During the first season of Star Trek in 1967, Spock said, “If there are self-made purgatories, then we have to live in them.” My dad shared this quote with me years ago and it stayed. I often reflect on the self-made cages we live inside of. The ways we bind and box ourselves in. How we mistake the ways we’ve been shaped — or adapted — for fixed identity. As if we were not malleable.

Perhaps this confusion is inevitable because so much of that shaping happens below the surface. We usually only see the shape we’ve taken, not the process that formed it. We don’t often recognize how much of who we are is learned, conditioned, repeated. Or how much remains possible.

Much of this shaping happens early in life, in those tender years when we are learning how to find safety, dignity, belonging, and connection. We figure out what we must do to survive emotionally inside the worlds we inherit. This is intelligent. Adaptive. Wise.

And then, because those strategies work to some degree, we repeat them again and again.

Over time they become embedded — in the body, the nervous system, our emotional responses, our ways of relating. Eventually we stop seeing them as patterns and begin experiencing them as identity: this is just who I am.

But much of the time, it isn’t who we are. It’s how we learned to be.

This shaping happens on many levels: in our families, education systems, relationships, cultures, religions, economies, and social structures. Through gendered expectations, moral messaging, racialized violence, scarcity, shame, conditional belonging, and what is passed through generations before us.

None of this stays abstract.

It all finds its way into the body.

And there it lives as deeply practiced patterns of response.

It can look like becoming the person who never needs help. Or the one who scans every room for signs of danger. The one who learned being agreeable meant staying safe. The one who anticipates everyone else’s needs before noticing their own. The one who stays busy so nothing catches up. The one who holds it together while quietly disappearing inside. The one who learned visibility was dangerous and so stayed small.

The list goes on.

Our nervous systems have a brilliant memory, and their primary job is survival. The patterns that formed early in life often carry hundreds or thousands of repetitions in the body and mind. They become deeply familiar pathways.

And yet, even deeply ingrained patterns are not permanent.

When we begin seeing these tendencies as adaptations rather than identity, something softens. We start recognizing not only the pattern itself, but the wisdom inside it. Many of these responses once protected us. Some may have helped us survive.

But later in life, they can also begin costing us something.

Connection.

Honesty.

Intimacy.

Self-trust.

The ability to stay present with ourselves and others.

And this is where many people get stuck: awareness alone doesn’t necessarily change the pattern.

We can understand ourselves intellectually and still find ourselves reacting in ways we don’t want to. Spiraling. Shutting down. People-pleasing. Self-abandoning. Repeating the same painful dynamics in relationships even when part of us knows better.

That can feel deeply discouraging.

But these patterns don’t live only in the mind. They live in the body and nervous system too. Which means we can’t simply think our way out of what the body has learned through experience.

Change asks something different of us.

Not force.

Not self-punishment.

Not becoming “better” at overriding ourselves.

But slowing down enough to recognize what’s happening underneath our reactions. Meeting those places with curiosity instead of shame. Staying present long enough for something new to become possible.

And this requires safety and trust — not just intellectually, but somatically. We may consciously know we are safe while our nervous system is still bracing for danger, rejection, abandonment, conflict, or loss. When the body does not feel safe, it will default back toward the patterns that once protected us.

This is why meaningful change often has less to do with discipline than we imagine.

Yes, it takes intention.

Yes, practice.

Yes, returning again and again.

But it also requires the right conditions: enough safety for the body to soften, relationships where honesty is not punished, room to wobble without shame, repair instead of perfection, and repeated experiences that allow the nervous system to risk something new.

This process is rarely graceful or linear. More often it is tender, messy, uncomfortable, slow. Much slower than most of us would prefer.

And yet this is often how change happens.

Not through sudden transformation, but through small moments of self-contact repeated over time.

And none of this happens in isolation because the shaping didn’t happen in isolation either. Our patterns emerge most clearly in relationship — in moments where something matters, where there is vulnerability, risk, conflict, uncertainty, longing, or the possibility of being misunderstood.

This is often where the work becomes most visible.

In the impulse to self-abandon during conflict.

To flee intimacy just as it deepens.

To over-explain.

Defend.

Shut down.

Disappear.

Brace for rejection.

Try to earn safety by becoming who we think we need to be.

These moments are not signs of failure.

They are invitations to notice what has been shaped inside of us and, slowly, begin relating to those places differently than we once had to.

Over time, something shifts.

We begin responding differently to ourselves in moments that once felt impossible to stay present with. And as that happens, our relationships begin changing too. We discover that we are not fixed. That new ways of being, relating, and responding are possible.

I still think often about those self-made purgatories Spock spoke of. But I no longer see these patterns as prisons or proof of who we are permanently. I see them instead as traces of adaptation. The outlines of survival. Evidence of how intelligently we learned to navigate the worlds we were given.

And from there, slowly and imperfectly, we can begin again.

~ Cherie