Safety, Madonna and the Fine Art of Not Handing Your Nervous System to the Crowd
Every Thursday evening in Brisbane, a small group of people meets to do something quietly, and sometimes noisily - revolutionary:
We spend an hour discovering what we actually need.
Extravagantly self-indulgent?
Possibly.
Juicy?
We certainly hope so.
Self-centred?
Only in the healthiest meaning of the expression. After all, if you have somehow become separated from your own centre, it is probably worth finding out where it went.
People who cautiously dip one toe into spending more time looking after themselves often discover something rather inconvenient: it works.
They feel clearer. They make better decisions. They become less resentful. They stop expecting other people to perform emotional gymnastics without ever being told what is required. They may even become more enjoyable to live with.
Strangely enough, looking after ourselves often turns out to be one of the more generous things we can do for everyone around us.
And when we explore our needs in the company of other people, we may fulfil several needs at once - connection, attention, stimulation, laughter, meaning and perhaps that glorious moment when someone else says:
“Good heavens. I thought I was the only person who did that.”
Human needs do not disappear just because we ignore them
Most of us have heard about basic human needs. Maslow arranged them into a famous hierarchy, while other psychologists, therapists and coaches use different names and organise them in different ways.
The labels are not the most important part.
The important part is that our needs influence our feelings, behaviour and decisions, whether or not we consciously acknowledge them.
Ignore a need and it does not politely pack its suitcase and leave. It puts on a false moustache, assumes another identity and begins running parts of your life from the basement.
An unmet need for belonging may disguise itself as desperate loyalty to a group. An unmet need for status may become a relentless pursuit of achievement. An unmet need for meaning can make someone vulnerable to any impressively confident person who claims to possess the One Great Truth, preferably delivered with dramatic lighting and a monthly subscription.
This is one reason people can become entangled with cults, controlling groups and self-appointed fountains of eternal wisdom. When someone promises to meet several neglected needs simultaneously, the attraction can be extraordinarily powerful.
Once we begin recognising the needs underneath our behaviour, something clicks. We see why certain situations have such a strong emotional charge. We become more difficult to manipulate. We start seeing through the charades, including our own.
For a darker exploration of what can happen when human needs are neglected or misdirected, you may like to read Mark Tyrrell’s The Dark Side of Human Needs.
These meet-ups are not therapy
There is no compulsory excavation of childhood.
Nobody is placed on a couch.
Nobody is appointed Grand Oracle of Thursday Evening.
These gatherings are practical and future-focused. We acknowledge that our existing patterns came from somewhere, but we do not necessarily need hundreds of sessions and several complete chapters of our lives to begin experimenting with something different.
We ask:
- What might this feeling be trying to tell me?
- What need could be operating underneath it?
- Is my current strategy actually working?
- What could I try instead?
- Could one enjoyable new behaviour meet several needs at once?
Some suggestions are sensible. Some are adventurous. Some may be much too “out there” for one person and nowhere near out there enough for someone else.
This is excellent. We are not all supposed to want the same life.
Laughter is encouraged and is occasionally close to mandatory. Human beings are profoundly funny, particularly when we are trying very hard to appear normal.
So what does safety really mean?
As you read the word safety, you may notice what your mind produces.
Perhaps you picture your home, a locked door, money in the bank, a familiar routine or someone you trust.
And as you allow that first picture to settle, you may begin to notice that safety is not one simple thing.
We can experience physical safety, financial safety, emotional safety, social safety and the internal safety of knowing that we can handle ourselves when life becomes uncertain.
Our needs also borrow one another’s clothing.
Someone whose need for control is not being met may focus intensely on earning more money. The number keeps increasing, but “enough” never arrives, because the underlying need was never really about money. Money represented control, independence or the ability to escape.
The same thing can happen with safety. We may attempt to organise every detail, remove every uncertainty and predict every possible outcome. Yet the deep breath never comes.
You know the breath I mean.
