When the World Feels Unsafe: A Trauma-Informed Reflection on Grief, Vigilance, and Nervous System Care

There are moments when the news stops feeling like “information” and starts feeling like weight.

Names like Renee Good and Alex Pretti now live in our collective awareness. I don’t want to analyze what happened. I don’t want to argue details. Everyone has already done that. What I want to name is something quieter, and yet very loud in the body.

As a veteran and a survivor of domestic violence, my nervous system knows what it means to live on alert. To scan. To listen. To brace. To never fully soften because safety once disappeared without warning. There is a particular kind of vigilance that comes from living in environments where danger can arrive suddenly, and where your body learns to stay ready, just in case.

When violence enters the collective conversation again, it does not only live in headlines. It lives in the body. It wakes up old survival patterns. It tightens the chest. It shortens the breath. It makes rest feel harder to reach. Even when we are physically safe, our nervous systems may not feel that way.

This is not a political reflection. It is a human one. A nervous-system one.

So many people right now are walking around feeling heavy, helpless, on edge, or quietly hopeless. Not because they lack resilience, but because their systems are tired of bracing. Tired of holding uncertainty. Tired of trying to make sense of a world that feels increasingly unpredictable.

There is also a complicated grief that comes when you have worn a uniform, believed in protection, believed in order, believed in the idea that human life should be safeguarded, and then watch harm continue to unfold anyway. That grief does not fit neatly into sides or slogans. It simply settles in the body.

I do not have answers. I do not have solutions. What I do have is deep compassion for the part of you that may be feeling activated, overwhelmed, or quietly afraid of the next shoe dropping.

If your nervous system feels tired right now, it makes sense.
If your heart feels heavy, it makes sense.
If you are struggling to stay grounded while the world feels loud and fractured, it makes sense.

Perhaps all we can do in moments like this is tend to safety in small, human ways.

Slow the breath.
Feel your feet on the floor.
Place a hand on your chest and remind your body that, in this moment, you are here and you are breathing.
Reach for someone who feels steady.
Limit how much you take in.
Let yourself grieve without needing to justify it.

This is not about taking sides.
It is about tending hearts.
It is about caring for bodies that have held too much for too long.
It is about remembering that none of us are meant to carry this kind of weight alone.

If you are reading this and feeling that familiar tightness, that old vigilance, that quiet ache of “I wish the world felt safer than it does,” please know this:

You are not broken.
You are not weak.
Your nervous system is responding exactly as it was designed to respond to threat and uncertainty.

And you are not alone in that.

xx, Diana