When the Body Doesn’t Know It’s Safe

In my upcoming book “A Philosophical Critique of Co-Existing  Mental Health and Substance Use Challenges”, In “Pain Comes First, Drugs Come Later”, I explore the idea of temporal confusion — what happens when distress, trauma, or survival reorders our sense of time itself. I wanted to give you an insight into what I mean.

Darren had been sleeping rough for three years when he was finally offered a room in a hostel. From the outside, it looked like a turning point — a door closing on the street, a step toward stability. Inside that room, though, time hadn’t restarted. He still lived as if he were outside. He stayed awake all night, eyes flicking toward the door at every sound. He slept through the day, half-clothed, half-alert. His room was cluttered with bottles, blankets, and plastic bags. It looked like the street because, for him, it still was the street.

On paper, Darren was “housed”. In reality, he was still surviving. The calendar on the hostel wall meant nothing; he didn’t live by dates but by sensations — the next hit, the next meal, the next moment when his body finally gave out and let him sleep. His body had become the clock, ticking to the rhythm of withdrawal, exhaustion, and fear.

For years, life on the streets had stripped time of its structure. There were no weekdays or weekends, no beginnings or endings. One night blurred into another; one pipe became five; one winter became three. When every day is a fight to stay alive, time stops moving forward. It loops. The brain learns not to plan, because planning assumes there will be a tomorrow. Trauma researchers call this stalled temporality — the point where the nervous system freezes in survival mode. It isn’t laziness or apathy; it’s an adaptive response to prolonged threat. Darren’s sense of time wasn’t linear anymore. It was circular, repetitive, and bodily. Even when the environment changed, his body didn’t know it was safe.

When professionals looked at Darren, they often used words like “unmotivated” or “resistant”. The system interpreted his behaviour through a moral lens — as if he were choosing chaos over order, dependency over recovery. But you can move a person indoors in a day; you can’t move their nervous system that fast. For someone who’s lived in a state of hypervigilance, safety doesn’t arrive with a key. The system might offer structure, but if that structure isn’t co-created—if it’s imposed—it feels alien, even threatening. To Darren, the hostel was not safe. It was exposure in a new form.

Structure, then, becomes something far deeper than discipline. It’s not about routine for the sake of compliance but about temporal rehabilitation — a gentle re-teaching of what rhythm feels like. When life has been reduced to surviving the present, structure reintroduces the flow of time, and through that, the possibility of meaning. Meals at the same time each day re-establish the body’s sense of sequence. Conversations at consistent times anchor the self in relationship. Sleep routines retrain the nervous system to distinguish night from day. These may seem like small, bureaucratic interventions, but in truth they are acts of existential repair. They help rebuild the idea that there is a tomorrow, that time flows again, that the world is once more predictable enough to imagine being part of it.

People like Darren live not only in poverty but also in what could be called temporal injustice. The rest of society moves through linear time — workweeks, deadlines, careers, holidays. Progress is assumed. For those left behind by trauma, exclusion, or substance dependence, time becomes cyclical, stagnant, or suspended. They are out of sync with the moral tempo of society, and for that, they are punished. Temporal confusion isn’t just psychological—it’s political. It’s what happens when systems create waiting lists that last years, benefits that trap people in stasis, or treatment models that demand linear “recovery journeys” from those who no longer inhabit linear time.

For Darren, progress began not with detox or therapy, but with the smallest acts of rhythm — a support worker who knocked on his door at the same time each morning, a shared breakfast that broke the long vigil of the night, and a cup of tea that marked the beginning of a day. Slowly, the repetition of care became the structure of time. When he started to anticipate someone turning up, to trust that tomorrow might resemble today, he began to re-enter time itself.

That’s what recovery really is: the reanimation of time. When someone’s world has collapsed into the present, we can’t expect them to live according to our schedules, our appointments, and our goals. The ethical work isn’t to demand they keep time but to lend them some. Structure, in this light, is not control — it’s recognition. It’s saying: you exist in time again. The world hasn’t forgotten you.

Until then, Darren isn’t just living in poverty or addiction. He’s living outside of time.