When the body begins to feel safe enough to explore grief, pain, and old emotional landscapes, there can be an unexpected threshold. Instead of relief alone, a new question arises: Is it actually safe to feel safety? In this space, people may begin to question their own reality. A form of emotional derealization can surface - where things feel unfamiliar, strange, or even disorienting.
There can also be fear. Not only fear of letting go, but a deeper, more subtle fear that asks: Can it truly be safe to allow new things in? Can I trust this softness? Can I trust this peace? When safety begins to arrive after long periods of loss or instability, the nervous system may feel disoriented. There can be a subconscious pull to stay with the pain simply because it is familiar - because it once felt like the only constant. In that way, pain can strangely feel safer than peace, and safety itself can begin to feel suspicious.
As we move toward safety, fear can emerge to question that very safety.
And yet, grief itself is inevitable. It does not disappear - it remain a living presence in our lives, woven into our story, our memory, and our capacity to love. It is not something to escape or overcome. Grief is a doorway - one that leads us into vulnerability, depth, tenderness, and ultimately, healing.
What becomes important to notice is the difference between allowing grief and fear to move through us and becoming anchored only in what was. When grief and fear are held without movement, it can turn into a place we live inside rather than a passage we travel through. Not because something is wrong, but because grief can feel like the last thread connecting us to what mattered. Staying in the pain can feel safer than stepping forward into the unknown.
Yet grief was never meant to trap us in the past. It was meant to open us into deeper truth.
There is space for both. Grief and joy can coexist. Pain and gratitude can live side by side. The capacity to hold two truths at once - sadness for what was lost and openness to joy for what continues - is not a betrayal. It is expansion. It is growth. It is the gentle unfolding of life forward.
Memory does not disappear when the pain softens. Love does not vanish when the body begins to feel safe again. What was real remains real - even as new joy enters the room. We can honor what was, remain in resonance with what we’ve lost, and still create space for happiness, pleasure, and life to move through us again.
And in that duality, safety deepens. Identity stabilizes. The nervous system learns that healing does not erase the past - it honors it, while making space for what is still becoming.
-Michelle Doublet
