How do you know if you’re stuck in a cage when the cage is all you’ve ever known?

There’s a scene in the movie, The Shawshank Redemption where Red, the older and wiser inmate, explains to the younger men why someone might resist freedom after decades behind bars:

“These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you depend on them. That’s being institutionalized.”

The younger men didn’t fully understand what he meant. But most of us live that same story, holding tight to what’s familiar even when it quietly suffocates us. We get comfortable with the chaos, the routine, the drama, until we can’t imagine life without it. The walls we once resented become the boundaries we defend.

Addiction, self-sabotage, control, or even the simple belief that life is only as big as what we can see…builds a cage. Over time, the craving for something more begins to fade. Hope turns into a whisper that only visits in our sleep through dreams.

So how do you know when you’ve been institutionalized? It’s simple. You stop seeing people for who they truly are. You stop being curious. You see difference as a threat instead of a mirror that could expand you.

Some people stay in cages built from belief systems or family rules. They were born inside those walls and taught to see them as protection, not confinement. The cage feels like home, so stepping beyond it feels like betrayal.

Others manage to break free. They tear down the walls that defined and contained them, only to find themselves disoriented by the vast new space around them. Without the structure that once told them who they were, they grasp for new certainty. In that grasping, they begin to crave new cages, some even build them anew, constructed from judgment, superiority, or self-righteousness. You can hear it in their words and their distance from the people and places they once knew to be safe.

It’s peculiar how new found freedom can easily turn into another prison when you believe everyone else must follow your new path. This is the challenge of change.

The truth is, escaping the cage doesn’t guarantee peace. Freedom can feel raw and lonely. You might find yourself nostalgic for the old walls because at least they were familiar. The discomfort of freedom isn’t failure, it’s the process of learning to breathe again. Or you may find the old walls to be such a deplorable burden you dismiss every minute of context it gave your life. Why not celebrate the old walls? For they were the ones that inspired you break free and find new spaces.

In my coaching, I hear this over and over in the stories of people rebuilding their identity. They expect the world to change with them. When it doesn’t, they feel unseen or rejected. That reaction is often self-protection, which is a way to cope and make sense of the isolation that comes with transformation. I can speak from personal experience, that breaking free and expecting others to come along is not freedom. It’s worse… it’s an even darker dungeon that goes deeper than before.

But real freedom doesn’t need validation. It grows quieter, steadier. As you responsibly navigate a new way with proper guidance and tools, you start seeing others not as opponents or reflections, but as fellow travelers with their own cages. Some are content to stay in those old walls, and that has to be okay with you.

So how do you know when you’re in a cage? When you begin to see it for what it is. To no longer find comfort in the walls and bars holding you inside. When the horizons of your dreams are on the other side of what you know. When the discomfort of breaking out is no longer greater than the discomfort of staying where you are.

If you dare to make an atomic reset in your life to find the authentic person you’ve craved to be for longer than you can remember. You’ll know you’ve completely found freedom when you can look around with compassion instead of comparison. When you no longer define your progress by where you were or the people in your past or present. When your life stops being a reaction and becomes an act of creation, you will be free.