People often ask me what it’s like to work in prison. They usually imagine towering walls, razor wire, locked gates and heavy steel doors. They imagine danger, violence and punishment. Those things exist, of course. But after spending years working therapeutically with men in the prison estate, I’ve come to realise that prison has taught me a great deal about human psychology.
In many ways, prison isn’t just a place. It’s a state of mind. One of the concepts that has always fascinated me comes from psychoanalytic thinking: the idea of prison as a brick mother (Rey 1994). Prison, like a mother, is containing, she has boundaries. She protects us from dangers we cannot yet manage ourselves. For some people, prison unconsciously serves a similar function. Its routines are predictable. The rules are clear. Meals arrive at the same time every day. Decisions are made for you. Your world becomes smaller, but also more manageable. For individuals whose early lives were characterised by chaos, neglect, abuse or unpredictability, that containment can feel strangely comforting. Not because prison is pleasant. But because certainty can feel safer than freedom. Freedom demands something much harder. Responsibility. Choice. Uncertainty. The possibility of failure.
The more I work with people, the more I’ve realised that most of us have built our own psychological prisons. Sometimes we imprison ourselves inside perfectionism. Sometimes inside people-pleasing. Sometimes inside anger or shame. Perhaps inside old identities or the belief that we’re not enough in some way. Inside careers that no longer fit us. Relationships we have outgrown. Stories we’ve repeated so often they feel like facts. These prisons often began as forms of protection. Just as the prison walls protect someone from a world they don’t yet know how to navigate, our psychological defences once protected us from emotional pain. Avoiding conflict kept us safe. Staying small kept us accepted. Being hyper-vigilant helped us survive. Over-achieving earned us love. Our prisons were never built because we were weak. They were built because they worked. At least for a while.
The difficulty comes when the prison that once protected us starts to imprison us. The walls that once kept danger out begin keeping life out too. Joy, creativity, connection, love, authenticity and freedom. I’ve seen this countless times in prison, in organisations and in therapy. People often believe they need different circumstances to become free. But external freedom means very little if we’re still locked inside old psychological patterns.
One of the greatest privileges of my work is watching people discover that the key was always inside of them. Not through positive thinking but through gently understanding the purpose their prison once served. Because we rarely need to fight our defences. We need to thank them. When we understand why we built the walls, we no longer have to keep reinforcing them. This is why compassion is so powerful. It’s difficult to dismantle a prison by attacking it. But we can slowly walk out of one once we realise the door has been unlocked for some time.
Perhaps that’s what freedom really is. Not the absence of fear or uncertainty but the growing capacity to tolerate both. To make conscious choices instead of automatic ones. To stay connected to ourselves when life feels unpredictable. To trust that we no longer need the psychological structures that once kept us safe. Working in prison has taught me that freedom has very little to do with walls. I’ve met people behind bars who have become profoundly free. And I’ve met people with every opportunity imaginable who remain trapped by invisible prisons they don’t even know they’re living inside. The question is what walls are you still living behind and are they protecting you or preventing you from living the life you were meant to live?
Reference
Rey, H. (1994). Universals of Psychoanalysis in the Treatment of Psychotic and Borderline States. Free Association Books.