Pink Pitchforks (Part 3): Safe spaces in community
How we care for each other's healing
This essay is a continuation from Pink Pitchforks (Part 2): Healing the witch wound.
The drug of false belonging
It is human nature to desire and seek belonging. It goes beyond identifying with tribe or feeling part of community. On a primal level, safety in numbers is a survival instinct. But what happens when the group is held together by invisible control mechanisms of conformity? This makes “community” into an extremely unsafe place for authenticity. We trade truth for social acceptance and we sell our real selves out for false belonging.
This is the membership offer for an immature sorority: If you inhabit a woman’s body, you are invited to join the club — but you are welcome to stay only as long as you parrot the dominant narrative. As soon as you veer from the approved script, you will be canceled. That’s the questionable deal we make for the drug of false belonging.
True community, on the other hand, requires space for us to disagree. It means honoring our uniqueness and holding our differences while remembering our shared human-ness. In true community, we feel seen and appreciated for who we are and what we bring, even if that is sometimes triggering. Community safety is purely an illusion if it is based on conformity and control. It can only be solid when it is rooted in mutual respect and kindness.
While community is a real need, I believe deep empowerment lands in the body when we stop seeking approval from outside. Our unconscious participation in relating power dynamics is what makes it easy for us to be led astray. But if we approve of ourselves, we are free to create our own safety. How many times have I endangered myself by giving away my authority? More than I can count, sadly.
When I got permanently banned from the women’s Facebook group, I was forced to release a lot of my own attachment to false belonging. This was definitely not a pleasant experience, but the power-up I received was a blessing in disguise.
My surprising discovery was that the more I let go of the need to be liked — and even embraced the idea of being hated — the more freedom and peace I had available. I stopped trying to manage things that are none of my business (like other people’s thoughts and opinions), which helped me reclaim a lot of wasted energy. I can speak my truth without trying to please. I can learn from my experiences without blame or shame. I can use pain as the rocket fuel for my evolution.
Victim: a state of emergency
I did not meet in-person with a single woman from my home community for an entire week after making my controversial post. Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe it was the energetic intensity. I had to seek comfort and counsel from male friends because my female friends were not around or available for whatever reason. It was as if an atomic bomb had exploded in my energy field. In the moment after impact, it was quite lonely in the center of the blast.
As my female friends slowly started to drop in to reconnect, I could see myself going into my own “poor me” story because I wanted them to feel sorry for me and take my side. At some level, I see this behavior as a natural, adaptive strategy. By drawing attention to myself with my victim story, I could call in the emotional support that I needed. There is a lot of power in naming yourself a victim; it’s like turning a spotlight on yourself and shouting, “Look at me! I need help.”
Identifying as a victim is an effective crisis response. I think of it like shooting an emergency flare into the air — a useful signal, but only temporarily. At some point, I realized that my cry for help was no longer genuinely helpful. I watched myself retelling my victim story and repeating the same complaints about the mean girls who had hurt me. I eventually noticed that this was keeping me stuck, looping endlessly in my negative emotions. Reliving the story in retelling it over and over started to become numbing and depressing.
The magic trick here is to invite and receive the support that assembles from our cry for help, and then use that support to build a bridge to a more empowered, self-sourced reality. We don’t want permanent residency in a so-called “safe space.” And we don’t want to become card-carrying members of a victims’ club. Not if we’re interested in true empowerment at least. The real flex is stepping into the power to shape our reality without needing anyone else to do anything differently.
The place for safe spaces
I know how valuable it is to have safe spaces for women to gather and share. Having access to this kind of safe space was a critical part of my own healing journey. Given women’s default conditioning to stay quiet, shrink back, self-sacrifice and prioritize men’s needs, women-only spaces can be revolutionary. They help us reclaim the innate ability to connect with and express our embodied yes and no. And when we have been harmed, we need and deserve community care as we’re healing.
But where do we find safe spaces? Online forums serve many functions well, but I would say that emotional safety is not one of them. Social media is probably the furthest thing from a safe space that you can get. Intimate, in-person circles can be contained with consensual guidelines and expectations. That is not the case in a global online forum full of faceless names, meeting through keyboards and screens. Real world meetings require intentionality — this protects the accused from online shaming and shields the actively traumatized from confronting questions prematurely. We need more face-to-face, heart-to-heart, safe spaces.
Safe spaces support a phase in the progression of our self-evolution. And, we don’t want to stay there forever. Safe spaces are like incubators; incubators are closely monitored, tightly controlled, contrived environments used to care for sick, compromised, or underdeveloped babies. They are not meant to be part of anyone’s permanent reality; they provide temporary protection and support growth when our natural defense systems are down for some reason. Incubators support us to reach full health and maturity so we can express ourselves in the big, wild, uncontained and unpredictable world outside.
This is the ultimate end game, I hope: When realizing uncontained freedom is no longer in conflict with resting in uncompromised safety, it means that we have collectively reached Love as our dominant frequency.
As we move towards this, there is often a fine line between helping and hindering another person’s natural evolutionary process. Reminding someone who has been harmed of their inherent power and agency is not victim blaming. We need to take care that in our supreme efforts to avoid victim blaming, we don’t accidentally fall into victim framing instead. Victim blaming is scolding a harmed person for not doing things differently in the past. By contrast, victim framing is holding and reinforcing the limiting belief that a harmed person cannot do things differently in the future.
In our sincere desire to protect victims in recovery, we might subtly anchor the belief that those who have been harmed are incapable of self-reflection and growth. But this doubles down on disempowerment, extending the victimhood condition from the past into the future. No one profits from this perpetuation of victim mentality.
There is a key turning point in the healing process. And the timing of this is different for everyone. But at some moment, we need to move out of safe spaces that depend on others for holding, and move into creating our own safety.
There is a fourth and final essay coming to complete this series and close this chapter for me — Part 4: Power and response-ability.
Part 4: Power and response-ability
Reframe on accountability
Transmuting pain into power
How I am creating more safety
Life lessons earned