Safety Is An Illusion

Hey, girl. Welcome to the GetYourGuy coaching podcast. My name is Anwar White, but you can just call me your own personal dating and relationship coach. Each week, you'll hear actionable advice, tips, and strategies that you can implement in your own love life. I'm talking about healing your heart, dating effectively, and understanding men so that you can, you guessed it, get your guy. Are you ready to level up your love life? All right, let's go.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome, everyone, to the get yout Guy coaching podcast. I'm super excited that you're here with me as we continue to do this work every couple of weeks. So thank you so much for your support, because today we're going to be talking about safety, safety in life and safety in dating. And here's what I know. When we think about our core issues with dating, and oftentimes, let's keep it real. In life, the question can often arise around, do I feel safe or do I not feel safe? And with those core questions come a variety of different emotions, feelings, thoughts, triggers.

And I want to kind of explore that today with you. And I want to do that because I want us to reframe safety. Your internal process, your internal safety meter is the thing that is making dating difficult and hard for you. And once we're able to get clear about that, my hope and my intention is that dating will become a much easier process for you. Okay, so, girl, no shade. I'm gonna have to talk about my story. I'm gonna have to talk about my relationship and my journey with safety. And I'll be honest with you, it was a long and arduous one. Why? Well, I grew up, and many of you may not know this about me, but I grew up in a single mother household. My father abandoned me when I was eight years old in third grade. Third. Fourth grade. And safety from my father was something that I never knew. We're talking about a man that's 6, 6, 6, 7, who had no emotional regulation, who was someone who worked a lot, spent a lot of money on us, but was abusive verbally and physically. So, you know, when I think about the times in which, and this is important for you to do as well, to really identify, what are those moments in your life where you felt uns. I remember a time where we came from a family gathering and my mother had this big pot of a turkey, and my father pushed her into the door when she opened the door when we came home. And it started this verbal and physical fight. I can remember another time where they were verbally going back and forth with each other for hours on end. And I was back against my bed on the floor, crying and scared for my life, for my safety, not knowing what to do, not being able to control the situation, not being able to change it, and not being able to do that. I felt unsafe. I felt out of control, right? And so I'm sharing all of this with you because I think it's important for you to understand that we all go through it. And it is important for you all to do that as well, to go through your own relationship with safety. Because if you, you don't, you will never get out of the safety kind of shame and spiral that happens in dating as well as in life. And so that's what I had to do. I had to go through years of intense work because the reason why at one time I didn't like men, I was actually scared of them because I was scared of my father. Because there was a time where, you know, he would randomly punch me and then say, don't cry or I'm going to punch you again. So I had, I was punched. And I couldn't share any emotion or feeling or anything. And I'm sharing this with you because again, you have to know those moments. You have to know why you might have certain feelings around men or dating or being emotionally or sexually intimate or intellectually intimate or spiritually intimate or physically intimate. Okay? So I had to do my work. I had to get clear that I was scared of men. I never thought that because I would talk shit to men and I would, right? I thought men were losers. I thought they were pervs. I thought I was better than them and I wasn't. I was scared of them and I was trying to minimize them and I was trying to dehumanize them for my own power and control, similar to how white people do Black people, girl, no shade. But I had to actually humanize men and in the process humanize myself and really get clear about my own safety. So I wanted to share that with you because I want to inspire and motivate you to really think about your own safety and what moments in your life have felt really unsafe for you. Okay? Because here's the thing.

Again. If we don't do that, you'll continue to live this way. But I also want to offer to you because I know my, my followers, my fan, my listeners, most of you are super smart, super successful, super high achieving. And I want to offer to you that you might be those things because it allows you to feel in control and not feel unsafe. But I also want to offer to you that there's still, perhaps there's a part of you that still feels really unsafe. You're running away from this, this zombie, like in the Walking Dead TV show, where it's constantly coming at you and you run and hard, but it's still coming and you will still have to meet it. I know for myself, I was overworking, over functioning, you know, overstudying, because I was trying to overcompensate for my unsafety. Unsafety based on my blackness, based on my gayness, based on my money wounds. And for you, it might be based on your womanhood as well.

So we're going to talk about that because it's very important that we reframe what this is and get real with why dating and, and relationships might be very difficult or challenging for you. Right. There are a lot of triggers that come up for us that have historically and even maybe currently have made us feel unsafe. Thinking that, you know, these men can do or say anything, or if they are giving you sexual innuendos or touchy feely or, you know, understanding that some of these things that they're doing will trigger your parental wounds, your inner child wounds. Whether it's abandonment, whether it's neglect, whether it is distrust. Right. Whether it's abandoned. I already said abandonment, girl. That's just my stuff. So it's always have a mind for me.

