The Need to Feel Safe and Secure

After our physiological needs have been satisfied we start to to be concerned about being safe. Safety needs are not like other needs. Physiological needs are clearly substances that we can get, earn or can be given to us. Love and esteem are also given to us or earned. But safety is a state of mind. We can never truly be safe as the universe has so many variables something could always go wrong. At any moment a comet could crash into the earth demolishing it and all life on it, yet this does not make us feel unsafe. When we eat our need for food is satisfied. When a parent loves us our need for love is satisfied. When our peers acknowledge our good works and admire us for them our need for esteem is satisfied. But when is our need for safety and security satisfied? Clearly our need for safety and security is satisfied when we feel safe and secure.

"The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble." Henry Miller

When are we safe? So when do we feel safe and secure? Obviously people in a concentration camp did not feel safe. Yet is that so? Many kinds of environments seem to us not to be safe yet the people in those environments may in fact, despite the dangers, feel safe. How can this be? The people in those environments simply believe in their abilities to deal with and neutralize those dangers. Some people feel safe in a bad or dangerous neighborhood, if there are many locks on their door, and they are careful who they open for. Other people with many locks on their door in a good neighborhood do not feel safe.

  Parent protection. When we are young good parents protect us from danger and we consequently feel safe when we are close to them. But of course when we are adult we must rely on ourselves to make us feel safe and secure. How do we make this transition from being dependent on our parents to feel safe, to being able to feel safe because of our own abilities? Obviously we must learn those abilities that make us feel safe.

      

The Paradox. Paradoxically we can only learn those abilities that make us feel safe by putting ourselves in danger, by in fact making ourselves unsafe. We usually do this in very small increments. This is most clearly seen in the case of people with phobias where irrational fear prevents the person from doing normal everyday things. The main way in which such people can be cured is to gradually be exposed to the object of their fear. If you are afraid of heights go up steps wait till you feel safe then go up another step and wait again and so on.

Some of the inmates of concentration camps may have made themselves feel safe by using clever words to fog the brains of their captors. Many skills that people learn help them to feel safe. We may learn a fighting skill like kung fu or karate to help us feel safe when walking alone. Making money to buy a house, bush skills, fire fighting, mountain climbing, car driving and running are all skills that can help us feel safe.

       

Being and feeling secure. It is not that we necessarily learn these things in order to feel safe, but rather, that we feel safer because we learn them. Every time some other need causes us to go out and confront the world (ie make ourselves feel unsafe) we usually learn some skill for dealing with the world. Much of what makes us feel safe and be safe in recent times involves simply taking common sense precautions. Simple things like locks, seat belts, motor cycle helmets, hard hats, steel toed boots and learning to lift the right way can all help. The strange by-product of learning these skills is that once leaned they have the effect of making us feel safe. In the end it is our confidence in our ability to deal with situations that are potentially unsafe that allow us to feel safe. If other needs cannot overcome the need to feel safe and secure these skills are never learned and so the person never feels safe. Learning (the harbinger of growth, reform and change) is essential to feeling safe.

"Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found." Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Curiosity first and last. In "Toward a Psychology of Being" Maslow makes a half-hearted attempt to make a case for showing that the safety need is stronger than curiosity and must therefore be lower in the hierarchy.

Maslow says:

"The young child in a strange environment will characteristically hang on to the mother and only then venture out little by little from her lap to probe into things, to explore and probe. If she disappears and he becomes frightened, the curiosity disappears until safety is restored. He explores only from a safe harbor."

From not safe to safe. It is the view of this site, that this tendency noticed by Maslow, far from showing the superior strength of the safety need, rather shows us how we use the need to learn/know (or explore) to help satisfy our safety need. Despite the fact that very young children feel unsafe when not close to their mothers, they never the less do venture away from their mothers. The child wants to feel safe, and does feel safe near the mother, yet the child moves away from the mother. Why? To satisfy curiosity certainly, but this activity also helps to satisfy the need to feel safe. He/she wants to feel safe when he/she is away from the mother as well as when he/she is with her. As the child moves further and further from the mother and nothing bad happens the child begins to feel safe away from the mother. He/she actually feels safer than he/she did before. Before he/she only felt safe near the mother but now he/she begins to feel safe away from the mother as well as when he/she is close. The need to explore has actually helped in satisfying the need to feel safe. The child may be trying to satisfy the need to learn or in fact any of the other needs when they do this, but as a side effect, when nothing terrible happens to them, they begin to feel safe further and further from their mothers.

