The Underlying Terror of Autonomy

In the last few weeks I’ve had a handful of conversations with friends, and an ongoing one with my son, that have all echoed each other in ways I’m still sitting with. Different people, different situations, same wall hit at the same place.

We were all talking about autonomy. About making real choices. About being honest with ourselves. And what kept coming up wasn’t excitement about freedom. It was fear, anger, and paralysis. The kind of feelings that sneak under our skin when we realize we’ve never actually chosen who we are, only performed the version of ourselves we had learned to play.

I’ve been thinking about autonomy for years. I’ve built my whole practice around it. I always assumed that the idea of getting to know yourself, of making choices from your own truth, was something everyone wanted to have. The deeper relationships, stronger bonds, and more enjoyable life are things everyone is seeking…but they take time to come around, and it’s that time in between, the unknown, that can be paralyzing.

What I’ve been hearing lately, and what I’ve watched my son work through over the years he’s been my son, is that the path to autonomy starts with something that feels much more like terror than freedom.

We are taught to be caricatures from the time we’re children. In a family with more than one child, there’s often “the smart one,” “the social one,” “the shy one.” We do something one day as a small person, and the people around us tell us that’s who we are. So we build on it. By the time we’re adults, we’ve spent decades performing a role we were assigned before we even had the opportunity to get to know who we were.

And the same thing happens with trauma, only sharper. A child who learns about abandonment learns to perform unworthiness. A child who learns about abuse learns to perform vigilance. A child who is bullied through grade school learns to perform self-protection. These aren’t choices. They’re survival, and they work. They keep us safe in the world we were given.

The problem is that survival so easily becomes identity. The wariness, the readiness for the next threat, the “don’t trip my triggers” mentality, all of these become the way we recognize ourselves, value ourselves. They become a crutch that we don’t even realize we’re leaning on.

Imagine someone who was bullied all through school. The pain and fear, the things learned to stay as safe as possible, to maintain sanity, to get through it. Now imagine that same person at fifty or sixty, still holding onto that pain. Ten percent of it is valid. They were formed by those years. They learned their self-protective behaviors and their deep fears of not being good enough because of what happened to them. The pain is real. So is what it cost them.

They go to therapy. A good therapist. They’re able to name why they’re anxious in all of their relationships. They find their anger, their indignation at having their childhood stripped from them. The therapist starts guiding them toward release, not necessarily in the form of forgiveness, maybe just indifference…neutrality. Toward seeing how they could take their choices back now, as a competent and capable adult.

And then they stop coming to therapy.

Not because they didn’t want the freedom. Not because the therapist was wrong. Because somewhere underneath the conscious work, a quieter fear had emerged. If I release this anger, if I stop being the person who was bullied, who will I be?

That’s the wall. Not the diagnosis. Not the understanding of why we became who we are. The wall is what comes after, when we have to decide whether to release the protective identity we’ve been building since childhood. Because what’s on the other side isn’t a more confident version of the same person. It’s a complete unknown. Sometimes the idea of releasing that part of ourselves, whether it’s always being “the social one” or the deep pain of childhood trauma, feels too scary to even consider, so our subconscious shuts it down…hard. Often telling you “I can’t do this, and anyone who asks me to doesn’t truly care about me at all.”

This is where I think conventional therapy often gets blamed unfairly. It’s not that therapists don’t want to support people through the release work. It’s that most people, understandably, walk away when they’re faced with doing it. Understanding our wounds is bearable. Releasing the identity built around them is terrifying. Most of us aren’t actually afraid of getting better. We’re afraid of becoming someone we don’t know how to be.

I have watched my son work through this. Not all at once. Not dramatically. He came to a moment of grief, and then a big exhale. It wasn’t as dramatic as he thought it would be. The hardest part for him, and I would guess for most people, was the first step. That first moment of accepting that the anger toward his birth parents wasn’t improving his quality of life. That sounds so logical and easy when you say it. In reality, it can be the hardest thing.

It’s like breaking up with an old friend. That friend is toxic for you, and you know it, but they’ve been with you for as long as you can remember, and you have no idea how life will look without them present every day. You can list every way they hurt you. You can be intellectually convinced you’d be better off. And still, the thought of an ordinary morning without their voice in your head feels somehow unbearable.

Once you make it past that step, the rest is often anticlimactic. It’s subtle changes. Confidence in your own boundaries, because you set them with intention rather than as defense. Space that was once filled with self-protective anger or fear or sadness opens up for new things to fill it in. You don’t become a different person. You become a version of yourself you’ve never had room to meet before.

This is the work my practice is built around. Whether someone comes to me as a death doula client navigating the final months of their life, or as a grief client trying to grieve in their own way instead of the way other people expect, or as a sexual embodiment client trying to figure out what they actually want from intimacy, or as a Tantric Reiki client letting energy move through them without direction, all of it depends on the same threshold. You have to be willing to release the version of yourself that’s been keeping you safe, before you have a clear picture of who’s underneath.

I can’t make that step easier. Nobody can. What I can do is be in the room while you take it. Not as the person who tells you who to become. As the person who doesn’t flinch while you find out for yourself.

That’s what autonomy actually is. Not the freedom to choose. The willingness to release the version of yourself that was choosing for you.