Welcome back to Tuff Love with Rob Kandell. In this episode, Rob explores the concept of the prisons we create for ourselves, as well as how to escape. Remember, 99.9% of the time it is us creating the prisons. There is that 0.01% of other people doing stuff to us and creating prisons around us, but that isn’t what this show is about. It’s about the prisons we create and how we respond to them.

This relates to Tuff Love episode 49, from November 2016, called The Lure of Freedom. That episode was about how freedom is so attractive and we think we want it, but at the time we don’t. If you haven’t listened to that show yet, go back and do so because it explores some different things to this episode.

The inspiration for this show is something from Rob’s life that happened recently. Morgan went to a birthday party of 8 or 9 women, and had a blast. When she came home, she said to Rob, ‘Thank you so much for letting me go.’ Rob’s first response was confusion because he doesn’t control Morgan and she doesn’t control him. It might sound ridiculous on the surface, but when Rob started to explore it, he had some realizations:

This is the cultural norm. Morgan had some reasons to thank her partner for ‘letting’ her go because it’s part of what our culture considers normal
We often put ourselves in prisons to remain safe. These prisons are a way to restrain us and to enable us to feel safe and contained. They’re somewhat comforting, but not actually healthy.
The first prison is that we all have fear around the consequences of our actions and the expectations. We ask ourselves, “If I am fully myself, what will happen? Will there be detrimental effects?”
When you’re looking at the prisons in your life and looking at the places you don’t feel free, the first thing to ask is if they’re imaginary or self-imposed. Rob’s guess is that they probably are.
When we feel like we’re out of alignment with out desire, that’s when prisons occur and that’s where we feel constrained. If you’re agreeing to be part of that experience, but don’t look at the places you are co-creating that experience, then it will feel like a prison.
The way to alter your relationship and modify your agreements to be out of prison is a simple process: communication. Rob suggests starting with something like, “I’m not pleased about how things are going. Can we talk about what’s happening, what we want and what we’re doing?”
It’s not easy, it’s not comfortable. But the prison is when you withhold what’s happening inside of you and live in your own world.
Most of us are chicken shit. We’re not willing to take the steps to be authentic in our relationships, and we feel imprisoned by the façade. But we’re only imprisoned by our own unwillingness to speak the truth.
Rob was feeling imprisoned at the end of his time with One Taste, but in retrospect he found he had made the choices all along the way to stay inside that process. It was his willingness to admit to himself and others that it was fully his choice actually empowered him to move out of victim and into the empowered piece of it.
We often think that things are happening to us, that it’s the circumstances controlling things, but it’s really out choice to be in any situation. The containment of the situation might have you feeling safe and warm and well-handled.
When you change your relationship and viewpoint around it, that’s where things feel less and less like prison and more and more like freedom.
Freedom is feeling secure and powerful in all circumstances. Your ability to know it’s you creating the circumstance will empower you to feel total freedom in all conditions.
We often don’t ask for how we want to be related to. How often do we walk into conversations and the person across us is not providing the presence that we want,