Small Steps to Safety. It is fear that makes us feel unsafe and insecure therefore by overcoming our fears we can satisfy our need for safety and security. By facing our fears, taking precautions and learning skills we build our confidence in our abilities so as to feel safe. We can face some unwarranted fears in small increments. The person afraid of heights can climb a ladder one rung at a time never moving upward until he is sufficiently secure at that height. He gradually gains confidence in his ability not to fall. Some people feel that by facing and overcoming an extreme fear like fear of heights or falling this lack of fear will generalize to enable them to overcome other fears. So a person may learn to sky dive and through overcoming that fear of falling also start to overcome fear of rejection or fear of making a fool of themselves. Never forget though that the need to feel safe is there for a reason and there is such a thing as being overconfident in our abilities to deal with risk. Some fears can only be overcome by the learning of new skills or taking sensible precautions. New skills are usually best learned in gradual steps also where fear is concerned.

The idea of gradual steps to safety is perhaps best explained by the tension between parent and teenager. The teenager is constantly trying to do new things by him/herself. But often the parent does not think the teen is ready. It is a constant dance the parent letting go a little and the teen trying to pull away showing he/she is capable. Another good example is teaching a child to swim. The teacher, at first, places a hand under the child's body to support him or her. But gradually the teacher uses less and less upward force to support the child as he/she gains skill and confidence. Finally the teacher removes his/her hand completely. All these things happen in gradual steps.

       

Stepping stones. Another way to look at this is to consider each ability we learn is a stepping stone to feeling safer and more secure. The way we learn those abilities is through the strength of other needs which draw us out from being safe and by building those abilities in small steps. The person learning to sky dive does not just jump out of a plane. First he has to learn how to operate the equipment, then he has to learn to trust that equipment in increasingly riskier simulations until he has sufficient confidence in himself, the equipment and the pilot of the plane to actually jump out of a plane. The greatest skill we can learn to make ourselves feel safe is to learn how to influence others because there is safety in numbers and cooperation. Just remember not to trade away important values to feel safe. 

      

The changing world of safety and security.

The price of safety and the frailty of the human spirit. Safety and security have always been used to manipulate and dominate others. There have always been people who in their desire to dominate others have offered to provide those others with safety and security for which they want something in return. Human frailty can lead us into the temptation of giving up other important values in trying to become safe or secure. The main problem is that people can be convinced to give up both privacy and liberty (and other important values) in pursuit of safety and security. We tear down our comforts, our privacy and our freedom just to get a little safety. Often this takes the form of walls that keep others out but simultaneously fence us in.

       

This is, and has always been, a bad bargain. If we let some other person (even a parent) satisfy our need for safety it is no longer truly being satisfied and we will be stuck at this need level. The only way to truly satisfy this need is to find ways to satisfy it ourselves. Of course the price we are paying is also far too high. Benjamin Franklin had a lot to say about this as portrayed in the quotes below.

          

The right to be safe and secure. In time past the safety of an individual was always at the whims of those with power. In the feudal system the king or queen is at the top and this position was held as a divine right despite the fact that originally the position was acquired by force of arms or some other form of power. The king would have offered safety to those who followed him and fought for him. To be safe you had to choose the winning side. But few felt very safe as they were always fighting to be the top dog. The other great power in ancient times was of course religion. Like the kings the religious leaders promised safety and security to have obedience.

    

With a system like democracy, which came much later, the idea of safety and security was often taken as a right for all persons especially now in modern times. But those who seek power over others have ever sort to find ways around this idea. In this time new technologies are seriously eroding both liberty and privacy. Like fire the devices of surveillance are good servants but bad masters. The technologies used for security are, in this age, is swallowing everything.

Technology and security. Technology has given us many wonderful modern conveniences but those who would control us are ever on the lookout for new ways to implement control over us and here following are some new ways they have discovered to do so. Technologies promise to keep us safe and make us secure but they erode our liberty, our privacy and god knows what else. They do not, for the most part, even make us feel safe, but rather find new ways to make us feel unsafe. Or where they do make us feel safe, they ironically, tempt us to do things that are very unsafe indeed. 

