Right. In some respects that is dead on. But the safe space is entirely controlled, which is something of the hitch that really sticks in people’s craw about being oppressed or silenced.
A safe space isn’t for everyone, all the time, to express whatever they feel openly at any given point. More specifically, a safe space is where people talk about what threatens them or makes them feel vulnerable, without interruption or judgment. And it doesn’t matter whether the threat is real or imagined.
As a mental health practitioner, I had to set up safe spaces for my clients all the time. Whether their fears were real, or they were having a straight up psychotic break and fully delusional with hallucinations. None of my opinions, theories, textbook learning, or ideas would help bring any sense of therapy into play. Pulling out research papers and academic articles to read wouldn’t make the client feel any safer, so they would be useless to share. In fact, more information would be more noise and make the client often feel more threatened. It was counterproductive. What I had to do was actively listen and make the person feel heard and understood - not tell them how wrong they were.
Many times, if family or friends were antagonizing clients into states of anxiety, which added to the problems, they were asked to leave so that the client could decompress and try to explain their fears without being told they were right/wrong/overreacting. It didn’t mean I was trying to oppress the other people in the situation, but that their additions to the conversation were deconstructing the safe space that was being created.
If you’re feeling walled out of any social safe space, it’s often because you’re not actively listening. Instead, whatever you’re bringing to the table is instigating more stress. And while you think your opinion or facts might be right, it doesn’t matter. Not until you fully understand if the problem the person is dealing with is biological, social, pharmaceutically or environmentally induced. Even if you have navigated all of those channels and think you’ve stumbled on the correct formulation of answers and therapies, there’s another caveat:
People won’t genuinely work with you or talk with you until they’re ready. Until they feel the threat has passed, or they’ve got a more stable ground to at least work and defend or improve themselves/their stances from. Sometimes it’s a lifelong struggle to get to that point, where people feel that kind of stability. But that’s another thing entirely.
So when you feel like people are using safe spaces to control thought, you’re not wrong. But there’s not this secret hidden agenda to subjugate anyone into compliance. Safe spaces are made for certain populations on certain topics. Sometimes you just don’t fit into that safe space because your opinion IS different and that’s totally okay.
If you don’t feel you’re being heard in safe spaces and that threatens your free will/sense of validation - then you make your own safe space to talk about those specific threats. But, going into other people’s safe spaces to take up your grievances with their not listening to you… that’s counter productive and why folks get moderated out of the discussion.
Corporations do it. Institutions do it. Local clubs do it. Neighbors do it. Family members do it. I mean, I am quite sure you have topics you don’t bring up at family gatherings or in front of someone because you know it’ll cause a rant. If you don’t want to hear that rant - that’s you, setting up a safe space for yourself via avoiding the topic.
Anyways. I get what you’re saying. It feels like people are trying to silence our discussions. There’s a lot of intricacies in the nuts and bolts of human discourse. It’s not a power play. They’re not forcing you to have different opinions, they’re just asking you share your opinions out in the wild world, where all thoughts are equally valid.
In safe spaces, there’s a select topic or thing that is agreed upon as prioritized - and agreed upon it’s validity regardless of what the rest of the world is saying. Sometimes it takes heavy moderation to keep the wild world opinions from bleeding into safe spaces. It looks and feels terrible for some people, who like the freedom to fire off their every passing thought. Yet, again… that’s not the purpose. The safe space is like a labratory or hospital clean room. Sanitizing/moderation is part of the healing process until the core issue has been appropriately dealt with. Then people can come out with lesser risks of infection.
Does all of that make sense? I’m two pots into coffee and not sure if I’m wording well.
