The Architecture of Safety
On Pakistani masculinity, emotional repression, and how trauma reshapes the way we love.
“One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood.”
— Hanif Kureishi
This was written in the spirit of healing, not accusation. If it stirs something in you, I invite you to sit with it — not as a mirror of blame, but as a reflection of what’s possible beyond silence.
What does it mean to feel safe with someone? Not just physically, but emotionally, sexually, spiritually? Not the safety of routine or permanence, but the deeper architecture of safety that allows the nervous system to exhale, the body to soften, and the soul to unfold without fear of being judged, abandoned, or consumed.
For survivors of trauma — especially sexual trauma — safety isn’t a given. It’s not something that naturally arises in proximity to love or desire. In fact, intimacy can be the most triggering terrain of all. As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, “Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health.” Yet, for many of us, safety is not familiar. It is not encoded in our early relationships. It must be re-learned, re-sensitized, re-built from scratch.
This chronic distrust of vulnerability is not only emotional, it’s biological. Generations of hypervigilance live in our bones. Epigenetic research has shown that trauma can be passed down through our genes, altering stress responses in the body and heightening our sensitivity to perceived threats. We are not just reacting to our partners in the present — we are unconsciously reacting to ancestral memories of war, betrayal, displacement, and of silence. For women in particular, whose survival often depended on anticipating danger, this vigilance is not neurotic: it is inherited. Our nervous systems, trained by generations of caution, don’t always know the difference between fear and love. And many have failed to protect those whom they love: women, children, and men too.
To feel safe in a relationship is to have your boundaries honoured without punishment. To be able to say no and not fear withdrawal. To express need without being labeled needy. To have your body touched not as an entitlement, but as a privilege.
These are not luxuries. They are conditions for real connection.
But we are not taught this. Especially not in the cultural context I come from, where women’s bodies are either sanctified or shamed, where sexuality is cloaked in silence, and men are rarely raised to understand their own emotions, let alone someone else’s. Pakistani men, like many men globally, are conditioned under a patriarchal template that divorces them from emotional fluency. Desire is often their only allowed form of expression. Intimacy without control is an unknown language.
bell hooks, in The Will to Change, writes: “The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings.” When those feelings are not metabolized, they become re-routed—into compulsive behaviors, addictions, secret lives. The shame of vulnerability is too much to bear. So men escape into porn, into fantasy, and silence.
And what happens to the women who love them? We carry what isn’t spoken. We become attuned to subtle shifts in mood, the cold distance, the retraction. Our bodies register what words refuse to admit. We feel everything.
And what about those of us who became the fluent ones? The ones who read the room, held the silence, translated moods into meaning before words arrived. We are praised for our emotional intelligence, but no one talks about how much it costs to always be the translator. The exhaustion of decoding pain that isn’t ours, the grief of holding the weight of two nervous systems. In loving men who never learned to feel, we often forget our own feelings entirely.
Partners of trauma survivors often walk on shards, never knowing what will trigger dissociation or rage or shame.
As Laura Davis and Ellen Bass write in Allies in Healing, “Survivors often develop an exaggerated need for control in their adult relationships. It’s the only way they feel safe. They also struggle with commitment — saying yes in a relationship means being trapped in yet another family situation where abuse might take place. So the survivor panics as their relationship gets closer, certain that something terrible is going to happen. They pull away, reject, or test their partner all the time.”
This is particularly complex in relationships where both partners carry trauma. We are not walking into clean spaces. We are bringing the ghosts of our pasts into our shared bed. And sometimes, the very ways we’ve learned to survive — numbing, controlling, avoiding — become the very things that hurt each other most.
Sex, for trauma survivors, is rarely just sex. It’s a negotiation with memory, with shame, and survival. It’s why Esther Perel writes in Mating in Captivity that “sex is a place we go, not just something we do” and that, “For [erotically intelligent couples], love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, experiment, regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered.”
For many of us, that place can be both a sanctuary and a battlefield. We may crave closeness and yet panic when it arrives. We may long for touch, yet recoil when it feels too much. We may confuse attention with care, desire with danger.
Audre Lorde, in Uses of the Erotic, reminds us that erotic power is not about consumption. It’s about presence, knowing, and aliveness. “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women [...] confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” But patriarchy has replaced the erotic with the pornographic, reducing feeling to function and intimacy to transaction. In this distortion, connection is no longer sacred, but it mutates and regresses into something performative, numbed out, or escapist.
In Pakistani culture, where shame is institutionalized and desire demonized, this disconnection runs deep. Men are not taught to ask, how do I feel? but rather, what will they think?
Public masculinity is prized; private vulnerability is punished. As Jasbir Puar notes in her work on affect and nationalism, state and gendered identities often converge in ways that police not just bodies, but their capacity to feel, desire, and to grieve. Pakistani men, caught between colonial residues and modernity, often have no vocabulary for emotional literacy — let alone erotic healing.
This isn’t metaphor. The boys raised on stories of martyrdom, whose fathers served in the army or prayed for sons to hold guns — those boys often don’t learn how to cry. They are told to harden. To command. To suppress. And they carry that into their relationships. It becomes a war of another kind. One fought in bedrooms, over dinner tables, inside women’s bodies.
