Dear Natalija:

You wrote: “Safety meaning you can leave anything anytime.” This is a very interesting definition of safety, one I had for the longest time myself. For some people safety means: you can stay in the same place and never leave.

I think that the reason your definition of safety is the Ability to Leave Anytime is because as a child you were trapped and unable to leave. That was a very distressful experience day in and day out, year after year. You wrote in your original post: ” I’ve spent almost my entire childhood surrounded with fighting, jelling (I still can’t handle someone jelling at me), blaming, trying to leave ..”

You are afraid of minor confrontations at present because in your home-of-origin there was no such thing as MINOR confrontation, was there? Fighting, yelling… these are not minor confrontations. So you are afraid of confrontations because understandably, in your brain, a confrontation is always major.

When there is a minor disagreement with another person you get scared as if it is major. It will take a lot of effort for you to calm yourself best you can and to bring up a minor disagreement while you are scared. Once you do that and have a good experience, that is the person reacted well to you, no fighting or yelling, and instead the person heard you, exchanged ideas peacefully and the problem resolved, you will have your first good experience with confrontation. Next time you have to confront will be a bit easier and so forth.

Hope you post again and again…

anita