ESSAY SERIES
The Psychology of Freedom
Captivity, Conditioning, Healing and Liberation
By Kemi C. Amusan
Charminine.com
ESSAY TWO
Internalized Captivity
From Repetition to Instinct
What we meet repeatedly becomes easier to recognise, anticipate, and answer. Social life works the same way. A child who keeps seeing authority attached to certain faces starts to link those faces with authority, and the one who keeps seeing certain people obey starts to link them with obedience. Wealth, beauty, intelligence, leadership, danger, incompetence: when these keep showing up attached to particular groups, expectations form around them.
At first these are just observations. Then they harden into assumptions. In time they become instincts, because repetition has made them familiar enough to feel self-evident.
Thus, hierarchy survives after the rules behind it have changed. An institution can declare that everyone is equal while its members go on handing out credibility and belonging along the old lines. They find certain candidates “suitable,” certain voices authoritative, certain people out of place, and they could not tell you why.
Nobody has to give an order. The conditioning has already done the work. Experience becomes expectation, and expectation, backed by the fear of consequences, becomes instinct. Those instincts then set the edges of what a person believes is possible for themselves and for others. What started as an outside demand turns into an inside expectation, and it often runs without anyone having agreed to it.
The system does not need to silence you if you have learned to silence yourself. It does not need to hide you if you have learned that being seen is dangerous. It does not need to remind you of your place if you worked out where it was before you moved. Anticipating the cost is enough to control behaviour.
Someone may come to feel that they would simply rather not speak up, lead, challenge, ask, or try, without ever noticing that this preference grew in a place where doing those things kept costing them. Over time, limits imposed from outside get filed as personal taste. You stop feeling blocked and start feeling that the thing itself is unappealing, improper, or beyond you. The boundary has moved from the environment into the self.
Think of the chained elephant, or the dogs in Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness experiments. Even when the constraint is removed entirely, the conditioned response stays.
The Difference Between Position and Worth
None of this means power is the problem. Every society needs differences in authority, expertise, and responsibility. A difference in position is not automatically oppression, and deferring to someone is not diminishment. Holding authority also does not make a person smarter, more deserving, or more valuable than the people who answer to them.
However, the injury begins when a lower position keeps teaching a person that they are inferior, less intelligent, less legitimate, or less deserving of consideration. And at the other end, it begins when someone whose opinions are consistently put first, whose mistakes are forgiven, and whose presence is never questioned can start reading all that accommodation as proof of natural superiority.
Both have turned a difference in position into a verdict on human worth. One learns to doubt their right to take up space. The other learns that the space is theirs, perhaps theirs alone.
The subordinate learns to monitor themselves. The dominant learns that the room will usually bend toward them. The subordinate asks, How will I be received? The dominant never frames it as a question at all and simply assumes, Of course I belong here.
A person who has spent years being scrutinised learns to prove their competence before offering an opinion, justify themselves before making a request, and answer objections before presenting an idea. Whereas the one whose belonging has always been confirmed can walk into an unfamiliar room without checking whether they have the right to be there. They can disagree without feeling their legitimacy is on trial. They can make a mistake without assuming it will become a permanent judgment of their ability.
More cruelly, the behaviours that result get misread. One person’s ease looks like capability, and another person’s caution looks like weakness. The subordinate expects to be scrutinised, so they may seem hesitant, less ambitious, careful about every risk. The dominant person takes risks freely and looks driven and naturally authoritative. Onlookers see the difference in behaviour and conclude the original difference was natural, without ever looking at where each person started.
The Performance Tax and Double Consciousness
An internalised hierarchy also adds the burden of predicting and managing how other people will interpret you.
- E. B. Du Bois called this double consciousness, the habit of seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that regards you with suspicion, contempt, or low expectations, and of measuring yourself against standards that were never built to recognise your full humanity.
Before a black professional walking into a meeting has said a word, she is already running the numbers. If she speaks first, will it read as aggressive? Can she challenge an idea without the disagreement being logged as hostility? If she shows frustration, will someone reach for the word angry? Should she soften that sentence once more, smile a little wider, explain herself more carefully than the point needs?
