Addicted to Safety.

What are the governors in your life?
Who installed them?
Are they self-imposed?

As you may know, a governor is a feedback device on a machine or engine that is used to provide automatic control, as of speed, pressure, or temperature.

People have “built-in” regulators that can be good and useful for governors can help them regulate life and prevent us from spinning out of control. Some folks need some governors installed in their lives! For they are addicted to the thrill and the risk and do many stupid things.

Some are addicted to feeling safe.

Like any addiction there is often shame and guilt associated with the disease.

But what about those “built-in” regulators or feedback devices in our heads that prevent us from moving forward in life? When we repress or suppress our deepest selves we often find ourselves depressed in some capacity or we cruise through life at 55 MPH and never really approach speeds that may make us feel out of control.

Governors can prevent us from going over a particular threshold and facing our own realties. They can act as self-imposed regulators or suppressors of pain that prevent us from moving beyond our status quo or keep us stuck at a certain speed or amount of pressure. We get up to a certain speed or pressure and just as we approach exceeding the barrier our governor kicks in and we never allow ourselves to move beyond our safety zone.

Like I said, governors can be a useful device for a while because they keep us safe and secure but at some point we have to remove our governors and risk experiencing those places within ourselves that we have never been. We have to remove our training wheels.

This may mean that we risk crashing and facing pain, and I am beginning to be that our true selves lie just beyond the pain or at least within the pain. I read a book back in college called Psycho Cybernetics by a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz he said, “It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear.”

Helen Keller said, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

Today I need to inventory my governors and finding them is simple: where am I avoiding pain? Where do I feel depressed? What am I avoiding? Where am I afraid? Where am I avoiding rejection?