to read. I definitely don’t access the news just before bed anymore, and I don’t have any news notifications pinging to my phone.

Knowing I’m safe, but finding it hard to truly believe it

It wasn’t until several years after getting together with my now-husband that I dared to start believing I might, finally, be a little bit safe. Ok then, properly safe. My psyche still holds on tightly to that hypervigilance, though.

I rationally know that I’m safe now, in this life I’ve fought hard for, with the wonderful patient and gentle and loving man he is (unless I want him not to be gentle at all, to which he generously complies). But despite daily constant evidence that I am safe, properly safe, it’s so hard to really believe it deep down in my bones.

I get to thinking that this is finally it. I’m safe and happy and everything is calm from here on out. And my mind will immediately follow up with “but it won’t last,” “it’s a trap,” “if you let yourself feel safe it’s going to hurt more when it all inevitably falls apart.” One of my children will die, or my husband will die, or I’ll find out I’m dying, or our home will be destroyed or taken away from us. Or I’ll be discovered to be an enormous criminal or fraud in some way and I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison, convicted of some heinous crime I don’t even realise I committed, but I probably did, because in my heart I am still fighting the belief that I’m actually a terrible person. A “sinner.” Childhood beliefs and religious trauma haunting me eternally.

It’s like my psyche thinks that the fear is keeping me safe, but it isn’t, of course. It’s just the familiar path my mind has always walked. We cling to familiar psychological routes. To let myself fully believe I’m safe would mean letting go of the fear, and the fear has been with me my entire life. That kind of letting go is terrifying in its own right. It feels like stepping off a ledge. Yes, you say it’s a step to safety, and yes, it’s terrifying being up here on a precarious little ledge. But I can’t seem to hand over that trust, I can’t seem to surrender, to step off and on to the safety I’m just hoping is there. What if the safety is just a mirage? What if I plummet to a certain death? So I stay, feeling trapped, on the uncomfortably precarious little ledge.

The physical signature of my fear

The fear feels like it’s in my heart, though I know it’s really in my mind. It radiates its ice cold tendrils out from the heart, down my legs, down my arms, up my chest to tighten at my throat, prickling my scalp. It encapsulates me top to toe. Like one of those medical diagrams showing the human circulatory system, only instead of blood, it’s a network of fear with the heart as its engine.

When something neutral happens but my body reads it as a threat, I get the panic response – but at the same time, there’s a rational voice telling me I’m being a huge idiot. The rational side, the part being helped along by therapy, says: you’re safe, you’re not in danger, you’re fine and loved, you can handle this, it isn’t as bad as it seems. The other side, the part trained by my childhood and other traumatic experiences in my life, says: panic, fear, terror, imminent danger. Fight or flight. Physical nausea, vision changes, hyperventilating.

I never used to label that as anything in particular. Just the way I am. I’ve since come to realise that it’s a panic attack.

What helps

It’s hard to find anything that properly and fully eradicates the panic, other than time and talking myself down off that ledge. Something new, big, and which my therapist suggested, is writing in my therapy journal. By hand, in a paper journal, rather than typing on a screen. I just write the stream of consciousness, even if it’s repetitive. How it feels, why I feel that way. Beliefs are easier to untangle and disarm when they’re on a page in front of you. I’ve always found it easier to advise someone else rather than take my own advice, and I doubt I’m the only one. Putting it all out in handwriting makes the words feel almost like they belong to someone else. And then, I can advise that someone else on the page. I hope that makes sense.

What else do I do? Well, I keep my hands busy with knitting, or Lego sets, or autism picky pads (I’m not autistic, but they’re really good for keeping your hands busy with a calming, repetitive motion). These have helped me stop the body-focused behaviours I didn’t even realise I was doing until therapy. Pulling out eyelashes and eyebrows, pulling hair, scratching my arms or shoulders until they bleed, sometimes even slapping myself in the face or hitting myself in the head. I’ve stopped those now. Sometimes I still catch my hand going toward an eyelash or up to my skin, and I know it’s time to get busy doing something else.

Relishing everything I’m allowed to do now

Christmas is one of the clearest and most dramatic signs of how far I’ve come. For years after leaving the religion, my Christmases were less of a typical celebration and more of an aggressive, rebellious “fuck you” to the JWs. Look at me! I’m celebrating Christmas and what can you do about it? Getting wildly drunk, then angry, then crying, then doing it all over again the next day. For the past decade it’s been more of a normal Christmas, whatever that is. I don’t have a lot to compare it to. Anyway, since I went totally sober in February 2023, the focus has shifted to spending precious time together as a family, embracing our home, celebrating the year we had, welcoming the next one with actual joyful anticipation rather than doing it all as some kind of performance.

