ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how survivors lose their sense of safety when trauma occurs and explores the need to re-create it in order for survivors to cope with the stress generated by traumatic events. The freeze, flight, fight, fright, faint emergency response triggered by traumatic events can also contribute to survivors not feeling safe. Parents can also become overprotective of their children in an attempt to respond to fears they harbor that their children will never be secure and will be traumatized as well. Individuals who have lived with trauma and crisis can also become habituated it, so much so that it feels familiar and strangely safe. Re-creating the trauma can feel safe in other ways. It offers an escape from day-to-day fears as survivor is flooded with feelings and detaches from reality as a result. Creating new healthy habits to add to the ones they already have is crucial, so that survivors have a toolbox to turn to in times of stress.