You know, and the social media conversation doesn't actually help. It actually can probably make you feel even more safe. So one of the things that I want us to think about is minimizing and muting those individuals, those profiles, parts of your feed that are continuously making you unsafe, similar to the news. Sometimes we have to shut that off as well, because if not, we're going to continuously live in this state of fear and ain't nobody got time for that. At the end of the day, we've got to live free. I always tell this to my clients and I think, I hope that you can think about it in the same way. There are people when you go to Six Flags or Disneyland and they're on the roller coaster that have their hands up when you have that drop. And then there are other people that are gripping like their life depends on it, to the, you know, the railing right in front of you. I want you to think about that. Do you feel like you're going through your life as if you're on the roller coaster with your hands up? Or if you're gripping for dear life, if it's the latter. We're gonna have to talk through that because I will tell you, in dating, that's not gonna work. In dating, when you are gripping as if your life depends on it, there's going to be no way for someone to be able to connect with you because you're going to be so focused on your safety that it's actually going to distract and disconnect you from other people.

Okay? So I want you, I want us to think about that. It's a very important concept. And.

I know it's like easier said than done, but.

When you start playing offense and dating instead of defense and no shade, most of us are playing defense, you will have much more success in your dating life. I was on Live this past weekend and we were talking about, you know, what things to say to flirt and banter. And I would give an example. Like if someone says, you know, oh, hey, you're looking really nice today, what would your response be? Do you know, most of the responses that I got were mean and surly rude. Like, because.

Most of the women in that room of thousands of people felt unsafe. And when you are approaching your love life with defense, defense wins games in NBA championships, but it doesn't win games in love. It's going to be impossible for you to connect. And so, you know, a lot of us get mad because we're not getting approached. But when I tell you that 80, 90% of the responses that I got from women in those examples were nasty, were rude, were short, it stands to reason that a lot of people, a lot of men are not going to want to approach that and experience that right now. It's not lost on me that a lot of these guys do not come correct. But we're talking about us because we are the only things that we can control. Okay, so with that said, I want to reframe safety for you. Because here's the thing, ladies, safety is an illusion. And that's the hard truth of it all. The idea of safety is often just a mirage.

Most of us will chase it anyway. Most of us will chase it through stable jobs, predictable or settling in relationships and routines that feel familiar. I go to work, I come home and I watch Netflix.

Here's the catch, though. What feels safe to you isn't some universal truth.

It's what you were conditioned to believe was normal by your family, by society. And here's the gag. Most often, that normal thing is really just a dressed up version of suffering.

Think about it. Why do you potentially keep choosing partners that are emotionally Unavailable. And most of us do, by the way, based on our lived experience and how we grew up.

Why does your income seem to hit a certain glass ceiling no matter how hard you work?

It's a money wound, right? It's because your nervous system has been wired to equate familiar with safe.

Even if familiar hurts, even if familiar keeps you small.

A lot of us in our grown woman status are living our love lives as if we were the little girls inside of us.

Choosing men that oftentimes are emotionally unavailable, like our fathers. Choosing partners that are hot and cold or abandon us or don't give us the attention that we want or we need because it's familiar.

Choosing overly charismatic men because that's what your father used to do. And to survive that, you had to stay small and quiet and not do too much or else he would think of you as competition and he would dismiss you and, you know, talk down to you so that he can continue his grandiose, narcissistic, like, show that he was putting on. These are all very, very important things. And so I just want to offer that it is okay to grieve. That if you've ever felt like you've been running a gauntlet like. Like those rats do in a spin wheel with no armor, no roadmap, of course you're exhausted. I always say, especially in dating, a lot of us are, like, kicking walls, punching walls, because we don't even know that we have hands yet. No one's ever taught us that we have hands that literally open the door and go through it. Here's the paradox, though.

The only real safety is getting comfortable with the lack of it. And I want to ask you, are you comfortable with the fact that in this life, lots of parts are going to be safe and lots of parts are not going to be safe, and there's nothing that we can do about it.

I really want us to think about it.

Okay?

Now here's the gag. Because, girl, as y' all know, life will test you and test this notion of safety. And as you grow, as you shed old skins, you're going to face fresh rounds of betrayal and unsafetiness. A friend vanishes when you need them. A partner who can't meet you where you are, a career that suddenly feels hollow.

But here's the magic. Each time it's going to sting a little less because these betrayals aren't random. They are just mirrors. People show you exactly where you've undervalued yourself, where you've settled.

And I want to offer to You. That's not cruelty.

That is a catalyst for change, for awareness.

And you're going to need to surface those hidden fears, to metabolize them, so that you can make room for what's actually meant for you. In other words, every betrayal, every unsafe thing that you see is a sacred invitation. An invitation to stop outsourcing your worth, to stop begging the world to reassure you and instead to bow to the fear, to make it holy in your own alchemy, to your own metamorphosis.

The gag is, ladies, you're going to have to become your own sanctuary.

How do we make this happen? How do we break the cycle?

You're gonna have to decide what's sacred. Not your parents, not your culture. You.

Respectfully speaking, your pain is. It's not meaningless.