1. New laws. Terrorists use these new technologies (bombs etc.) to threaten our safety. Government response to this has been to take advantage of our fear for our safety by writing new laws that curtail our freedoms and our privacy. This in turn leads to suspicion of others with government encouragement. These laws and suspicions are not good the deprive us of our freedoms and in the end make us neither safe or secure.
   

        

2. Surveillance. Terrorists use these new technologies to threaten our safety. Government response to this has been to also increase the powers of security agencies like the D.H.S. and the N.S.A. and by allowing those agencies to make full use of the new surveillance technologies.

        

   On top of this everybody has gotten into the act with cameras following our footsteps almost everywhere we go. This proliferation of camera and listening devices threatens both our liberty and our privacy and in the end does not make us feel safe or secure. 

            

3. Other social media risks. Sharing photographs and private correspondence when it occurs online is very unsafe. It's not a good idea to share anything on line that you wouldn't want the whole world to see. Between hackers and big data collectors your data will likely be exposed. Similarly contacting unknown people you cannot see is fraught with disappointment and dangers.
   

          

   Social media tends to magnify humanity's stupider tendencies so that what was just gossip before has now become fake news where it is no longer easy to determine what is true. Also what was physical bullying before has now become cyber bullying where anyone can bully anyone else, no size or strength needed. 

    

4. The cell phone. Mobile phones lull us into thinking we are always safe while using them. However, they tempt us to do all manner of crazy things that are completely unsafe. The dangers of cell phone usage is largely our own fault and self imposed. It seems to be safe to walk and talk on a mobile phone or even drive and use a mobile phone, but when we do this, we are dividing our attention and making our reaction times much slower than they should be. This inability to act quickly can often be the difference between life and death.

        

   Texting while driving. Texting on a mobile phone is even more unsafe than talking on one. Texting requires we use our eyes. So not only are we dividing our attention but we are taking our eyes off the road if we do it while driving. Not only does our reaction time go down, not only do we take one hand off the driving wheal, but we also have to take our eyes off the road. This inability to act quickly, the inability to see properly and the incomplete control of the car, make the combination of texting and driving a massive death trap.

                 

   Texting while walking. Texting is similarly unsafe when walking. While walking we need to see where we are going but again texting requires we use our eyes. So again our attention is divided and again we are walking partially blind. This might be fine on paved footpaths or pavements but there are always works going in this world and damaged pavement is common as are potholes and other dangerous areas. We are still likely to seriously injure ourselves walking and texting. The only saving grace is that we are less likely to injure someone else.

    

5. Predators. The personal computer and the internet give children the illusion of safety but but in fact they are very unsafe with predators lurking in chat rooms and every unsavory corner of the internet. They also comb through any personal information information children may leave lying around online such as addresses and phone numbers. Or they may simply try to trick children into giving them such information. Of course, predators were always around in the local community, but now they can reach your children from the far corners of the earth.

   

6. Apple. Computers have been around as a technology for a while and so has the internet. But recently with the advent of keeping our private information in the cloud we are suddenly faced with a massive treat to both our privacy and our security. Apple has become the major player in the implementation of this technology. The problem is that even if apple does it's best to keep your information private they are under tremendous pressure and temptation to share that information with others. Governments, security agencies, hackers and big business are all vying to collect big data on all of us. This technology was supposed to make us feel secure but it has diminished our liberty and our privacy without providing that security.  

   

7. Facebook. Facebook is in a slightly different situation. It is a web site that asks you to knowingly put your private information on it for all to see. However despite what they may say any information you put on Facebook is not lost even if you delete it. It is there to haunt you forever. Again Facebook is not immune to hackers and pressure to give up that information. When Facebook told us our information was secure they lied, and on top of that, they devastated our privacy in previously unthought-of ways.

        

8. Google. When you search on a search engine your every keystroke is recorded by that search engine. Again you are voluntarily giving up all that information to the search engine. Google has become not only the leading search engine, but is used so much by most people as to have almost become a monopoly. This monopoly records our every search. Google promised us all the information in the world and that what we were doing to get it as secure and private. It was neither. Google too is not immune to hackers or government pressures. 

