Imagine Something Different

Imagine something different.

I mean that literally, and I mean it as a piece of clinical work, not as a motivational poster. For the length of this article I am going to ask you to set the other person to one side. Not to erase them. Not to decide anything about them. Simply to stop using all of your imagination on their next mood, and to spend a little of it on you.

This is the eighth piece in *When Peace Depends on You*. The first seven named a climate. This one is a window. If you have been reading in order, you have already done the harder looking. You are allowed a different kind of sentence now.

A few pictures, if you can bear them

You say a true thing and you do not have to draft it for an hour. You sleep before they sleep. You hear a key in the door and your shoulders stay where they are. You spend an afternoon with a friend and you do not pay for it later in weather. You laugh in your own kitchen and the laugh does not have to be managed so that it does not sound like criticism.

You remember what you think. You can want a weekend, a course, a quiet room, a different job, without immediately translating the want into a defence. You look at your face in the mirror and recognise the person looking back — not the edited version that keeps the peace.

If those pictures made you ache, that ache is not evidence that you are ungrateful. It is evidence that some part of you still knows what emotional safety feels like, or still knows enough to miss it. I will not dress that up as a promise that your life will look like this by Christmas. I will say that the nervous system needs a destination, even a faint one, if it is going to stop living only in threat.

Emotional safety is not a luxury

People who have gone without it for a long time start to treat it as something for other families — for people with money, or fewer children, or a different temperament. I disagree. Safety, in this sense, is not marble kitchens. It is the ability to be imperfect in a room and still belong there. It is being able to have a need without being punished for the need. It is repair after a mess, not a relocation of the mess onto you.

You may not be able to build that in the relationship you are in. You may. That is not today’s assignment. Today’s assignment is to stop calling the absence of safety “normal” just because it is familiar. Familiar and healthy are not synonyms. Malta is full of familiar houses that are not restful houses. You are allowed to want rest.

If a picture of ease feels childish, that is often a sign of how long you have been the adult in the room. Wanting a kitchen you can laugh in is not immature. It is a nervous system remembering it was not always employed as security staff. Let the picture be unfinished. You do not have to know who is in it with you. You only have to know that you are in it, and that you are allowed to take up a little space.

Some people find it helps to borrow a memory rather than invent a future — a time before this climate, or a friendship in which they can exhale. If you cannot find one, we will not force a golden childhood onto you. We will build the sample from here, in a quiet room, one hour at a time. You do not have to arrive with a vision board. You can arrive with nothing but the sense that the life you are living is too small for the person still inside it.

Emotional safety shouldn’t feel like a luxury you have to earn by being small.

Where imagination becomes practice

In individual therapy we often begin not with the other person’s behaviour, but with a small experience of a different climate: a room where your sentence is allowed to finish; a practitioner who will not use your tone against you; fifty minutes in Mosta that do not have to be reported to anyone. That is not a substitute for a safe home. It is a sample. Many people have not had a sample in years. The body learns from samples.

You can also practise in tiny, private ways. A walk without the phone. A sentence in a journal that you do not then delete. A coffee with someone who does not require you to be the strong one. None of this is leaving. None of this is a campaign. It is reminding your system that other temperatures exist.

If imagination feels dangerous — if even picturing ease makes you guilty, or superstitious, or sure you will be punished for wanting — tell us that. It is common. It is workable. We will not rush you from a picture to a life overhaul. The next article exists for that very reason: you do not have to decide anything today.

Continue with You don’t have to decide anything today. Previous: Your body may understand before your mind does. When you want the sample in person, write to us or call +356 9985 4942.