Psychological safety is freedom from humiliation, bullying and gaslighting on social media or in the public space.
For a long time I have risked my personal psychological safety in order to bring awareness to the issue of our time. Bullying and narcissism. Being visible isn’t easy if you have been raised to be ashamed of your body and people check you out and make personal comments since age 0, just because you were born in a girl’s body. They don’t think there is anything wrong about commenting on your body and what you wear or look like as a normal part of discourse. This is considered normal if you are a woman.
It is crazy, but this aspect of society is all over our Internet spaces. All over social media, people are obsessed with how they look on camera. It isn’t cool. It is a bit anxiety provoking. Being visible is psychologically risky. That’s how safe our freedoms really are.
Lack of psychological safety is why every woman is a coach on social media. It is also why many wise people stay away from people, especially social media, because of the body gloating, the body shaming, and the risks of vulnerability.
I have been an explorer and a writer on these topics and what I found was that not only was there a general lack of awareness about these issues, among certain groups when people sensed your vulnerability, they got worse. I was betrayed by people who acted as if they are women’s empowerment supporters but do the opposite, because the system is set up so that men behave like predators and women are prey. Women’s empowerment in Pakistan literally means that now women are okay with being used for money and/or sex.
If you do a good job of being a curious explorer, you have at least once destroyed your life and found just the right people to help you.
What were my mistakes?
I was heartfelt but I underestimated the extent of the issue. I was awkward and hopeful. The old habit of pleasing people had not completely gone. On the flip side, I had genuine passion. I had will. I had commitment. I knew how failure didn’t mean that I was worthless, but that I hadn’t figured it out yet. When I wrote about narcissism, I was literally shunned, gaslighted and ignored. I misinterpreted that to mean that the issue has no bite. Instead, the truth was that the crowd around the Emperor never supports the little kid who speaks up, even though they can all see it.
If you want to get back in the ring, you educate yourself
You look at the one big finding from your personal project on authentic social change writing and speaking. You look at a few other things. You sift through them. You blow the dust. You declutter. You throw out the stuff that won’t work. You stop fighting the people who have no benefit from changing. They also don’t know what you mean. For them the world is black and white. Western style freedom for them means free sexual privilege for men. And Eastern style freedom, means free plus financial privilege for men. For men raised to be predators in a toxic masculinity, a woman is only respect worthy if she isn’t vulnerable and slaps them back. Then, apparently they want to marry you, because that way they can control you. Love in a world of narcissists is never about your needs.
After a while of processing what it is really like to be you. You stop hiding from people who will never understand you. You grieve over the friends you lost. Then you get up one more time. A little older. A little wiser. You say thank you to the people who still care. You dust off and you go fight again. This time you fight differently. Instead of pitching yourself headlong like David against the Goliath of narcissism, you have data now. You know what doesn’t work. You know a little bit more than you did 10 years ago. So you get up armed with your research findings. Armed with more stamps of education but more importantly the learning from failure is priceless. You get right back to work.
Because isn’t this the life you chose? when you left the safety of your comfort zone? when you realized that you weren’t actually safe in the comfort zone because it felt like a gilded cage whose rods hurt you as much as they saved you from attack? Well now you know what those rods in your cage were meant to save you from. Sick, perverted people. You also know that it wasn’t really safety. That safety will only be possible when psychological safety becomes recognized as a social goal within all institutions.
If, in the end of your journey to fight the lion in the lion’s den you learnt …..that
You are not alone.
That’s not too bad. It isn’t victory, not yet. One day, there will be others and you will find them …
Behind The Veil 