August 2025 - Where Avoidance Wears the Mask of Healing: Learning the Difference between Self-Protection & Self-Trust

We talk a lot about safety in healing spaces. Safety in relationships, safe environments, safety as a requirement for growth. But what we rarely acknowledge is that what many of us call “safety” is actually avoidance dressed up as protection.

After abuse or control, avoidance can feel like clarity or strength. And sometimes, it is. But often, it’s just the freeze response in a prettier outfit. We learn to avoid people, situations, intimacy, and even our own vulnerability, because we haven’t yet learned how to stay with ourselves when discomfort arises. Too many of us have learned to avoid what is necessary for growth instead of building capacity to meet it.

When we say, “that’s my boundary,” what we often mean is, “please don’t trigger my fear” or “I’m uncomfortable not being in control”. But a true boundary isn’t a rule someone else has to follow with blind compliance. It’s an action you take to remain in integrity with yourself.

It’s a conversation you have with people you care for about your limits where you can explain in clear terms why this boundary is essential to maintain connection. If your boundary is limiting connection with someone you genuinely care about and respect, then it’s worth it to consider if the boundary is about helping the connection or about controlling the situation. A boundary is open to discussion, potentially even negotiation depending on the circumstances. If it’s not up for discussion, then what you’re enacting is a rule to be followed.

There is also a major difference in speaking boundaries in safe relationships that are challenging your ego or self-image and enforcing boundaries in unsafe relationships that are harming you. This requires a level of discernment that is learned from experience of tolerating discomfort vs tolerating what is no longer safe. Many people when they first learn about boundaries often confuse being challenged with feeling unsafe, but they are not the same. Sometimes, being challenged is the discomfort you need to face to grow and deepen your connections.

At the end of the day, a boundary is about self-trust in what YOU will do, and that trust must be built within the body, not just declared in language.

This is especially tricky terrain for survivors of relational trauma. We were trained to manage others’ behaviour as a way of feeling safe. So when healing begins, we often bring the same strategies with us, but we just give them more empowered names.

But boundaries that are rooted in fear & disguised as self-awareness, will keep us alone in the same patterns. We might know we’re avoidant, but if we don’t practice risking connection, that awareness becomes just another tool of isolation.

Internal safety doesn’t mean you’ll never get hurt again. It means you can trust yourself to respond when you do.

That trust lives in your body. It grows when you stop outsourcing your sense of safety to others and start listening for the cues within you that were once drowned out by fawning, pleasing, or self-abandonment. It grows every time you choose to speak up, to stay present, to hold your own hand when you feel like running.

You don’t build internal safety by being perfect or always “knowing better.” You build it by failing, adjusting, and choosing to stay connected to yourself anyway. It’s what makes it possible to trust someone because you trust your decision to try. And if that decision leads to pain, you know you’ll gather the data, make a new choice, and move on.

This is what embodiment really means:

Being with what is, in your body, in real time.

Not bypassing. Not coping. Not spiritually detaching from your humanity. It means feeling your truth through sensation, movement, and stillness alike.

That’s where healing lives. Not in rigid rules or bulletproof boundaries, but in the lived experience of presence.

Pop culture rarely gives us stories that model this kind of self-trust, but when it does, we feel it in our bones. In Everything Everywhere All At Once, we watch a woman leap through timelines only to realize that her power lies not in changing what’s around her, but in claiming her own wholeness. In Barbie, we see the ache of awakening; how leaving behind perfection in pursuit of realness means feeling the full spectrum of what it is to be alive. And in Wild, we follow a woman who doesn’t heal by being saved, but by choosing, again and again, to put one foot in front of the other.

These stories remind us that liberation doesn’t arrive cleanly. It’s not a single “aha” moment. It’s a process of staying present to your own truth, especially when that truth asks you to soften instead of shut down.

Somatic Practice: The Somatic Yes & No

Take 5–10 minutes & find a space to move freely.

Close your eyes and start by exploring the sensation of a no. Let your body contract. Let it pull back, tighten, recoil. How does no feel in your spine, your jaw, your chest? Stay with it. Notice the texture of resistance, of discernment, of refusal.

Now, gently shift into yes. Let your body expand. Arms, breath, ribs, heart. Let your body lean forward. What does yes feel like? Can you stay with the softness of openness without rushing into performance?

Let both live in you. No judgment. Just presence.

Let your no be felt. Let your yes be free. Let your body decide.

Consider asking yourself these questions for some reflection on your avoidance:

Where am I calling something a boundary when it’s actually a fear-based request?

What does real safety feel like, not just the absence of danger, but the presence of me?

When was the last time I trusted my choice, not just the person I chose?

You’re allowed to cultivate peace. But keep asking yourself if your peace is actually peaceful, or just an avoidance of triggers.

This full moon, may you begin again; not by cutting yourself off, but by coming home to the only place safety has ever truly lived:

within you.

With love,

Zofia