The Fear Of Being Free

Why does freedom feel unsafe, overwhelming, or empty after you finally leave the job, relationship, role, or identity that once trapped you?

In this episode of Walk With Me, I explore the psychological weight of freedom through the lens of Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and the Walk With Me Method. As a chiropractor, Identity and Internal architecture coach, public speaker, and creator of the Walk With Me internal architecture framework, I break down why people often say they want freedom, but unconsciously run from the responsibility, uncertainty, grief, and identity collapse that real freedom brings.

This episode is for anyone who has ever left a toxic job, relationship, belief system, family role, or old version of themselves, only to feel strangely lost afterward. You may have escaped the structure that confined you, but that structure may also have given you certainty. Without a strong internal architecture, freedom can feel less like liberation and more like standing in an open field with no map, no walls, no instructions, and no one left to blame.

I explore the difference between negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from control, rules, oppression, or old identities. Positive freedom is freedom to create, love, choose, build, and live from the inside out. The problem is that many people fight to be free from something without knowing who they are free for.

This walk also breaks down three ways people escape freedom: submission, destructiveness, and conformity. Submission is giving your identity to a person, group, ideology, relationship, role, or leader who promises certainty. Destructiveness is trying to destroy what makes you feel powerless, including opportunities, relationships, dreams, or parts of yourself. Conformity is becoming whatever the room, culture, platform, or system rewards until borrowed thoughts start to feel like your own.

Through the 8 pillars of the Walk With Me Method: Awareness, The Mind, Identity, The Nervous System, Emotions, Capacity, Behavior, and Meaning, I explain why freedom is not only a political or external condition. Freedom is an internal capacity. You can have options and still not be free. You can have money and still be chained to success. You can leave the old environment and still carry the same internal architecture.

In this episode, you’ll explore:

• Why freedom can feel unsafe after leaving an old structure
• The difference between negative freedom and positive freedom
• How Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom applies to modern anxiety, identity, and self-improvement
• The three ways people escape freedom: submission, destructiveness, and conformity
• Why people recreate the same prison after leaving the old one
• Why freedom requires awareness, nervous system regulation, emotional capacity, behavior, and meaning
• How the 8 pillars help you build the internal architecture to hold freedom
• Why real freedom is not just “doing whatever you want”
• How to stop outsourcing your identity and become internally directed

This episode challenges the fantasy that freedom means no limits, no responsibility, and no structure. Real freedom is the ability to choose consciously, stand in your own body, think your own thoughts, feel your emotions, belong without disappearing, love without submitting, disagree without destroying, succeed without becoming a product, and be alone without abandoning yourself.

The question for this walk is simple:

Where do you escape freedom?

Do you submit to a role, relationship, ideology, group, or authority so you do not have to stand alone? Do you destroy opportunities, relationships, or dreams before they can expose you? Do you conform so well that the life you built to be accepted starts looking like the life you actually wanted?

If that question hits something, do not shame yourself. Study it.

The part of you that escapes freedom is not evil. It is afraid. It is trying to find safety, belonging, and a structure strong enough to hold uncertainty. But what if the structure you are looking for is not another person, ideology, achievement, role, or group to disappear into?

What if the structure is you?