                   

All Needs. It is true of all needs that when we are young we may need help in satisfying those needs. But as we grow older it becomes more and more important that we are able to to satisfy those needs alone without help. This is particularly true of the need for safety and security. Yet, as this site has shown, in order to learn the abilities needed to make oneself safe one must actually forgo safety. The need for safety prevents moving on to higher needs, if it is not satisfied regularly. But also the need for safety and security can become very non-growth promoting if we somehow come to fear the wrong things.

While we humans, are probably safer now than at any previous time, we certainly do not feel safe. Some people come to even fear to love or be loved. To love or be loved you must put yourself out there where it is unsafe. The desire to learn and know normally helps people to take this risk and move beyond safety. In the process they learn how to feel safe when exposing their emotions. But if they can not push past their comfort zone they will never satisfy love and belonging. It is given up so they can feel safe. Similarly, some people fear being noticed because they are afraid of being wrong, making a mistake, or failing. But by hiding they have to forgo gaining the esteem of others and their own self esteem. Worse yet people can come to fear their inner self and thus of course are unable to actualize that potential. Almost anything can be given up in order to feel safe. Much is given up because of tech. The new technologies, however, are not alone in making us feel unsafe. Many psychological theories and religions help to aggravate this fear of becoming by stressing that our inner nature is evil, or as did Freud, make it amoral with a theory of a primordial Id. However, we are not born evil. We are either born a blank slate or we are born good and made evil by our environment. Maslow and the 3rd force psychologies have shown us considerable evidence that we are born with innate meta values of justice, truth and goodness. Despite this born evil beliefs still have great impact on society unfortunately.

       

The Pathology of Safety and Security. Some people never feel safe. They go through their lives stuck at the level of safety. Sometimes the very environment, in which they were brought up, never felt safe. Parents who punish excessively often create such fear in their children as to never allow them to feel safe. This early lack of safety and inability to make themselves safe can lead to a lifetime of seeking safety.

         

Parents can create difficulties with safety by over protecting their children. Thus parents in their concern to make their children safe may prevent their children doing the very things they need to conquer their own fears or learn the skills needed to feel safe. Parents that are over concerned with their children's safety often prevent them trying risky sports, risky physical activities of any sort, risky intellectual activities and risky social activities. The result is a mollycoddled child unable to make themselves safe or feel safe. They may be willing to give up their entire freedom to feel safe and secure.

 

Fear is the great non-motivator for many so called normal people in the normal society. Although the only way to truly make yourself safe is to become competent at making yourself safe, many people instead rely on others to make themselves safe. The news media do not help in this regard indeed they make things worse. They blast us with sensational news much of which is is intended to make us fearful and anxious.

When others stand up for these people they feel safe. They go on through their lives letting others make decisions and perform actions to make them feel safe just as the child does. Like the child who never feels safe away from their parents this type of person also never feels safe away from the person or persons they are using as a parental substitute.

      

They do not experience love and belonging as the satisfaction of that need but rather as the satisfaction of their need for safety. In this scenario love and belonging become an addiction complete with withdrawal symptoms if the love and belonging are removed. Bullies and others that hunger for power prey on such people. They say: follow me and I will make the decisions. I will make you safe. If you are with me kicking the other guy you are not the other guy being kicked. Although they never really feel safe the need for safety in such people is very strong. So strong that little brainwashing is required to cause a change in their whole moral outlook as is evidenced in such people as Patty Hurst. However, in a world where safety has been withdrawn we are all open to this to some extent. There is a whole area of psychology devoted to people, who for what ever reason, become captives of other people. These people, out a desire to make themselves safe again, start to empathize with their captors and experience positive feelings toward them. This is called Stockholm syndrome.

               

Here is a perfect cartoon on safety. The dog is afraid to go outside. He thinks it is not safe outside. His master convinces him to go outside. The reality is that sometimes it isn't safe outside and sometimes it is, but if it isn't, and you have learned certain skills, you will still be safe.