This second job runs underneath the first. She is never just doing her work. She is also managing someone else’s reading of her. The tax is paid in attention, emotional energy, and time, and in the constant adjusting of behaviour to meet expectations other people may never have to think about.
She watches her tone, posture, volume, clothes, facial expression, and how much confidence she lets herself show. She apologises before anyone has accused her of anything. She turns a clear instruction into a request. She plays down her own accomplishments so she won’t seem boastful. Each adjustment looks small. Added together, they weigh a great deal.
The white colleague in the same meeting may carry none of it. His disagreement is read as confidence, his frustration as passion, his assertiveness as leadership. His presence never needs explaining. This does not happen in every interaction, and no two people in a marginalised group experience it identically. But the same behaviour can be interpreted very differently depending on who is doing it. He can put his full attention on solving the problem. She has to solve it while also checking whether her way of solving it will be accepted.
The quieter form of this conditioning is walking into a room already calculating how much space you are allowed and how to keep everyone comfortable enough that you can stay. Other people’s comfort moves ahead of your own. You fine-tune your timing, your language, your expressions, the exact version of yourself that creates the least resistance.
This code-switching can stretch well beyond speech, into voice, ambition, mannerisms, posture, humour, emotional expression, and even the level of confidence that seems safe to show. And even when the person consciously believes they are free to relax, underneath all of it, the nervous system keeps asking one question: Am I safe to be myself here?
Ironically, while a person can be hypervisible when their body is treated as a source of suspicion, they become overlooked as a person with their own intentions, abilities and feelings when their individual humanity disappears behind the category attached to them and only get noticed as a representative of a group.
The hierarchy gets this labour out of people without ever formally assigning it. Managing other people’s perceptions becomes part of the price of taking part.
Meanwhile the dominant self can get so used to being deferred to, believed, centred, protected, and assumed competent that none of it feels like an advantage anymore. It just feels like life.
When that arrangement shifts, and someone else asks for the same space or the hierarchy behind a person’s position gets questioned, it can thus feel like an attack. A playing field that always felt neutral suddenly looks like it has been rigged against them. Being asked to share authority feels like losing it. Being asked to reconsider assumptions feels like being accused of personal failure.
Once the advantage has become invisible, equality starts to look like discrimination.
When Survival Becomes Personality
Eventually, behaviour that began as survival turns into identity. A response to scarcity gets read as a lack of ambition.
The child who learns that speaking up brings punishment is described as naturally quiet. The woman who learns to apologise to ease tension is called conflict-averse. The Black professional who keeps softening her tone to avoid a bad reaction is labelled unassertive and not leadership material. The child from a poor family who learns not to ask for things, because asking always met with embarrassment or refusal, may stop recognising desire as something they are allowed to voice.
These people may sincerely believe they are describing who they are. They may never ask under what conditions the behaviour first became useful, or what they had to become in order to belong, or how an outside expectation got absorbed into their sense of self.
The environment shapes the behaviour, the behaviour becomes familiar, and the familiarity becomes identity. That identity then seems to confirm the very assumptions that shaped it. And once a behaviour has been reclassified as personality or identity, the system that produced it is much harder to challenge.
The Cost of the Performance
Every time the self is muted to protect the room’s comfort, the room learns what to expect. People start to overlook you while counting on you to accommodate. And because you never voice your dissatisfaction, they assume you have none.
The pattern then looks like proof of the original conditioning. The person is overlooked because they learned not to draw attention. They are given less authority because they learned to hesitate. Their needs go unmet because they have become skilled at hiding them.
Meanwhile, the mind keeps a running ledger of everything that could have been said and wasn’t. Anxiety grows. Relationships thin out, because intimacy needs presence, and presence is hard for someone who has learned to ration their own expression.
It hurts most when the traits being suppressed are exactly the ones the environment needs. The clear voice is leadership waiting for a task. The anger held back might have drawn the boundary that kept a life from fraying. The ambition kept small to avoid seeming threatening might have built something valuable. The desire dismissed as unreasonable might have pointed toward a better life.
Shame, Fear, and the Loop Between Them
When a girl growing up in a colourist society, notices which girls get praised, which brides get admired, which faces appear in advertisements, which features are called beautiful, the message builds through repetition until it becomes a yardstick she holds against herself. She may even forget when the measuring started. In the gap between who she is and who she was taught to admire, shame takes root.
