I can relate to "not feeling safe enough." It's something that came up for me through EMDR and somatic experiencing (SE), and maybe when I did EFT (tapping), too.
I've been addressing my pain-triggering emotional baggage for over 9 years now. By recognizing my anger, fear, and shame, I brought down my pain significantly back in 2007/8. The safety stuff took longer to surface.
Tapping helped me have less intense reactions when talking about disturbing things, but didn't bring down my pain any further. But that doesn't mean it won't for you or that it still wasn't an important step in my overall process of addressing emotions and then letting them go.
But either way, if you are in a safe place with a therapist or with yourself, hopefully you can allow yourself to let the feelings come up. I think that's what made it possible for me. In fact I think you just made me realize why maybe I'm better able to acknowledge and release scary emotions with therapists rather than by myself: I don't know that I feel safe enough by myself. I'm not saying everyone needs a therapist to do this work, but maybe some of us need that safety net that we haven't been able to provide for ourselves yet. But maybe just that realization for me today might help me and allow me to do more work by myself at home! (Thanks!)
I've done a lot of writing about what has come up when I've worked with therapists (through bodywork or with psychologically based therapists), but I've been very hesitant to do the kind of journaling as Nicole Sachs' details in her book (based on Sarno's suggested approach) on my own. I think I feel scared to go to some places (in my mind) all by myself.
For a little more on my experiences with addressing feeling safe, I found a therapist who does both EMDR and SE (per Peter Levine) and that helped me discover that feeling safe was important to my continued healing. I do think this type of work (EFT, EMDR, SE) can help, but to date, I've found it to be less dramatic in relieving my physical pain than mindbody myofasial release bodywork, although I did have a couple sessions of EMDR and SE that did bring down large spikes in my pain. However, maybe these methods of addressing emotions that are stuck in my body were less dramatic to me because I'd already made significant progress (got much of the low-hanging fruit via reading Sarno and going through intensive myofasial release mindbody work).
Shame and feeling a lack of safety seem to be very deep-seated in me and I feel they are hard for my body to let go of. Sometimes the process is slow.
When I realized not feeling safe was deeply rooted in my subconscious, I started employing mantras about being safe when my symptoms are bad. I probably should do this more frequently than I do since I still have daily pain, but since my symptoms are so much more tolerable and manageable, I sometimes only remember to think about safety (or other deep emotions) when my symptoms flare up.
I don't know if all this is of any help, but I thought I'd at least share my experience since it feels similar to what you described.
(If you're interested, I've written about my experiences with all the different things I've tried, including EFT, EMDR, SE, MFR, etc, throughout my healing journey. See the "treatments" tab on my website:
www.healingfromchronicpain.com. My site is just about my personal experience, but I like to share if it can possibly help even one person.)
Best of luck to you!
