Reading the Room: Where Safety, Bias, and Accountability Intersect
What I’m about to say might rub some people the wrong way—but maybe that discomfort means we’re touching something real. My goal isn’t to moralize or diminish anyone’s experience. It’s to talk about something we all live with: how our bodies read safety, threat, and tone in others—and what we do with that information.
When Safety Instincts Get Misunderstood
We live in a time where even ordinary acts of self-protection—crossing the street, securing your belongings, scanning the environment—can be misread as judgment or bias. But there’s a difference between evaluating energy and assigning value to identity.
I spent twelve years as a police officer. My training hardwired me to always have a plan—to assume that at any moment, someone could try to attack or kill me. That kind of vigilance gets into your nervous system. But I also had to learn not to act that cognition. My job required me to prepare for the worst while still treating people with professionalism, calm, and respect. I couldn’t front-load hostility based on a possibility that hadn’t yet happened.
That balance—between readiness and restraint—still lives in me. Even now, out of uniform, my body naturally scans every environment. It’s not about hate. It’s about conditioning born from years of managing danger while trying to stay human.
Context Matters, But So Does Agency
Yes, people’s histories shape how they move through the world. Years of stress, adverse childhood experiences, attachment wounds, absent or poor role modeling, and trauma all leave their mark—on how a person carries themselves, how tension sits in their face, and how others perceive them. That deserves compassion and context.
But compassion isn’t the same as excusing. Every adult is responsible for how they show up. The world reads our signals—body language, tone, presence—and those cues affect how others respond. Understanding why we learned certain defenses doesn’t remove accountability for managing them.
Awareness of our wiring isn’t an excuse to stop challenging it—it’s the starting point for agency. This isn’t about conformity—it’s about awareness. Everyone broadcasts energy, and it matters how it lands.
The Middle Ground We Keep Losing
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy teaches that two seemingly opposite things can both be true at once. That idea applies far beyond therapy—it’s a life skill we’re losing.
Two things can be true at once:
Circumstances shape people.
People still choose what they do with that shaping.
When every honest observation turns into a moral accusation, real conversation dies fast. Growth happens in the middle—where empathy meets accountability.
Some frameworks and trainings have lost that balance. They rely on shame, accusation, or collective guilt to drive awareness. The intent might be to awaken empathy, but the impact can backfire. For people who value personal accountability over group identity, that tone lands less like education and more like indictment. It creates environments where compliance replaces reflection, and fear of saying the wrong thing replaces honest dialogue.
That’s a lesson I had to re-learn in grad school. There were times I felt I had to delicately tiptoe through discussion prompts—crafting inauthentic responses just to avoid upsetting a professor with a different worldview or “lived experience.” It wasn’t about fear of disagreement; it was the power dynamic of knowing that one person’s ideology could decide my grade—or my reputation. That kind of environment didn’t foster growth; it trained conformity rather than critical thinking, self-reflecting, and articulating.
I saw that same dynamic again later, as an entry-level registered counselor working under a Licensed Qualified Supervisor—a role where I was supposed to learn from his experience and process my own countertransference (emotional residue or reactions a therapist brings into the room based on their own history or biases). Instead, supervision often became about absorbing his political opinions just to keep the peace, get the log signed, and the paychecks processed.
Our viewpoints didn’t align, and we both knew it, yet I acquiesced to avoid unnecessary conflict. What made it worse was his refusal to even acknowledge the power dynamic—how his position shaped what could or couldn’t be said. So instead of being open or curious, I’d deflect or change topics to keep things manageable. That wasn’t supervision; it was submission.
And what I didn’t realize at the time was how similar that felt to what’s happening in the broader culture—people learning to censor themselves, not out of respect, but survival.
Real progress doesn’t come from collective shaming. It comes from honest self-examination—where awareness meets agency, and humility doesn’t require humiliation.
Honesty Is Not the Same as Hatred
Naming patterns of tension, guardedness, or aggression isn’t an attack—it’s awareness. Understanding context doesn’t mean behavior should have no consequence.
In recent years, some frameworks have started celebrating words like unapologetic. In the right context, that can mean confidence or self-acceptance. But when it’s used as armor against accountability or to dismiss how we’re received by others, it stops being empowerment and starts reading as hostility. There’s a difference between being unapologetic about your worth and being indifferent to your impact. Assertiveness isn’t about volume—it’s about tone, timing, intensity, and clarity.
The goal isn’t blame—it’s balance. Be ready for risk without treating everyone like a threat. Stay alert, but stay human. That’s not prejudice. That’s maturity.
A Few Questions Worth Sitting With
These aren’t accusations—just questions I ask myself, too. If we all slowed down long enough to examine our own reactions, maybe we’d get closer to honest dialogue and less performative morality.
When I feel the urge to “correct” someone, am I protecting truth—or protecting my sense of being the good one?
Do I listen to understand, or just to prove I’m on the “right” side?
Have I ever confused empathy with permission, or silence with moral superiority?
What would shift in my interactions if I led with curiosity instead of correction?
Am I willing to hold two truths—that systems influence us, and so does individual responsibility?
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47
Reflection isn’t weakness. It’s how conviction stays honest. And if your first instinct right now is to fire off a comment or rebuttal—try practicing just noticing. What’s happening in your body? Where does it land? What are you defending?
Sometimes I practice simply not responding—just observing the reaction and letting it pass. Not everything needs a response, a reaction, or an opinion. Sometimes restraint is the highest form of awareness.
“You always own the option of having no opinion.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.52