The one where the shoulders finally drop, the internal guards stand down and something inside quietly says:
For this moment, I am all right.
An unmet need for safety may sometimes appear as anxiety, constant monitoring, obsessive behaviour, avoidance or social withdrawal. Staying home can protect us from embarrassment, rejection and unpredictable human beings.
Unfortunately, spending all our time avoiding unpredictable human beings can leave us with fewer relationships, less confidence and a weaker support network, which may eventually make us feel less safe.
There we are being funny again.
What could Madonna possibly teach us about safety?
Quite a lot, actually.
Madonna has spent decades being adored, condemned, imitated, mocked, celebrated, judged, dismissed and rediscovered, sometimes by the same public.
Entire groups of people have changed their minds about her repeatedly. She has been subjected to industrial quantities of emotional projection and public judgement, yet the observable pattern of her career is that she recentres, reinvents and continues.
What she experiences privately belongs to her. But the public lesson is difficult to miss: safety cannot depend entirely upon the crowd maintaining a stable opinion of you.
There is a thought I associate with Madonna, although I am presenting it as a Madonna-like paraphrase rather than an authenticated quotation:
You cannot please everyone. People can love you this week, hate you next week and love you again the week after. Every Leo knows their worth - even if they had to learn it the hard way. I wish I could package that knowledge and give it to everyone.
That is not the safety of universal approval. It is the safety of possessing an internal centre to which you can return.
With a Leo Sun and Virgo Ascendant, Madonna offers a particularly vivid version of the principle:
Remember your value. Examine what happened. Adjust the method. Get back to work.
The Leo part does not surrender the throne every time someone disapproves. The Virgo part reviews the performance, fixes the hem, reorganises the lighting and prepares for the next entrance.
Internal safety does not mean refusing all criticism or imagining ourselves to be invulnerable. It means the crowd does not hold the title deeds to our self-worth.
This is where our weekly gatherings become useful
When we are caught inside a powerful emotion, our attention narrows. We defend, withdraw, attack, freeze or repeat familiar strategies.
But something changes when we feel relaxed enough to become curious.
And perhaps, while sitting among equals, hearing someone else describe a completely different approach, you may suddenly notice an option that was invisible five minutes earlier.
- It may be a boundary you need to set.
- A conversation you have been avoiding.
- A practical safety plan.
- Three people you can call when something goes wrong.
- A small financial change.
- A decision to leave the house and risk encountering one of those unpredictable human beings.
- Or perhaps the revolutionary act of saying:
“No, that does not work for me.”
Without delivering a six-act opera explaining why.
I facilitate these gatherings and keep the conversation moving so that everyone gains something useful from the hour. But this is not about presenting my Practice, or me, as the sole source of wisdom.
We all bring ideas. We all arrive with the same broad human needs, even though we have developed wonderfully different and occasionally bewildering ways of meeting them.
Astrology or hypnosis?
These gatherings sit under the hypnosis side of my Practice because they focus on subconscious patterns, emotional needs, suggestions and practical behavioural change.
Astrology may also offer useful starting points.
If you choose to provide your date, place and time of birth, I may use your chart to suggest some approaches that could feel more natural or interesting to you.
This is entirely optional. You do not need to believe in astrology, understand astrology or pledge allegiance to Mercury before entering the room.
Some ideas may sound completely mad to you. Others may feel timid. One may cause something inside you to become unexpectedly quiet as you realise:
That one might actually work.
Would you like to join us?
Our practical human-needs meet-ups are held on Thursday evenings in Brisbane, Australia.
You can book online here:
[Insert booking link]
If you live outside Brisbane but would like to participate in future interactive online sessions, send me a message and ask to join the waiting list.
Come along with your curiosity, your sense of humour and your wonderfully imperfect collection of human patterns.
You do not need to have everything worked out.
You only need to be willing to discover what might happen when you begin meeting your needs deliberately, rather than leaving them in the basement wearing false moustaches and running the show.