Follow Walk With Me for new episodes every Monday morning at 3:00 AM Eastern Time. Leave a review, share where you are listening from, and send this episode to someone who is ready to stop performing freedom and start building the internal architecture to actually live it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Walk with me. Because you can't change your life until you understand the virgin of you creating it. This is a space for honest conversations about the systems, patterns, and beliefs quietly shaping your life. America! America! America! Fuck yeah! We just celebrated 4th of July. Freedom, and freedom has been on my mind. Not freedom as a slogan, not freedom as a flag, not freedom as nobody can tell me what to do. Maybe a little bit of Mel Gibson and Braveheart kind of freedom. But what I really mean is the real psychological weight of freedom. Most people say they want freedom to be free from the job that drains them, free from the relationship that suffocates them, free from the expectations, free from the family role, free from the identity they pigeon pigeonhole themselves in, free from the system that keeps telling them who they have to become in order to be valuable. And I think about what happens when you finally get some of that freedom. The feeling of liberation suddenly turns into feeling lost. What happens when no one is telling you who to be anymore? What to say, how to feel, what to do? And now you have to decide. What happens when the structure you hated was also the structure that made you feel safe? Take a walk with me. If you want to stop performing growth and start understanding the system currently creating your reality, click the like button and subscribe to start challenging your own matrix. I think this is one of the most uncomfortable truths about human beings. Don't we all like to believe we're running toward freedom? I'm running up the hill. But how quickly do we run from it? There was a thinker named Eric Fromm, a great philosopher, who wrote about this idea in a book called Escape from Freedom. And the basic idea is this: human beings fought for freedom. We fought to be free from oppressive systems, dogma, control, class systems, and structures and religious authority, social roles, and all the things that told people exactly where they belonged. And when those structures began to break down, something else happened. People were freer, but at what cost? Now, more than ever, we are connected to people's lives, but never more alone than now. You don't have to look far for someone to tell you you're more responsible for your life than ever. Responsible for your future. And with that comes more uncertainty. You are thoroughly exposed. You are so used to the old world telling you who you are, and that can be oppressive, but how strangely comforting. You may not have freedom, but you have certainty. You know your place, you know your role, you know what is expected, you know what the rules are. But when those rules disappear, now you're faced with a much heavier question. Who am I? What do I believe? What do I choose? Where do I belong? What is my life actually for? This fantasy of freedom starts becoming your favorite role play and starts becoming a weight. You're trying to drop after your closest authoritarian dealership. Take me back, master. Here's your look, look 3000. Freedom is responsibility. Freedom is uncertainty. Freedom is the weight of choice. Freedom is standing in the open space between who you were told to be and who you now have to become. And not everyone has the internal architecture to hold that. I'm not insulting you, that's just the human condition. When you do not have the awareness, identity, nervous system regulation, emotional capacity, behavior, and meeting to stand in freedom, you will search for something else to hold you, caress you, tell you everything is going to be okay, change your diaper, warm up some milk, and sing you a lullaby to sleep. From called this negative freedom versus positive freedom. And negative freedom is freedom from the freedom from control, freedom from rules, freedom from the old identity, freedom from the thing that had you trapped, as you would like to say. Positive freedom is different. Positive freedom is the freedom to, the freedom to create, the freedom to love, the freedom to choose, freedom to build, freedom to become, the freedom to live from the inside out instead of being organized by the outside world. And this is where most people slam the brakes. You fight to be free from something, but you do not know who you are free for. When you do not know what you are free for, freedom can feel a bit uncomfortable and dangerous. It can feel like emptiness. It can feel like standing in the middle of an open field with no map, no walls, no instructions. Choose a direction and go. And with that, there's no one to blame. What happens then? You leave one prison and immediately build another one. You leave one controlling relationship and find another controlling relationship. You leave the job you hate and go somewhere else and recreate the same dynamic. You leave the family role, but still carry the family identity. You leave the old belief system, but find another rigid ideology to belong to. You say you want freedom, but what you really want is relief. You want relief from the uncertainty, relief from responsibility, relief from the terrifying question of who am I now? When that question feels too big, you escape. There's three ways that people escape from freedom, according to this book. The first is submission. This is when your sense of self feels too small, too uncertain, too overwhelmed, so it fuses with something that feels bigger: a leader, a group, a belief system, a relationship, a role, a guru, a strong personality, a tribe. Come to me. Do not worry. I will tell you who you are, I will tell you what to think. I will tell you who the enemy is. I will tell you where you belong. Ah, what a relief to hear that. For a second, I thought I was gonna have to figure that out on my own. There is relief in not having to stand alone. There is relief in not having to think deeply. There is relief in handing your own uncertainty to someone who speaks with absolute confidence. But the cost is your selfhood, your agency. Suddenly you stop asking, is this true? And you start asking, is this what I need to believe to fit in? You stop asking, is this aligned with me? You start asking, is this a good place for me to hide and feel safe? You stop living from your own internal architecture