Safety, reinforcement, and rigidity
Last weekend I watched Mayday, the new Apple TV film with Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. Reynolds plays an American Navy pilot shot down over Soviet territory in 1987. Branagh plays a retired KGB officer who finds him in the woods and decides to help him get home. It is a fun movie and somewhere in the middle of it the two men begin to understand they have spent their entire lives being lied to about each other’s countries.
That idea has stayed with me longer than the rest of the film did. Both men had been handed a picture of the world by the country they were born into, and both had carried that picture for decades without much reason to examine it. That has nothing to do with intelligence or character. They had been formed by systems with no interest in showing them anything else.
I bring it up because I catch myself doing the same thing more often than I would like to admit. A professor I had in my master’s program used to say that humans are terrible self-assessors, every single one of us. I think about that line constantly, usually right after I notice that I have been talking down to someone I disagree with. The impulse to see clearly what someone else cannot see sits very close to the impulse that keeps a person from ever seeing themselves.
Whatever picture of the world you are carrying, you did not choose most of it. It was installed early, before you had any capacity to evaluate it, by people who were trying to keep you alive.
Caregivers teach children what to fear, and that teaching is mostly wordless. It comes through a face that tightens when a certain subject comes up, a tone that shifts when a certain group of people gets mentioned, a body that goes still in a way the child registers without understanding why. The same machinery that taught you to stay away from the hot stove also taught you which political party is dangerous, which religion is wrong, which kind of person to be careful around, and what happens to people who ask too many questions. All of it went in at the same level, and none of it arrived with a label separating the survival information from the worldview information. This is why challenging someone’s framework rarely produces an actual conversation. You think you are questioning an idea. Their body registers a threat to their entire existence.
What childhood installs, culture confirms. Somewhere in the late teens a person leaves home and starts choosing their own environments, and the choosing is never neutral. They select the friends, the media, the workplaces, the churches, and the neighborhoods that already match the picture they are carrying, and every one of those choices sends back the same signal. You were right. The confirmation feels like the world agreeing with them. Twenty or thirty years of this and the picture has become the lens they look through, which means it has become invisible.
Robert Kegan’s work on adult development names the mechanism here. A person cannot evaluate a framework they are embedded in, because from inside it, the framework is the thing doing the examining rather than something they can hold and look at. Some separation has to happen first. Something has to pull them far enough outside the system that they can turn around and look at it.
Life offers that separation more often than we tend to think. It arrives as an illness the framework can’t explain, or a child who turns out to be someone the framework said shouldn’t exist, or a friend who reveals something that doesn’t fit, or a job that ends and takes an identity along with it. These openings come for everyone. Nobody goes an entire life without being handed an exit door.
What separates the people who never arrive is what happens at that door. They look at it, and then they decline. Every time. The invitation to consider that things might be otherwise shows up, gets refused, and then shows up again a few years later in a different form and gets refused again.
After enough refusals, something hardens. The person begins to experience themselves as someone who knows how things are rather than someone who holds positions, and there is nothing left to ask, because from the inside all the questions have already been answered. Erich Fromm described what happens when a structure like this gets challenged. The challenge registers as a threat to the person’s sanity rather than as a disagreement about ideas. That is why the conversation you keep trying to have goes the way it goes. You are offering information. They are defending their existence.
What has happened by then is a sequence. Safety came first, laid down in childhood by people who were trying to protect them. Reinforcement came second, gathered across decades of choosing environments that sent the same signal back. Rigidity is what those two produce when nothing ever interrupts them.
From the outside you can watch it operate. The news goes on at the same hour every day and says roughly what it said yesterday. The weekly gathering, whatever form it takes, repeats what it said last week. Invitations that would require any real discomfort get declined, along with the conversations that might introduce a different view, on the grounds that there is nothing to be gained from either one. The person has stopped putting their own thinking under any pressure at all, because underneath it sits a logic that feels airtight. I reached this conclusion years ago, I am a reasonable person, and so the conclusion must be sound. The reasoning has become its own evidence.
This works the same way regardless of which direction a framework happens to point. Certainty replaces curiosity, then rigidity takes hold.
The cost of all this lands on everyone around them.
The people who love someone in this condition eventually stop bringing them anything real. It happens gradually. You share something that matters to you and it gets dismissed, or corrected, or turned into a lecture. You try again a year later with something smaller and it gets the same treatment. Eventually you learn which topics are available and you stay inside them, and what used to be a relationship becomes a performance of one. You still show up, you still call on birthdays, but the free flow between you stopped a long time ago and all that’s left is tolerance.
If you are the person who stopped trying, you may be carrying guilt about it. Most people in your position are. There is a story running underneath that says loving someone means never giving up on reaching them, and that your withdrawal is a failure of love.
Your withdrawal is an accurate response to what is actually available. You stopped bringing real things to someone who couldn’t receive them, and you stopped because continuing to do it was costing you something and changing nothing. Calling that a failure of love has it backwards. You recognized what the relationship could actually hold, and you stopped asking it for more.
The energy you have been spending on trying to change them is yours to reclaim. Every conversation you have rehearsed in your head, every article you have wanted to send, every holiday you have spent bracing for the moment when it goes sideways, all of that is energy that belongs back in your own life. You can’t think another person across a threshold. You never could. The only framework you have any real access to is your own.
You can love someone whose world you can no longer enter. You can enjoy the parts of them that are still available, which are often more than you expect once you stop testing for the parts that are not, and you can let them be who they are without needing them to become someone else in order for the relationship to matter.
The pilot in the Mayday film had further to travel than the man who rescued him. He started out unable to trust the person who was keeping him alive, and he got there because he had no other way home.
You are embedded in something too. Whatever framework you are carrying right now has its own blind spots, and there is someone in your life who can see them more clearly than you can. Humans are terrible self-assessors, every single one of us. The difference between the person who arrives and the person who never does comes down to what they do when life brings them to a door.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Individuation Begins With Safety
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
