Someone posed the question:
“Even if it just makes other people feel safer, why the F*CK wouldn’t you?”
I’ll begin here by setting out some fundamental thoughts. First, your feelings are in your person, not in my actions. No matter what I do, your choices in how you respond to me lie within you.
Cojoined with that is the idea that you feeling fear is irrespective of my actions. Whether or not other people might react with fear, your feelings are still in response to the stimuli you take in and the ways in which your filters interpret it. This explains why some people are afraid of heights while others are not, as one example.
This baseline comprehension is critical in understanding the rest of this post. If you don’t agree with this premise nothing that follows will make sense and you might as well stop reading. Assuming you do “get it”, please proceed.
Have you heard this quote?
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
This idea is so very important.
While it is accurate that not everyone has done the work necessary to recognize that space between stimulus and response, that doesn’t change the fact that only you control that space — not me.
The whole idea of “safe spaces” is to eliminate the stimulus that creates the reaction which, as a result of eliminating the cause, has the “result” of people feeling safe. That’s not really accurate though. What’s more accurate is that people are having their experience and it doesn’t get interrupted by something that challenges their ’emotional response system.’ To not be exposed to thoughts, ideas, and actions that challenge our world view may have us feel “safe,” but that doesn’t actually make us safer, simply more sheltered from divergent thinking.
The long term impact of continuing to shelter one’s self from ideas that challenge them is the inability to handle input that is uncomfortable. Put differently, the longer you wait to exercise your emotional response system by exposing it to things that are edgy to you, the less practice you have being with the discomfort of living in a world where not everyone makes sense to you.
I read the initial question as tacitly saying, “What kind of ahole doesn’t change their behavior when they know that someone else would feel safer?”
Counterpoint: How does sheltering someone from ideas that make them uncomfortable prepare them to live in the real world where uncomfortable things happen regularly?
And the ancillary questions that go with that include: How much behavior is one supposed to change for other people? Toward what end? For what benefit? In what contexts? For what reasons?
How inauthentic are requests like this requiring other people to be to accommodate the requester’s subjective feelings?
At what point is individual choice to be authentic to oneself more important than other people’s feelings?
As an edutainer, this seems like an important set of things to consider. One man’s offensive is another man’s humor — see Blazing Saddles and Tropic Thunder as examples of this.
As someone who regularly engaged in an activity that by many standards is considered “dangerous” (fire dancing, in case you somehow don’t know that about me), am I responsible for your feelings when you watch me perform? I dare say the fact that it looks dangerous creates a response in audience members that makes them feel some sense of thrill from the lack of perceived safety associated with it. Furthermore, I believe those feelings of lack of safety — aka thrill — create an allure. This is not dissimilar from speeding on a motorcycle, down hill mountain biking at your edge, sky diving, and a myriad of other activities we engage in for the fact that they are not “safe” by some standard.
Sure, sure.. you’re probably thinking, “yeah, but people chose to engage in those which isn’t the same!”
And that would be accurate. Individuals choose, through risk assessment, where they are willing to take these risks that are “unsafe” vs “safe” by their subjective standards. Each individual chooses this.
Thus, you choosing to challenge yourself IS different than you being challenged by an interaction with someone else in society where their views or actions “make” you feel less safe. (To be clear, I don’t think anyone’s actions “make” you feel anything; rather, they create a stimulus to which you respond wherein *you* make you feel unsafe through your internal processing.)
The thing about safety is it’s a perception, not a reality. How safe can one really be when, from the moment of birth we are dying in a body where something like 90% of said body functions aren’t within our control as we spin on a planet that is whirling through space revolving around a dying star that gives us life and we have no control over any of those things?
Considering that reality, it’s entirely possible I could spend my entire life engaging in actions in a ways as to make everyone else around me “feel safe” all the time and never achieve that goal no matter how much effort I assert in that direction.
Which makes it, imo, a futile goal, since my actions don’t determine your feelings.
It is, instead, your response to those actions that makes you feel what you feel.
To answer the initial question, why I might not engage in an action that may or may not make someone else feel safe is because their feelings aren’t my responsibility. They never have been and they never will be. The best gift I can give another is exposure to their own feelings so they can learn how to manage them for themself since I simply can’t do it for them. Plus, authentically speaking, I can barely take responsibility for my own feelings sometimes because this life is challenging!
To ask me to change who I am and how I behave in service of the possibility that you might feel more safe certainly doesn’t guarantee you will while it costs me my sense of Self by sacrificing my authenticity to appease another.
More importantly, the truth is, if you don’t like my actions or ideas because they create a lack of safety within you, you can avoid them which will help you feel “safe” in the end.
The beautiful thing about this is we can all make these choices in our lives. We can choose the stimulus that we allow in our lives if we can’t control our reactions. If the news makes us fearful, not watching it might help with that. If seeing gay people kiss makes us feel fearful, we can look away. If seeing women in shorts on lawns across the street makes us feel fearful, we can not look.
You — yes, you, that human reading this — you have a choice. Your most empowered choice is the one you can make, not the one you pass off to others. You can’t demand they change. You can’t guarantee they will honor a request. Fact is, you can’t guarantee what your response will be even if they do somehow do what you want. But you can choose with your actions both what you allow to impact you and the ways in which you are impacted if you practice engaging with the space between stimulus and response.
#empowermentLiesWithin