and start outsourcing your identity. The second escape is destructiveness. This is when the world feels too threatening, too overwhelming, too humiliating, too uncertain. And instead of building your own capacity, you try to destroy what makes you feel powerless. Destroy the person who disagrees. Destroy the group that feels different. Destroy the opportunity before it can reject you. Destroy the relationship before it can abandon you. Destroy the dream before it exposes you. This doesn't always look like violence. Sometimes it looks like the self-sabotage. It looks like burning bridges. Sometimes it looks like cynicism. It can look like rage. The crazy shit about this is sometimes it's like mocking the thing you secretly want. Because wanting it would make you more vulnerable. The third escape is conformity. The sneaky one. The one I have to check myself for. And for those who mask really well, my fellow ADHD people know this. This one doesn't always look like fear. It can look like success as well. It can look like being polished. It can look like being marketable. It can look like having the right opinions, the right clothes, the right brand, the right language, the right lifestyle, the right personality for whatever room you are trying to survive in. This is where it becomes where someone becomes a social chameleon. They do not necessarily submit to one dictator. They submit to the atmosphere. They become whatever gets approved, whatever gets liked, gets rewarded, gets them belonging. Whatever keeps them from standing out too much. What becomes dangerous and the insidious apart is that eventually they think those borrowed thoughts are their own. They think those borrowed desires are their own. They think the life they built to be accepted is the same thing as the life they actually wanted. But underneath it all, you're still asking, where did I go? That's why I believe this conversation matters. Escape from freedom doesn't only happen in politics. I do not think it only happens in history books. I think it happens every day in life. It happens when you stay in a role because you do not know who you would be without it. It happens when you keep performing strength because being honest about your exhaustion would disrupt the identity everyone depends on. It happens when you keep chasing achievements because stillness would force you to feel the emptiness underneath your performance. It happens when you adopt the language of healing, growth, success, masculinity, femininity, spirituality, or ambition without asking whether any of it actually belongs to you. It happens when you say, This is just who I am, when really it is who you became to survive. And that is where the eight pillars come in. Freedom is not just a political condition or a socio-economic factor. Freedom is internal capacity. That's why you can have options and still not be free. You can have money and be chained to your success. You can have a platform on a foundation built on sand. You can have followers and be imprisoned by their image of you. You can have left the old environment and still be carrying the same internal architecture with you to the next spot. So when you say you want freedom, I ask you, do you have the architecture to hold it? The first pillar is awareness. Awareness is where freedom begins. You cannot change the pattern that you are fused with. You cannot interrupt the script that you are reading, that you don't even know you're reading. You cannot stop escaping freedom if you do not know what you do when freedom starts to feel suffocating. Awareness is that moment when you catch yourself. And that pause matters because in that pause of awareness, you get to ask Am I choosing this? Am I aligned or am I trying to be accepted? Am I being honest or am I just trying to fit in? That question alone can change the direction of your life. The second pillar is the mind. Because once the body feels safe, because once the body feels, oh would I say this? Because once the body feels unsafe, the mind starts writing stories. And as the mind is a brilliant storyteller, it will tell you why you cannot leave, why you cannot start, why they are the enemy, why you have no choice. You have to be this way. Why the dream is stupid, why the relationship is fine, why your exhaustion is normal, why your anger is justified, why your conformity is maturity, why your submission is loyalty, why your self-abandonment is love. The mind is not always trying to tell you the truth. The mind is trying to protect the identity you're afraid to outgrow in the freedom that comes with it. This is why you have to examine the story, not shame it, not fight it. Examine it. Ask it, where did you come from? Who taught me this? What are you trying to protect me from? What would I have to experience if I stopped believing the story that I have currently? The third pillar is identity, the blueprint. This is where freedom gets real. Do you fear the new life? The death of your old self? Do you fear who you will disappoint? Who will you no longer be useful to? Perhaps you're scared of who you will lose if you stop performing the version of you that everyone else benefits from. So the question becomes: who are you without the role? Who are you without being the strong one? Who are you without being the fixer? Who are you without being the high performer? Who are you without being the rebel? Who are you without being the victim? Who are you without the applause and the admiration of your followers? Who are you without the struggle? The identity we call me is really just a survival contract we signed years ago. And freedom requires renegotiating that contract. The fourth pillar is the nervous system. The part I think so many conversations about freedom misses. Because freedom is not just in your mind, your identity, or your awareness, it's also in your body. When you step outside the old identity, your nervous system is not just gonna come up and say, congratulations, you're growing. Here's your one-way ticket to liberation. It may say danger. It may say, oh shit, we're exposed here. It may say, damn, we're gonna be rejected again. It might say we're going to lose belonging. It's gonna say, hey, let's get back to what we know, what's familiar. This is why people self-sabotage right when life begins to expand. Success can feel just as unsafe as failure. This is why healthy love can feel as suspicious as the old one you left. This is why rest can feel irresponsible when you have so much responsibility. This is why being seen can feel