Your joy isn't trivial. Even if the world doesn't reflect it back yet, you have to be the one to witness yourself fully, to look at your own beauty, your own resilience, and not flinch. This isn't about becoming invincible, though. It's about realizing that you were never unsafe to begin with. That the uncertainty and the chaos and the heartbreak, those aren't your enemies. Those are the things that are shaping you.

In Venice. They do a lot of, like, glass blowing, right? That's the air that's shaping you. And you are meant to be this beautiful, unique, uniquely shaped creature item that is beautiful to you and everyone else. Okay, so I want to reframe safety for you.

This isn't about am I safe or am I not safe?

It's really about.

Do I trust myself or do I not trust myself?

So one of the things that we can do, right, because, you know, we're all about solutions here, is I want us to do things that show that you trust yourself. So when it comes to money, right, let's. Let's create actions that. That show, improve to yourself that you can trust yourself. Oftentimes I say you got to give yourself treats on a weekly basis.

Why? Because sometimes, if we grew up in very poor households, we will think that.

Something that is, let's say, a cookie, that's $5, a plane ticket, that is $600 instead of $300, that. That will kill us. But we have to be able to trust ourselves enough to know that we're going to be okay and that we will make sure that we are okay. So treat yourself, ladies. And these treats can cost money. They don't have to cost money.

Now, in relationships, relationships, the way that you can trust yourself and create safety is through your boundaries. Honey, I want everybody getting a boundary in your life who is not giving you what you need or what you deserve in your relationships and family and friendships at work.

We get to let them know, hey, I would prefer if you did this. Is that something that you can do? Hey, I feel more comfortable if this happens in our relationship. Can we agree upon that? This is all very, very important. We're going to have to be able to trust ourselves more in relationships, and that's going to help you in dating, and it's going to help you in dating, because.

I can tell you right now, if you look at your top 10 relationships, I can tell you exactly what kind of dating experience you're going to have. So part of this is really categorizing your relationships and categorizing them into three categories. One, ones that you're going to have to let go.

Doesn't matter if it's a college friend or someone that you grew up with. That's the first category. The second category is relationships that you're going to have to set a boundary with for them to continue and to flourish and thrive. And then the third category is the relationships that fill you, that actually make you feel alive. And those are relationships we're going to have to show gratitude toward. Okay.

Boundaries keep you safe, and they allow you the evidence to be able to trust yourself in having a say into each and every relationship that you have in dating. I tell my clients all the time, we give in everybody boundaries, and lots of them, because relationship ready men.

They respect and honor each and every one of your boundaries. And if they don't understand it, they don't dismiss it. They ask curious questions in terms of why you might have that boundary, because they want to know you and want to know you more. So, ladies, let's set the boundaries.

And thirdly, because we talked about money, we talked about relationships dating, one of the things that I've learned in doing this work for almost 16 years now is that most of y' all don't know how to flirt, and most of y' all don't know how to banter. And those sorts of things can feel very unsafe because, again, we're holding onto that roller coaster bar.

Because we're not allowing ourselves to be light and free because we don't trust ourselves. A lot of trust isn't about. It's not about trusting other people. It's about trusting yourself to know that you're going to be okay regardless of what these people do.

And so one of the things that I want to encourage Each and every person to do. And online dating is a really great way to practice these muscles, these flirting and these bantering muscles is to do that, just that, flirt, banter, engage and connect. Because quiet as it's kept, that's going to be the quickest way for you to connect with men online. A lot of you all are acting as if it's Microsoft Teams or slack and no shade. That's boring. So don't ask these lame ass questions that you receive all day, every day. Come with the banter, come with the flirt, come with something.

And once you do that, you will learn that you can flirt, you can banter and still be in control and still be safe and actually feel more empowered than anything else. Now if you want to learn how to do this and master this, definitely come into my programs. But many of us can use online dating to practice this and hone it within ourselves. So I want to offer that to you. Okay, good. I hope that this conversation around safety has been helpful for you and understanding that safety is about trust and distrust within ourselves and we get to do things and create evidence so that we can continuously trust ourselves each and every day more and more. So this week I challenge you. I want you to think about where you are clinging to safety that's actually suffocating you. That's actually disallowing you from having fun on this roller coaster that we call life and we call dating and love and relationships and men.

And I want to ask you, and this can be a journal prompt, what would it feel like to loosen your grip a little bit? Just a little bit.

All right, ladies, I hope that this was helpful. I want you to understand that safety is an illusion. It's a mirage. This world and dating is always going to have safe and unsafe parts. But it is up to you to make sure that you are well controlled, regulated, boundaried, so that you can always be safe within yourself.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And remember that the bravest thing that you can do is to stop fearing the fall.

Thank you for listening. I'll see you on the flip side. Bye bye.

Hey girl. Thank you so much for listening to the get yout Guy Coaching podcast. If you like this episode and want to talk with me personally, please book a free consultation at www.getyourguycoaching.com apply or subscribe and leave me a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Talk soon.