WHERE ARE YOU NOT FREE?
Are you someone who values freedom like I do? Maybe you’ve noticed there are areas of your life where you don’t actually feel that free. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Maybe it’s because it’s coming up for me more and more in my own personal therapy sessions. You begin noticing the ways you feel bound or constricted through the obligations, expectations, people pleasing, roles you stepped into at some point that somehow you never stepped out of. Roles you created for yourself or ones other people handed to you that you just kept carrying, often unconsciously.
So I keep coming back to this question… Where are you not free? And more personally… Where am I not free?
When I really follow and explore what comes up, what stands out is how rarely the answer is only about external circumstances. Of course those most definitely exist. All of the schedules, responsibilities, relationships, expectations. All of that shapes us. But often a deeper layer of our freedom, or lack of it, originates somewhere internal, in the places where we learned, without realizing it at the time, to narrow ourselves in order to belong, stay safe or maintain connection. These are called adaptations, and they can look like being agreeable, capable, strong, productive, easygoing, impressive, invisible when needed, or endlessly reliable. They weren’t random and made sense in the environments where they formed.
When I think about freedom psychologically, I don’t think about having no obligations. I think about having choice. Not surface level choice, but the deeper kind where you can actually feel yourself present in your own life instead of constantly monitoring or editing who you are in order to maintain a role. It’s the difference between participating in your life and performing inside it, if that makes sense.
I sometimes think about this the same way I think about art. When I’m painting, I can feel when something is overly controlled. My movement tightens or the lines lose their looseness. The piece starts to feel like it’s trying to be correct instead of alive. I notice my mind gets louder, and I’m less in a state of flow. The tightening starts internally first. You can feel it in your body, in the way your thoughts begin organizing themselves around who you think you should be rather than who you actually are. And once you notice that happening, it’s hard to unnotice it.
So when I ask where you are not free, what I’m really wondering is where you might be holding yourself inside a version that once protected you, but doesn’t quite fit anymore. Where you feel pressure to maintain an identity rather than inhabit the full range of who you are. Where you might be living according to expectations you never consciously chose, beliefs you absorbed before you had language to question them or rules you learned so early they feel like facts. Sometimes it shows up as control when allowing would feel more honest. Or judgment when curiosity would feel more true. Or a constant awareness of how you’re being perceived.
Most people don’t even realize they’re participating in these patterns because they were reinforced for years and often still are. The responsible one, the peacemaker, the achiever, the strong one, the good one, the helper, the one who holds everything together. These patterns aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They developed for real reasons and served real purposes. They helped you stay connected, protected, included, loved, accepted or valued.
Through an Internal Family Systems (IFS) lens, we might describe these as parts. Not your whole self, just aspects of you that learned how to step forward when something felt at risk. They’re strategies that became familiar because they worked. You can see these same parts show up in creative work too. There’s often a part that wants to get everything right before beginning, another that edits too soon, another that hesitates before making a mark because it doesn’t want to waste materials or look foolish or make something imperfect. Those parts can be helpful at times, but they can also limit expression when they take over the entire process. I know I’ve met these parts in myself more times than I can count in my art practice. The difficulty isn’t that these parts exist. The difficulty is when they become the only voice shaping how you see yourself and move through your life.
IFS talks about something underneath those parts, something more like the essence of who we actually are that isn’t organized around fear or performance. It’s often called the Self. I tend to think of it as your core presence rather than a role or identity you constructed to be accepted. This center is often described through what are known as the eight Cs: calm, curiosity, clarity, compassion, courage, confidence, creativity, and connection. When you’re moving from that place, there tends to be more space inside your experience, more flexibility, even when life is uncertain or demanding. It feels less like forcing and more like allowing. Less like gripping and more like participating.
So sometimes ask the question where am I not free alongside other ones. Where is that steadier center not leading right now? Where might an old protective pattern still be running automatically? Where might a familiar story still be repeating because it once helped you survive something? Where might you be living inside a role that fit you once but doesn’t actually reflect who you are anymore?
I don’t actually have this all figured out or anything else for that matter. I’m still learning and still sitting with the question. We’re complicated, we humans. For me, it feels a bit like a puzzle with more pieces than I can see at once, pieces I’m slowly turning over, shifting around, trying to understand how they fit.
xx,
Michel