Yesterday, I attended a webinar called Sobriety, Safety, and Healing After Betrayal with Dr. Jake Porter. There was so much good information shared, but one idea really stayed with me.
Dr. Porter compared sobriety to a light switch. It’s either on or off. But safety is more like a dimmer switch. The light switch can be on, but if the dimmer is all the way down at zero, there still isn’t any light. This explains how my husband can be sober but I can still be searching for emotional safety.
That made me think about how I communicate what I’m feeling. It is okay to say, “I don’t feel safe,” but it may be more helpful to say, “I feel less safe than I did yesterday,” or, “I feel safer than I did last week.”
When I think about safety on a scale from zero to ten, I can see how the number can move up and down during the healing process, and probably throughout the rest of life. Something my husband does may move me toward feeling safer, while something else may move me back down again. Feeling safer doesn’t mean trust has been completely restored, and feeling less safe doesn’t mean every bit of progress has been lost.
I’ve also been thinking about how a marriage is a lot like a house. A house has different rooms, and in this house every room has its own light switch and dimmer. In the same way, there are different rooms within a marriage. I may feel a seven in one room and only a two in another. I may feel fairly safe with my husband in one area while still feeling very unsafe with him in another. I want to be very clear that I am not speaking about physical safety. That should always be at a 10.
Looking at safety this way is also helping me understand where I need boundaries. If the safety in one room is at a seven, I may not need as many boundaries there. But if another room is at a two, then I need to look carefully at what boundaries I need in that area.
When my husband and I were talking about this, he pointed out that the boundary scale almost works in the opposite direction from the safety scale. If my safety is at a two, I may need a level eight boundary. If my safety is at a nine, I may need only a level one boundary. The less safe I feel in a particular room, the stronger my boundaries may need to be there.
Those boundaries are not meant to punish my husband or control him. They help protect me in the places where safety and trust have not yet been rebuilt. As safety grows through rigorous honesty, transparency, vulnerability, humility, and changed behavior, some of those boundaries may be able to change too.
Communicating where I am in each room can give my husband a more honest picture of how his choices are affecting my sense of safety. I’m not responsible for managing how he feels about the number, and I don’t have to tell him how to fix it. I am giving him an honest picture of where the light is growing brighter and where the room is still dark.
There was a lot of good information in the webinar, but the part about the dimmer switch really stuck with me. It helped me see that safety is not something I either have or don’t have. It can move up and down a little at a time. Maybe it is because I’m an electrician’s wife, but thinking about safety this way gives me a clearer way to understand and express what I am feeling, both to myself and to my husband.
-Aimee
September 17, 2026
