Independence, Autonomy, and Healing: Rethinking Freedom in Therapy

Photo by: Gayatri Malhotra

Freedom is one of those words we toss around easily — especially in the therapy room. We say things like “find your voice,” “set yourself free,” or “take back control.” But what does freedom mean when you’ve never felt safe enough to make your own choices? What does it mean when every time you tried to choose yourself, someone told you that you were being selfish, disloyal, or ungrateful?

For many clients, especially those navigating trauma, generational pressure, or chronic invalidation, autonomy isn’t just a personal goal — it’s an act of resistance. A reclaimed right. A survival strategy. And often, that process involves grieving what you hoped family could be, and confronting what it has actually been.

In clinical terms, we sometimes call it cutoff — the conscious decision to separate emotionally, physically, or both from toxic or abusive family systems. This isn’t a flippant choice. It’s a deeply painful, often stigmatized one. Our culture — and many therapists — still hold to the belief that reconciliation is always the goal. But in liberation-based therapy, we ask a different question: What kind of freedom is possible when the cost of connection is your selfhood?

For some, cutting off is not avoidance. It’s an act of reclamation. It’s saying: I don’t have to stay in spaces that deny my worth just because we share blood. It’s learning to live without the constant emotional whiplash. Without gaslighting. Without the manipulation that’s been dressed up as love.

For a queer client disowned for their identity, or a neurodivergent adult pathologized their whole life by family members who refused to understand them — cutoff isn’t drama. It’s medicine.

But it’s not easy. For clients from collectivist cultures, freedom might not look like severing ties — it might look like redefining roles and drawing new, firmer lines around the self. For others, especially survivors of enmeshment or emotional incest, the first acts of freedom are quiet: choosing your own meals. Blocking a number. Not returning a call. Crying without having to explain why.

Photo by: Annie Spratt

Therapy needs to make space for all of it. Not just the triumph of “breaking free,” but the messiness that comes after. The grief. The loneliness. The guilt that lingers even when you know you did the right thing. The inner child who still waits for approval that may never come.

Because autonomy, real autonomy, is rarely clean. It comes in waves. It asks you to sit with the loss — of people, of illusions, of comfort — and still keep going.

We have to expand our definition of freedom. It’s not always about independence in the capitalist sense: making money, moving out, proving your worth through productivity. Sometimes, it’s about the quieter revolutions: trusting your own judgment, feeling safe in your body, reclaiming time that was stolen from you by someone else’s control.

We ask clients:
Whose voice is in your head when you shrink?
What would it mean to stop proving your value to people committed to misunderstanding you?
What would freedom feel like in your nervous system, not just your calendar?

And just as importantly: Who are your people now? Because healing isn’t isolation. We heal in new communities — in chosen family, in affirming relationships, in therapy that sees you not as broken, but as whole and worthy of love without condition.

Photo by: Kampus

Sometimes, freedom means staying — but only if you can do so without abandoning yourself. Other times, it means walking away entirely — not out of hate, but out of radical self-love.

Clients often say, “It feels wrong to cut off family.” And we tell them: what’s wrong is being harmed over and over and calling it loyalty.

True healing through autonomy teaches us that boundaries are not barriers to love — they are the conditions that make healthy love possible.

Freedom isn’t a destination. It’s a process. A practice. A quiet revolution that says: I get to choose. I get to change. I get to belong — to myself, first.

For therapists interested in working with clients through this issue; See this free clinical training guide.