Is it safe?

Children are innocent, like an untouched sponge being immersed in the ocean of life. Their learning is experienced through feeling their emotions, which they absorb from others.

Children emotionally absorb everything they experience as they explore the environment they are in. Their emotional understanding is both open and intuitive, learning the language of communication, plus absorbing the many behaviours and beliefs from those around them. It is here they begin to feel their own boundaries and develop perceptions towards the normality of their family life. These perceptions will be challenged when they enter other family environments, which they naturally compare to their own. When this happens, they begin to question their home environment and ultimately their own feelings and perceptions.

If their home environment is unsafe due to neglect, bullying or other forms of abuse, their feelings change. Their natural innocence slowly suffocates and they learn to hide. This behaviour influences their perceptions, so they begin to develop coping mechanisms in order to survive their daily experiences.

Finding safety is learned as they navigate their own emotions, understanding who they can be themselves with and who they need to hide from. These emotional decisions provide protection, ensuring they feel safe, as they become more aware of their boundaries.. But over time, assessing their own needs for safety becomes exhausting. Continually questioning whether it is safe to be themselves or not creates an inner conflict. This perpetual pattern of self protection, begins to diminish their true authenticity, which leads to confusion.

Due to their young age, they have to remain in their family. Being unable to make changes to their home environment they change themselves instead. This need to survive, continuously disconnects them from their own unique self causing them to sabotage themselves.

Their beautiful innocence, which was once the untouched sponge, is now soaked within the heaviness of surviving. Their disconnection with their true self has been drowned with a belief that disappearing is the only way to be safe. The home they inhabit, haunted by intergenerational traumas, governed by unconscious behaviours and beliefs is so visible to them but yet unseen by those who are unable to witness their own wounds.

Children are often so gifted to see and sense these hauntings in their homes but the difficulties arrive when they try to share what they see. And if they do share and are then told they are wrong, or even punished for sharing. Their emotional awareness becomes increasingly confused, they develop a belief that they cannot share their feelings. In order to co-exist in the haunted home, they continually detach from their own feelings causing an even deeper disconnection within.

The risk of sharing their own feelings in this home becomes so huge, they build walls of protection just to survive. But overtime, what was once protection becomes a prison of perception with the belief that the world is not a safe place to be. So, they learn to hide, isolate themselves and lock themselves away.

But then something changes, whether it be a greater connection with their intuition, or a therapeutic connection as an adult, their prison walls begin to fall. They can no longer carry the compass of confusion, or drown within the ocean of their own doubt. They re-learn to connect to their inner sense and their pure sweet innocence is reborn.

And this is the beauty in their being.

To witness the depth of their pain, their shame, how they hid from themselves and to feel every emotion that was once suppressed within them becomes a release. It is here, they begin to find freedom from their prison of protection, as they reconnect to their soulful self, lovingly guiding them home.

This is the gift of true freedom, whether it happens in the body of the child or the body of the adult. The opportunity to finally let go of the hurt they carried, release the confusion and the many years in isolation, feeling afraid of never being understood.

To fully welcome the loving arms of the soulful self, inviting the child to remember all that they truly are, reuniting both inner sense and innocence as one. For some, this depth of conscious compassion may not be received in childhood, but it can always be welcomed in adulthood. Inviting who we truly are, to surface from the depths of disillusionment and rediscover the new redirections for a life lived with love.

To begin again.

As conscious adults, we can learn to open our hearts and understand that our parents were once children and they may have lost themselves within their need to find safety. This loving awareness guides us to re-weave our own boundaries, so the child within all of us can be seen, heard, eternally loved, forever free to be.

This way of being, invites us to connect to our soulful self. To compassionately welcome our way of understanding, that the needs of our own inner child are beautifully held in the loving arms of the adult, we are today.

I am this loving adult, holding the most beautiful child inside me. His search for safety was always in me and even though I hid away, so I could not see, this beautiful child is deep within me. Such loving tears have been released, accepting that I have carried a belief that the pain deep inside me was too much to feel. These tears have shown me that the child inside me was to scared to feel, believing the adult couldn’t help him to feel and be real.

Feeling my emotions that were once hiding in years of sadness, now fully open to be received, has become such a beautiful way to be. I can place my hands on my heart and cry, as I feel and remember all the times in my childhood I learned to hide from myself and others simply to find safety.

And so I breathe and say “the safest place is myself”.

For, now I am here, for the heart that I am.
My safety is mine, with all that I am.
I hold myself, not running away.
I am present to all that wishes to arrive.
Both child and man are here to thrive.
I am finally safe, for my love, I embrace.

© Pete Bengry 2026

Credit to Dmitry Ratushny for image