“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

-William Faulkner

Have you ever struggled to leave a situation that you knew wasn’t good for you? Maybe it was a relationship that no longer felt aligned but you kept making excuses. Maybe it was a job that was draining the life out of you but it never seemed to be the right time to hand in your resignation. Or maybe you felt an impulse to put yourself out there in a new way but it felt too scary, so you kept staying in your comfort zone.

I often get clients who feel stuck in situations that are not quite making them happy but are comfortable enough so that they don’t leave. They keep talking about how uncomfortable it is but don’t make any actual changes. I’ve come to recognise this as the comfort of the familiar. We choose the familiar over the unknown because the unknown can seem scary and unpredictable. Some people even stay in abusive relationships because the fear of the unknown is greater than the pain of their current awful but familiar situation.

I have certainly done this and have recently discovered just how attached I can get to being comfortable. Being comfortable is soothing for the nervous system. And since our brains often equate familiarity to comfort, it makes sense that we will try to hold on to what’s familiar for dear life. And it’s all good if the familiar is a healthy happy place for us but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it starts to make us feel trapped or small or suppressed. That’s where the internal battle starts.

So why is it that we struggle to leave situations that we know are bad for us? My main hypothesis here is that much of our decision making is ruled by our reptilian and limbic brains. The reptilian survival part of the brain was inherited from our distant ancestors, and its job is to keep us safe, fed and belonging to a tribe. It reads messages from our nervous system, and if it notices something putting us into a fight/flight mode, it tries to keep us away from that thing. The emotional limbic brain likes pleasure and instant gratification and seeks comfort. The neo-cortex is the newest part of the brain that can reason and analyse and be self-aware but because it’s fairly new it often gets overruled by the more ancient primitive parts.

Understanding that this is the way our brains are wired can be immensely helpful in itself. This knowledge gives us power. If I know that the fear and discomfort that come up at the thought of leaving a familiar but undesirable situation are just survival brain reactions, I know I don’t have to obey them. It doesn’t necessarily mean pushing them to the side. What I suggest is negotiating with the survival brain, comforting the fear by letting it know that there’s no terrible danger here and that you’re fully capable of handling whatever comes. We can do this through parts work such as Voice Dialogue or active imagination.

Instead of fighting ourselves we can work on creating safety from the inside first, since this is what our survival brain is craving. 

Here are my 5 strategies for creating safety from the inside to help you leave the comfort of the familiar.

1. Ask yourself what you’re afraid of and take those fears through a reality check. Talk through them with a friend or a therapist to get a different perspective. Our fearful survival brain often paints colourful scary pictures when in reality it may not be that bad.

    

2. Find practical tangible ways for mitigating those fears and potential scary outcomes. Make sure your parachute is in good working condition to open when you jump out of that plane. That can include surrounding yourself with enough support to hold yourself through the pain of heartbreak or setting enough money aside.

    

3. Dialogue with your fearful parts. Imagine your fearful part as a character (like from the film Inside Out) and talk to it, either out loud, internally or in writing. Find out what it needs and give it some reassurance. Remind it that you’re a grownup now and are very well resourced to take care of yourself.

    

4. Make a list of your internal and external resources. We often forget how resourced we are when we get stuck in our survival brain.

    

5. Work with your nervous system directly to put yourself in a deeply regulated state. Any practices that activate the parasympathetic nervous system or stimulate the vagus nerve are helpful: slow deep breathing, yoga, qigong, EFT tapping, vagal toning self-massage.

As you work with your fear and nervous system, it can also be helpful to keep reminding yourself why you’re wanting to make this change, the positive benefits it would bring to your life. This would shift you into the more resourced and creative neo-cortex. Practice visualising the most positive outcomes and seeing the version of yourself who has already moved through this change with ease and grace. Feel the contrast between where you want to be and where you are now.

It takes courage to move from the familiar into the unknown. This courage will help you grow, evolve and expand into a stronger wiser version of you. Whatever the outcome, you will have gained a very valuable experience in terms of your inner growth. This way, there are no failures or bad outcomes – only growth and expansion.