Oh, and birthdays! I can celebrate my birthday with a massive cake and as many candles as I want. I can wear what I want, as revealing as I dare, or as casual as I like. I can watch what I want, yes, even films rated 18. I can eat black pudding if I want to, even if it does have blood in it (it turns out I hate black pudding, which I was gutted about, but at least I tried). I can research anything. I can change my mind. I know that dinosaurs really did exist, no they’re not a hoax (I know), that evolution is real and continues to happen all around us, that this isn’t the final perfect form of anything, nor is it all proof of some divine existence which for some reason loves to watch us all suffer, in its mysterious omnipotence. I can educate myself, and I can let my beliefs evolve with what I learn.

I can spend my time however I want to spend it. I’m not tied to multiple weekly meetings which have a schedule of judgement and fear, or trudging from door to door selling a religion to people who, understandably, just want to get on with their day.

I can be as openly bisexual/pansexual as I like, and my husband actively encourages it, as I do his bisexuality. This sex blog is testament to how much I revel in the freedom of my sexuality. I can be myself.

Internal safety and external safety

There’s feeling safe in your environment and the practical, tangible aspects of your life, and there’s feeling safe emotionally, psychologically, letting go of inner fears and vulnerabilities. External safety is the easier one for me to grapple right now. We bought our forever home in 2016, after a lifetime of renting and never being able to get on the property ladder. No landlord to tell us we have to move because they’re selling up. Though I do have recurring nightmares that the bank will say our mortgage was a huge error and we’ll be evicted and end up living in one small dark room. Because you know if there’s something to worry about, no matter how unlikely, I’ll find it.

My husband is my actual safe space. I know, overused phrase, but it’s the truth. He’s a constant presence of calm. What scares me is how much I rely on him for that. But maybe that’s what love is. Surrendering to complete vulnerability, letting yourself be entirely emotionally connected with another person, for as long as you’re lucky enough to have it.

Internal safety is much harder for me. Feeling totally safe that he’ll keep on loving me, despite what I fight against believing about myself. Feeling safe to let go and just be happy, without my brain insisting he’ll die in a freak accident the very next day. That’s the long-term project, the one I’m still working on.

The day I asked his permission to rest

I’ve been struggling to work as much each day as I used to. I have M.E. and I’m in perimenopause, and the combination is brutal. I increasingly work from the sofa instead of at a desk because it’s more comfortable.

One day I was explaining to my husband that I’d done my best but I literally couldn’t work anymore that day. I needed to lie down and rest. I was telling him all this, and the look on his face was, in the nicest possible way, “why are you telling me this?”

I realised I was asking his permission to rest. Like I felt undeserving of rest. That really, I should push myself to work through, to struggle, to be in pain. I was confessing to him a failure, that I couldn’t carry on working.

He just said, “good, you should rest more!” and smiled at me, pulled me into a kiss, with a long loving cuddle. In that moment it became even clearer to me that he genuinely loves me. You know how you can know something and then really know it? Anyway, what I’d been doing was looking for permission to be ill, but I hadn’t needed to ask. He wasn’t going to judge me or be angry with me. He just wants me to be as comfortable and as happy as possible, whatever that takes, even if I could never work again. His love isn’t dependent on me earning, or performing productivity. He loves me as a person, not me as a productive earner for the home.

I felt safe in his love. It was warm and effusive, and the full body tingle of it was unfamiliar and strange. But good. I try to notice it and feel it as often as I can now. I think it’s helping me to heal.

To anyone still in survival mode

If you’re reading this and still living in survival mode, I just want you to know that someone out here knows how it feels. Not the exact flavour of your survival mode, because yours is made of your own experiences and beliefs and psyche. But I honestly know what living in survival mode feels like. The klaxon. The feeling of being hunted. The endless, inevitable-feeling doom.

It’s just a feeling, though. Not a fact.

I can’t tell you how or when it will fade, or that it ever will, fully. But I hope that in time you’re able to see the sensation for what it is. A mode. It’s toggleable. You just have to not give up, and I hope that one day you find a way to dial it down a little. Hopefully switch it all the way off. Feeling a bit hypocritical here because I haven’t managed it yet, but that doesn’t mean I think it isn’t possible.

Keep the faith along with me. We’ll try to believe the best together.

A note to my future self

It was never easy, but that just means you’re a fighter. And fighting means you do truly believe, in some part of yourself, that you’re worth fighting for. It’s hard now, but it is easier than it was. The long, slow, ongoing fight means you’re swimming against the tide of your conditioning. Even when you’re swimming hard it can look, in that moment, like you’re getting nowhere. That doesn’t mean you’re not putting the effort in, or that it’s pointless. Keep going. It’s stopping you slipping back to the shore of despair and hypervigilance and fear.

Swimming hard means you’re trying. Trying means you believe you’re worth trying for. It means you know you are worth love.

You’re doing it for that little girl who deserved to be loved, fully, as you love your own children. The girl who looks terrified, you know she does, because you’ve got her photo framed on the wall as a reminder of what was. She never got full, warm and unconditional love from her parents. But she’s getting it from you, the adult self. And that is the very core of what continues to heal you.