Freedom Isn’t What You Think It Is

Or: What Shawshank, Survival, and the Voice in Your Head Can Teach You About Liberation)

Before we begin—know this: This isn’t a piece about breaking free. It’s a piece about learning how to stay. Because:

🜂 Freedom isn’t the absence of constraint.

It’s the capacity to stay—with yourself, in your body, when rupture arrives.

🜁 Survival strategies aren’t moral failures.

They’re evidence of your nervous system’s intelligence.

They helped you belong, breathe, and survive.

🜃 But intelligence alone isn’t enough.

Real transformation requires somatic willingness—to feel what you’ve avoided, to move through what you’ve feared, without flinching or fleeing.

You’ll recognize them—not as theory, but as truth.

And if you’ve ever wondered why healing hasn’t worked the way you hoped—this may be why.

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There’s a scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy Dufresne — played by Tim Robbins— imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, closes his eyes and leans back against the wall as music plays over the prison loudspeakers. For just a few minutes, he gives his fellow inmates something they haven’t tasted in years: a moment of transcendence.

But what makes that scene unforgettable isn’t the beauty of the music.

It’s what it costs.

Andy pays dearly for that moment—solitary confinement, more punishment, more time.

And still, he plays Sull’aria.

He chooses the risk.

But here’s the deeper truth:

Freedom isn’t just about external systems.

It’s about the ones we carry in our bodies.

Our attachment patterns—how we learned to connect, retreat, perform, or please—shape our relationship to freedom.

If love once meant proving your worth, then freedom can feel like abandonment.

If conflict meant rupture, then commitment can feel like captivity.

And so we stall.

We sabotage.

We stay near the exit.

Not because we don’t want freedom—

but because some part of us still believes that freedom and connection cannot coexist.

True freedom isn’t loud.

It’s not a bumper sticker.

It’s not a platform.

It’s that quiet, electric moment in the nervous system when something in you says:

Even if I lose something, I won’t betray myself right now.

But here’s the paradox:

The closer we get to freedom, the more terrifying it becomes.

We think freedom will bring us security, happiness, maybe even peace.

And sometimes, it does.

Until it asks us to live without the very structures that once kept us intact—

The Adderall. The wine. The hustle. The persona. The heavily curated brand. The endless masks.

Until it whispers:

You can leave the prison now.

And suddenly, we’re not so sure.

Because there’s a risk—not to the outside world, but to our internal system of regulation.

For many of us, the cage isn’t just confinement.

It’s familiarity.

It’s protection.

It’s scaffolding built from pain—but pain we knew how to carry.

And our internal regulators will do anything to keep us safe, even if it keeps us tied to that pain.

In one of the most revealing moments of The Shawshank Redemption, Red—played by Morgan Freeman—sits once again before the parole board.

He’s been here before.

But this final time, something in him has shifted.

He tells the board that he’s been institutionalized.

Not because he loves prison.

But because prison makes sense.

It protects him.

It holds shape.

And while he doesn’t name it in those words, what he’s describing is a nervous system that feels safer inside the cage than outside it.

Because inside, the rules are clear.

Your place is known.

You matter, in a way.

You are part of a structure.

Outside those walls?

He’s just “an old crook.”

A man the world has moved past.

Not needed. Not seen. Not sure.

“These walls are funny… First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.”

That line isn’t just about prison. It’s about all of it:

The coping strategies.

The roles we rehearse.

The identities built around pain.

The addictions that help us stay one breath ahead of collapse.

We all think we know who we are—

Until reality tests the story.

Until our freedom is threatened.

Until something in us comes online through awareness.

We say things like:

“I’d never betray my values.”

“I’d always speak the truth.”

“I’d fight for the freedoms of others as much as for myself.”

But that’s the language of comfort.

When the stakes are low, we all sound noble.

It’s when power, status, belonging, or control are on the line that our real values surface—

Not the ones we aspire to,

but the ones we operate from when we’re afraid.

Remember:

The subconscious has one job—self-protection at any cost.

We imagine ourselves as Andy—the idealist, the optimist.

Calm. Focused. Principled. Free.

But we forget about Red—the pragmatist.

The one who knows foreboding joy.

The one who doesn’t stray too far outside of safety.

We forget about the man who, after decades inside a system that told him what to eat, where to go, and who to be, steps outside…

And can’t breathe.

Because “freedom” isn’t always liberation.

Sometimes, it’s just the absence of what once gave your pain its edges.

And in that absence, we feel the void.

The ambiguity.

The nothingness our nervous systems were trained to fear.

So let’s stop pretending that survival strategies are moral failures.

They’re not.

They’re brilliant safety nets—crafted by the inner child when the world felt too complex, too conditional, too unsafe.

Let’s stop reducing addiction, performance, perfectionism, and avoidance to flaws.

They’re not evidence of weakness.

They’re evidence of adaptation.

Think about the child who learned that a caretaker’s presence—though consistent—was laced with control.

That love was conditional.

That promises didn’t hold.

That connection came wrapped in emotional monopolization and sharpened words.

Of course, you adapted.

Adderall may have helped you stay one hour longer in a system that never understood your brain.

Weed may have softened the edges of memories too jagged to hold sober.

Polish—or perfection—may have given you permission to show up when rawness felt like too much.

Yes, we want to heal.

Yes, we want to let go.

But before we dismantle the scaffolding—

Let’s thank it.

Because it held us when nothing else did.

All of this makes me contemplate this emotionally loaded word:

Freedom.

What if freedom isn’t escape?

What if it’s not a void, or a breaking, or the absence of structure?

What if freedom is simply this:

The capacity to stay when relational ruptures find us.

To stay present when discomfort rises.

To stay visible when old shame flickers.

To stay embodied when the story tries to pull you back in.

Not because you’re forcing yourself.

You can’t hack or out-think your body into safety.

But because something inside you is strong enough, soft enough, resourced enough… to hold the moment without abandoning yourself inside it.

That’s interoception—the quiet capacity to track what’s happening within.

Not just what you think.

But what you feel.

What tightens. What softens. What signals now is not then.

That kind of freedom doesn’t scream.

It doesn’t post.

It doesn’t need to be performed.

It’s quiet.

It’s internal.

It’s sovereign.

The context of our pain matters.

It explains. But it doesn’t excuse the parts of us that now choose to stay unseen.

We don’t erase the context.

We build from it—until staying becomes safer than disappearing.