I don't know that I ever really believed the world was safe. But one memory that stands out is this...

My mom was schizophrenic, as was my grandma (her mother). They were the only adults that lived in the house with me--I didn't have a dad or any other "sane" family member around. My grandmother had some level of discretion about her illness--it was better controlled, or she at least acknowledged she had it, and shut herself away from me when she freaked out. Mom, on the other hand, would go into shrieking fits at the top of her lungs about "ghosts" or "commies" or "Jews" or whatever fit into her paranoid mental narrative that day. Most of my interactions with her, from a very young age, was trying to avoid her trigger topics. I'm not by nature a manipulative person, but I learned young how to quickly change a topic, and to stay quiet and say nothing in order to not provoke a fit.

My grandma was a smoker, and had breathing difficulties. One day when I was about 5 my mom, in her mental illness, thought my grandmother was saying things under her breath, and flipped out on her, screaming and such. It terrified me.

I ran outside, and inside my mom beat up my grandma. Outside, I hid in the yard, and said the "Our Father" prayer, hoping God or someone would come save me, and make it stop, and make things safe. Nothing and nobody came. Eventually they stopped fighting, and my grandma retreated to sit in the car. She had blood on her face, a split lip. I don't recall her saying anything, and I didn't ask, just sat in the car in the driveway with her.

So I always knew the world was pretty unsafe, and often devote a large amount of brainpower to carefully judging the temper of people around me. Instead of the world being black and white, it's more of a prediction matrix...how dangerous is this person? What about that person? Oh, someone's yelling, their dangerousness score just went up 1000% and I'm going to go hide...