Dead Man’s Switch
On learning safety in unsafe times
The price of vigilance may be exhaustion, but its prize is survival. The feeling of safety is a luxury that many cannot afford. One of the issues with notions like ‘intolerance of uncertainty’ is that they turn anxiety into a disorder of the person, like there is some stuff we just need to stop (looking for danger) and some other stuff we just need to get better at (tolerating uncertainty). This ignores the fact that some of us are prey. Fear, anxiety and hypervigilance are woven into the daily lives of many women, people of colour and us queer folk because we are often prey. Some of us never got to experience and learn what safety feels like.
Vincent Deary, How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living
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When I was young, maybe five or six, I was sitting on the edge of a pool, dangling my feet above the shallow end. I didn’t know how to swim, which was unfortunate given the Florida heat and the envy of watching my older brothers showboating off the diving board.
Out of the blue, a toddler waddled over from the kiddie pool, plopped down on the edge and then right into the water. For a quick moment, I froze. And then I jumped in. I reached the bottom, grabbed the baby, and remembered the lack of my abilities. So I hoisted him above my head as high as possible and pushed off from the bottom of the pool. Repeatedly. At some point, the weight from my arms was removed. Time was a distant theory as the water swirled above my head and the world was quiet. I don’t know how long it took before one of my brothers was pulling me up and yelling at me to breathe.
We never told our parents what happened, but I spent the rest of that summer at a different pool, a circular one that got deeper the closer to center you waded. I’d walk towards that center until my feet could not touch and then I’d “swim” back to the edge. From solid ground, to the weight of the water filling me with panic, to a flailing attempt back to safety. I discovered that staying underwater meant I flailed less and got to the edge faster. And so I taught myself to swim, kinda. As long as I was submerged, I could do it. As long as I could hold my breath long enough and often enough, I would be safe.
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There are many theories and models regarding stress and anxiety. In traditional models, stress is viewed as a reaction. They presume a body that is calm at baseline until something triggers an alarm and the system then turns on to fight the threat. Like a motion-activated lightbulb. And some folks are like those lights that turn on when the wind blows a little harder than normal whereas others need someone jumping up and down, waving their arms before activation.
An alternative model is the Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress (GUTS), which views the stress response as the default. Like the Hulk always being angry, this presumes that we are by default on alert. Rather than activated by motion, this light is connected to a dead man’s switch and is always running until we hold down the “I am safe” button.
To be clear, the button isn’t an off switch. It just breaks the circuit for as long as we hold it down. The original dead man’s switch was designed to trigger an emergency response the moment the conductor let go. For me, that emergency response is hyper-vigilance. As long as I hold the button, I am okay. But the moment I let go, the alarms sound. The more I can learn what it is to be safe, the more often I can keep that button pressed.
Deary explains it as an inhibition: “Notice that the recognition of safety just inhibits the stress response. It doesn’t switch it off. It’s more like keeping your foot on the brake rather than turning off the engine.”
Deary also says, “This is the reason so many of us stay alert and agitated in the absence of any clear and present danger: we have not learned safety.”
The first time I read that sentence, my chest and throat tightened and unexpected tears appeared. When do we learn safety, I ask myself. When we are taught. When did I learn safety?
If safety is learned, then what happens to those of us who were enrolled in a different curriculum?
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“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Vuong writes freedom but it may also be pronounced as safety. He and Deary both know that some of us are prey and were we other mammals, our eyes would be on the side of our heads to heighten our vigilance.
Being preyed upon, either directly or indirectly as other people like me fall to predators, keeps my hand on the dead man’s switch.
Saying that I’ve lived most of my life in fear might be inaccurate. Deary also writes, “Fear knows it is in danger; anxiety is not yet certain, thus the perpetual vigilance...we are neither in full flight, nor can we relax and switch off; we are stuck in between.”
It is the perpetual vigilance of anxiety that has permeated much of my life. Medication, therapy, good ol’ “feel the fear and do it anyway” approaches have worked and not worked to various extents. And by “worked” I mean they’ve enabled me to engage with clients, coworkers, society at large. They’ve turned down the volume of anxiety but never silenced it completely. Medication treats the internal chemical, but doesn’t remove the external hunter.
The story of anxiety for me has been one of wanting to overcome it. To fix that part of myself that is stuck sitting between the couch and the wall, hands over my ears, as the epic battle raged in the kitchen, the dining room, into the bedroom. To somehow convince my body that being around other bodies does not always require elevated heart rate or sweating or the destruction of my gut.
Traditional models of stress focus on the activator that is disturbing the default state of safety, the motion triggering the light. GUTS flips that and says the light is always on. Deary, again:
“Safety is not just the absence of threat. Safety is a distinct physiological state, one that we learn to embody through experience of having things be predictably OK for long enough periods of time. As the GUTS proponents argue, our research focus on what maintains chronic anxiety is asking the wrong question. We should instead be asking what stops it. This will give us a better sense of what safety actually is as both an embodied and an experiential state.”
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Waking up from a disturbing dream, I cuddle up against my wife, trying not to wake her. Usually she awakens enough to mumble, “everything okay?”
“I just had a rough dream,” I’ll say and without fail she pulls me closer, arm across me, whispering the incantation “I’ve got you.”
My body relaxes a little and usually I’m able to go back to sleep. This isn’t the magic of love; it’s decades of building a bond of trust. This wouldn’t have worked at the onset of our relationship 20+ years ago. It’s an earned and learned safety and one I’m eternally grateful for.
The conduit of safety isn’t reserved for other people only. Which is good given how much people aren’t, by and large, my thing. My best friend, a German shepherd/lab/chow blend, was a great conveyer of safety. When anxiety would get the best of me around being physically safe, I’d look to him for reassurance. If he wasn’t disturbed then I knew I was okay. And if he was alert or activated, I knew to pay attention. I trusted his sense of safety more than my own.
Sometimes, releasing the switch requires more than I can do alone. Sometimes I need someone else’s hand, or paw, guiding mine.
It’s tricky this notion of safety being more than “the absence of threat,” especially with the constant very real threat of threat as a queer, transgender, autistic, female-coded person living in America right now. Learning safety requires positive evidence of security. Repeatable, reinforceable social, physical, and cognitive experiences that allow me to at least experience that “embodied and...experiential state.”
I wish I had a round pool to practice in, to walk closer to the center until my tip toes no longer hold me up and the buoyancy of the water takes over. I don’t know how to do this just yet. But I know it’s possible. I’ve had moments of floating, eyes closed, warm sun, fully supported and free. I’ve been working my way inward without even realizing it.