And when she starts asking for equal treatment, a child at the other end of the track, one whose whole sense of worth has been built on being admired, can feel the order that gave her value coming under challenge.
Hence, we have the two core emotions sitting at the core centre of conditioning – fear and shame.
Fear shows up dressed as an argument about standards, merit, tradition, or personal responsibility. Underneath the argument is an older, less conscious calculation: If the hierarchy disappears, where does that leave me? It asks, What will happen if I don’t comply? Shame asks, What is wrong with me for not wanting to?
Fear steers behaviour through expected consequences. Shame makes the wish for autonomy itself look like a defect, until the person polices themselves and nobody else has to.
Shame tells the subordinate, You are not enough. Fear tells the dominant, If they rise, you may fall.
Shame pushes down and produces withdrawal, overperformance, silence, apology, perfectionism, and invisibility. Fear pushes outward and produces defensiveness, resentment, exclusion, policing, and resistance to sharing anything. The emotions differ. The architecture is the same. Between them, they hold the structure up from both sides.
The two also feed each other. The subordinate expects punishment and becomes cautious. The dominant reads that caution as low confidence, ambition, or competence, and trusts the original judgment more. The subordinate senses the judgment and becomes more cautious still.
The loop runs the other way too. A dominant person expects a group to be threatening and meets them with suspicion. The group feels it and gets defensive. That defensiveness is then taken as proof the suspicion was justified.
Hence, the self-fulfilling prophecy: a system that produces the very behaviour it later cites as evidence for itself. And then someone shrugs and says, “Well, it’s always the usual suspects.”
The Vocabulary Changes, the Roles Don’t
As old forms of domination become socially unacceptable, the same pattern moves into new words.
Inferiority becomes “culture fit.” Exclusion becomes “selectivity.” Suspicion becomes “risk management.” Privilege becomes “merit.” Deference becomes “professionalism.” Silence becomes “emotional intelligence.” Resistance becomes “ingratitude.”
So conditioning outlives the law. A law can tell people what they may no longer do. It cannot immediately wipe out their associations, make unfamiliar people feel familiar, or teach them to spot the assumptions hiding inside their own instincts.
And even when no single member ever meant to keep it, institutions reproduce hierarchies. A company keeps hiring people who resemble its current leaders and decides they are simply the best cultural fit. A university rewards one style of speech and calls the people who use it more intellectually confident. A promotion system rewards visibility and self-promotion, then concludes that the most visible people are the natural leaders.
Nobody has to decide that the system should stay unequal. The existing arrangement supplies the criteria, the criteria shape the decisions, and the decisions reproduce the arrangement.
An institution can seat different people at the table and keep the same rules about who gets heard. It can promote women into leadership and still reward traditionally masculine behaviour. It can hire Black professionals and still expect them to perform whiteness to be seen as polished.
The faces change. The psychological architecture underneath stays where it was.
For that reason, conditioning is not only a private problem to be solved by looking inward. People learn through institutions, and institutions reproduce whatever they reward. Someone can work hard at questioning their own assumptions while living inside an environment that reinforces them. Someone else can learn to trust their own judgment and then meet systems that keep penalising their independence. Thus, representation alone may not break this cycle.
The environment has to change alongside the individual. Otherwise, people are being asked to unlearn a lesson while still living in the conditions that teach it.
To understand conditioning is to see that the social order lives in more than laws, rules, and institutional structures. It also lives in the instincts people have picked up, the roles they have learned to play, the limits they have mistaken for personality, and the judgments they have come to call common sense.
The hierarchy is reproduced each time a learned expectation slips unexamined into another decision, another relationship, or another generation. It continues whenever people mistake adaptation for identity and inherited advantage for inherent worth.
So beyond the subject of abolishing the old rules, the more important question is whether the assumptions those rules cultivated still govern how people see themselves, read one another, and share out the freedom to act.
Until those assumptions are examined, the hierarchy can outlive its original commands. It can run on instinct, renew itself through ordinary decisions, and pass from one generation to the next as though it were simply how the world works.