threatening. Your system learned safety through familiarity. If you're familiar, life requires self-abandonment, chaos, performance, control, then freedom will initially feel dysregulating. Your nervous system doesn't bother to ask if this is good for me. That's not its function. It's going off of is this familiar enough to survive or thrive? That's why you can't shame yourself into freedom. You can try to force yourself into expansion, that's possible. But you have to teach your body that the new life is survivable. The fifth pillar is emotions. I know that freedom will bring up grief. And people do not talk about that enough. Because in the process of becoming free in your freedom, you may have to grieve the years you've spent trapped. You may have to grieve the version of you that thought suffering was normal. You will have to grieve the relationships that only worked when you were small. You may have to grieve the identity that got you love, even if it cost you peace. You may have to grieve the fantasy that someone else was gonna come and save you and give you permission to live. And if you cannot feel that grief, it's gonna turn into rage. If you cannot feel the fear, it may become control. If you cannot feel the loneliness, it may become conformity. If you cannot feel the shame, it may become judgment. Emotions are data in the eight pillars. They're not dictators, they are not moral failures, they are signals to your system. If you do not learn how to read them, you will keep letting them drive you in circles. The sixth pillar is capacity. I think this may be the heart of the whole conversation. I'm still thinking about it. But freedom requires capacity. The capacity to hold uncertainty, to hold responsibility, to hold visibility, to hold disagreement. Capacity to hold loneliness without abandoning yourself, to hold success without shrinking. Capacity to hold choice without needing someone else to tell you what to do. You don't return to the old life because the old life was good. You return because the old life was familiar, a capacity you know. The container was small, but hell, hey, at least you knew how to survive inside it. Freedom expands that container. Expansion, a good amount of the time, feels like threats before it becomes and feels like liberation. It's not about pretending you're fearless, it's about building the internal containers to stay present when your fear walks with you. The seventh pillar is behavior. Eventually, the system shows itself and reveals if you truly value freedom. And your behavior is the evidence of that. Not your intentions, not your affirmations, not your self-concept, your behavior. Do you choose differently when the old pattern shows up? Do you pause before you submit? Do you breathe before you go on the attack? Do you tell the truth before you conform? Do you rest before your body forces you to collapse? Do you ask for what you need before resentment becomes your language? Oof, that's a tough one. Do you take one honest step toward the life you say you want? Behavior is where freedom becomes visible. The eighth pillar is meaning. I believe freedom without meaning is becomes emptiness. This is why the I get to do whatever I want is just not enough. Sure, that sounds freeing at first, but eventually the human soul needs direction, it needs devotion, it needs purpose, it needs connection, needs something deeper than consumption, performance, and approval. Meaning is the compass. It answers the question what is this freedom for? Not only what am I leaving for this, but what am I building? Who? Am I becoming? What kind of love do I want to practice? What kind of work feels honest? What kind of a relationship allows me to remain whole? What kind of life reflects the truth of who I am? That is positive freedom. Not just breaking chains, but building a life where the burdens you choose to carry of are of your own power of choice. Not just escaping control, but becoming internally directed on where you can control and what you can control. Not just rejecting the old identity, but embodying the new one. So let's wrap up this walk of freedom here, huh? What do you think freedom means? Really? Is it having no limits? Is it less expectations or more? Is it structure or destructure? Is it more responsibility or less? We are where we are today because our current way of thinking is just another fantasy. Real freedom is the ability to choose consciously, to stand in your own body, to think your own thoughts, to feel your own emotion. So belonging doesn't without disappearing, to love without submitting, to disagree without destroying, to succeed without becoming a product, to be seen without performing, to be alone without abandoning yourself. That is freedom. And that kind of freedom is not handed to you, it is built. That is the internal architecture of freedom. So the question for this walk is simple. Where do you escape freedom? If that question hits you hard, don't shame yourself. Study it. Because the part of you that escapes freedom is not evil. It is afraid. It is trying to find safety, it is trying to find belonging. It is trying to find a structure strong enough to hold the uncertainty. What if the structure you're looking for is not another person, another ideology, achievement, performance, another role or another group to disappear into it? What if the structure is you? Not the old you, not the one who performs to survive or fit in or call yourself free as you rattle your chains. The built you, the aware you, the regulated you, the emotionally honest you, the self-trusting you, the you with the capacity, the you with meaning. The you who can finally stop asking the world for permission to damn exist. That is the work. Because you cannot change your life until you understand the version of you creating it. And you cannot live free until you build a version of you who can hold freedom without running from it. Walk with that. As we finish our walk for today, remember, you are not here to perform growth. You are here to understand yourself clearly enough to live differently. This is Walk With Me, because you can't change your life until you understand the version of you creating it. Follow the show, leave a review. I want to know who you are and where you're listening from. And share this episode with someone who's ready to stop fixing symptoms and start understanding the system. Episodes are released every Monday morning, 3 a.m. North American Eastern Time. Until our next walk. My name is Dr. Geo, and thank you for the company.