This is compounded by the militarization of masculinity itself. In Pakistan, the army is not just an institution, it is a cultural symbol, a patriarchal ideal. The soldier becomes a stand-in for the nation: stoic, disciplined, unfeeling. Emotional repression is seen as strength. Hypermasculinity is rewarded, not questioned. As feminist scholars like Saadia Toor and Nida Kirmani have argued, the state’s obsession with control — over borders, women, dissent — finds expression in the regulation of male identity as well. In this framework, vulnerability is weakness, softness is shameful, and sexuality must either be violently asserted or tightly policed.
As bell hooks reminds us: “Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for — companionship and understanding. It is a denial of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness. Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood.”
In Pakistan, that rage doesn’t only play out in homes — it’s institutionalized in the very fabric of the state. The military, often seen as the ultimate symbol of masculine control, enshrines a form of hyper-patriarchal nationalism where vulnerability is weakness, and strength is defined by domination. This ethos filters into the household: if the nation cannot cry, neither can the men who are raised to protect it. Anger becomes the only sanctioned emotion. Patriarchy, in this way, is not just structural — it is deeply spiritual. It builds walls not just around nations, but around hearts. Anger becomes the only sanctioned emotion.
Sexual violence, too, becomes a tool of dominance — used not only in interpersonal contexts, but systemically, as part of military operations, police encounters, and political suppression. From Balochistan to Kashmir, from Hindu women to subaltern women in general, the threat and reality of rape have long been embedded in the machinery of state terror. This violence isn’t incidental. It is an extension of colonial violence and repudiation, a national ideology that teaches men to dominate rather than feel, to conquer rather than connect. These are the legacies that live on in our bedrooms, our silences, our shame.
As I wrote in my essay Sexual Violence And The Hypermasculine Nation State for Naya Daur: “Trauma is a constant process of forgetting and diminishing, recollecting and remembering. Trauma can induce an amnesiac state, where picking up the pieces can be difficult because we don’t want to remember, we don’t want to retraumatize ourselves. Not just the individual self, but governmental bodies as well. Nationalism—the love of our country, a shape on a map—allows us to forget. History, violence, and trauma are interlinked and they intersect. Thus, the process of forgetting, repeating, and remembering renders them cyclical.”
So how do we build an architecture of safety inside this mess? Inside this dilapidated home that’s been attacked from the outside time and time again?
How do we, as a community, who have been conditioned to believe that safety can only be acquired through violence and hyperviligance — learn to truly love not only our loved ones — but ourselves?
Not through control. Not through surveillance. But through co-regulation, the quiet, unseen work of two nervous systems learning to attune to one another. It is in the pause before reaction, the breath that interrupts the spiral, the way a soft touch on the back can say I’m here when words fail. Safety is not achieved through rules or monitoring; it’s cultivated through relational rituals that teach our bodies it is finally okay to relax.
Through nervous systems that learn to soften around each other, not sharpen. This is the rewiring of survival patterns into trust patterns. It’s the nervous system learning that closeness does not always equal danger, that presence can be reliable, that one can be wanted and safe at the same time. For many trauma survivors, this is revolutionary.
Through agreements made with reverence, not resentment. Agreements that are not enforced with shame, but honoured with care. Boundaries are not weapons in healthy relationships: they are doorways into deeper truth. Mutual agreements around sexuality, emotional labour, and space are not about restriction but about intentionality: How do we want to show up for each other and ourselves? What are we healing by choosing this together?
Through sexual healing that centers connection over performance. Sex is not just an act, but a somatic language. For those with trauma, healing sex means reclaiming agency, slowing down, and rewriting the body’s story in real time. It means being allowed to feel and not just perform. It means touching from a place of presence, not entitlement. It means asking not Did I satisfy you? but Did you feel safe with me?
Through truth that is told not to hurt, but to liberate. Radical honesty is not the same as brutal honesty. The former invites expansion and the latter demands collapse. Telling the truth in safe relationships should feel like making room inside a crowded body, not throwing grenades. The purpose of truth is to build a shared reality, a scaffolding where we can meet each other again and again with more clarity, not less.
We need partners who understand that trust isn’t about perfection. It’s about consistency. Repair. Transparency. We need men who are willing to become fluent in emotional presence, not as a gift to their partners, but as a reclamation of their own humanity.
As bell hooks further writes, “Men who cannot recognize the emotional wounds in themselves cannot empathize with the emotional pain of others.”
We also need to remember that safety is not a static state. It must be nurtured, watered like a garden of roses under the scorching Lahori heat, and like it is protected against the flooding of barsaat. And when it is — when it is real and mutual and alive — it becomes the soil, the bud, and the bloom where intimacy can finally grow. Not in the image of romance we were sold. But in a love that is slow, sanctified, and honest.
A love that doesn’t demand we forget our pasts, but helps us remember we are more than them. A love that holds the architecture of safety like sanctity— brick by brick, breath by breath.
What if safety looked like a hand on the back, not to guide or to push, but simply to remind us we’re not alone? What if it looked like pausing before reacting, breathing instead of blaming? What if healing wasn’t heroic, but habitual — made of small, boring, daily and gentle moments of tenderness and reassurance?
Brilliant, insightful...
This was truly profound Zahra, and I could glean deep aha moments( philosophical, theoretical, conceptual, courage)! that help explain the failure of politics (partly) within my East African context. Shukran