The unsafe world. We have always lived in an unsafe world. Stone-age people were always unsafe because of predators. The middle ages was a nightmare time of plague and constant waring. This time is similarly unsafe. It is just that the things we need to be safe from have mostly changed. Perhaps the most important change is surveillance. Many today feel themselves unsafe because it feels as if their every action is being watched and that constant scrutiny makes them feel unsafe and insecure. Some of us already live in Orwell's nightmare world where big brother is watching us. 

 

One thing that has not changed is the danger of plague. Because tourists have been able to travel quickly all over the world a virus has suddenly spread to almost every corner of the earth. The world is currently in the grip of a world wide pandemic. We live in a time of danger when going outside is not very safe due to Covid 19. But we have to go outside to eat and do minimal things to live a good life. We have to find ways of making ourselves safe by following protocols and taking precautions.

Climbing the Hierarchy. Maslow not only devised his hierarchy of needs but also devised a theory of how humans moved from one level of need to another. He was of the opinion that satisfaction of needs led to their becoming less dominant immediately causing the next level of needs to become dominant. He also felt that if needs were satisfied on a regular basis they would become weaker as the other needs became stronger. Now while this is obviously correct it seems as if he has missed two important ways these need to be modified. Firstly needs often do not conflict and actually support one another. Secondly, the weakening of the safety need happens not so much because it is regular but rather because we believe we cause it to be regular. The safety needs only weaken when the person or organism is confident of his/her ability to satisfy that need. It is I think very clear with safety that if we rely on others to make us feel safe we will never really feel safe. It is our confidence in our own ability to make ourselves safe that enables the need for safety to be truly satisfied.

The Role of Parents as Regard Safety Needs. Parents, society, and the institutions of society have a distinct and similar role to play in the satisfaction of people's safety needs. The role of good parents is to satisfy their children's safety needs while they are still incapable of keeping themselves safe. For the most part parents always try to keep their children safe, it an imperative built into their genes. Parents are often willing to give up their own lives in order to keep their children safe and secure. Other care givers may be less so inclined.

Regardless, a good parent or guardian firstly satisfies directly the safety needs of those in their care while they are infants and unable to satisfy their own safety needs. They should do this without contributing to the child feeling unsafe through excessive punishment. They should also do it without conditions. For good parents this is always true. Unlike the physiological needs which can be supplied in part, safety and security needs are all or nothing either you are safe and secure or you are not. Each parent or care giver has the responsibility to do his or her best to keep those in their care safe. If they do not they are not good parents/care-givers.   

But secondly and more importantly their role is to act as facilitators in enabling those in their care to learn the skills that are needed to satisfy their own safety needs. The most effective way they can do this is by allowing their children to try their wings when the feel ready and not be overly protective as they get older and more competent. A good parent should be able to perceive when the child needs to try to do it by him/herself, when only advice is needed and when the child no longer needs any help at all. While the good parent should want to satisfy his child's safety needs when the child cannot satisfy his own needs, the same good parent should want more for the child to learn how to satisfy his own safety needs by learning certain skills. Paradoxically this often means that parents should encourage those in their care to take controlled risks and confront their fears. Also of course it is the responsibility of parents to help undo any unhealthy fears of growth and facilitate the actualization of all potentials. Also a good parent has to realize that his or her children know far better when where and how safety needs need to be satisfied. These things are also true for any care giver.

The Role of Society as Regard Safety Needs. If this is true for the good parent surely it should also be true for society and the institutions of society. However, as already explained above governments and their institutions such as the N.S.A. exact a seep price of liberty freedom and other hard won comforts for the safety they provide. There are many ways in which safety is made conditional in the modern world. As explained above it is bought at the cost of freedom, liberty and our hard fought for comforts. While we cannot expect governments to provide for our safety and security completely unconditionally they could do much more and take away far less than they do. Society and its institutions should supply our safety needs when we are helpless to supply them ourselves, just as our parents do. But more importantly they should strive to enable us to learn the skills we need to satisfy our own safety needs. Likewise they should be aware that we always know best when safety needs are currently dominating our motivation and thus when this need is to be satisfied. Paradoxically this often means that society should encourage its citizens to take controlled risks and confront their fears. Also of course it is the responsibility of each society to undo any unhealthy fears of growth and facilitate the actualization of all its citizen's potentials.