The Function of Freedom
Healing is measured by the burdens we no longer ask others to carry.
Toni Morrison once wrote, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
It is one of those sentences that seems almost obvious until you sit with it long enough to realize it isn’t.
Morrison meant it structurally. Politically. As a charge to use access and power in service of others’ liberation. I’ve found the sentence also works at a smaller scale — in the rooms we inhabit daily, in the relationships we return to, in the emotional climate we create without always knowing it.
Most of us think of freedom in personal terms. Freedom of speech. Financial freedom. Freedom from oppression. Freedom to choose our own lives. We measure it by what becomes available to us.
Morrison’s sentence quietly shifts the question.
It asks not what freedom gives us, but what freedom gives the people around us.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve found myself wondering whether this is also what healing is for.
We often talk about healing as something deeply personal. We heal to suffer less. To become more peaceful. To stop repeating old patterns. All of that matters.
But what if those are only the first fruits?
What if the deeper purpose of healing is that other people slowly stop carrying what belongs to us?
We rarely realize how often our unfinished work spills into our relationships.
Sometimes it looks obvious. More often it doesn’t.
What protected us in one chapter of life often becomes what limits the people we love in the next.
It appears in the conversations we avoid because honesty feels too vulnerable. In the acknowledgment we never offer. The gratitude we never quite express. The apology that stays trapped behind our pride.
It appears when someone else’s success quietly stirs comparison instead of joy. When another person’s contribution feels strangely difficult to recognize.
None of these moments seem especially significant on their own.
Together, they reveal something.
We rarely respond only to the present moment. We respond to everything our nervous system quietly mistakes the present moment for. A delayed reply becomes rejection. Honest feedback becomes humiliation. Someone else’s success becomes evidence that we’re falling behind. Intimacy begins to feel like a threat. The present moment rarely carries the full weight of our reaction. What we learned to do to stay loved — stay small, stay distant, stay perfect, stay useful — does.
We carry this into every room we lead.
Some leaders create environments where people become increasingly cautious. Ideas stay unspoken. Risk-taking disappears. Recognition becomes scarce. Everyone learns, often without knowing it, to organize themselves around the emotional gravity of the leader.
Other leaders have the opposite effect. People become more creative around them. More honest. More generous with one another. They acknowledge good ideas regardless of where they came from. Success is shared instead of guarded.
I’ve come to suspect the difference has less to do with leadership skill than with inner freedom.
I’ve seen the same dynamic in the most intimate relationships.
Romantic partnership is, at its core, a journey of self-confrontation. It requires you to be seen consistently, not just on your good days. It exposes the places where your ego needs to be right, recognized, or remain central. It asks whether you can celebrate another person without quietly feeling diminished by it. Sooner or later, it reveals exactly how much unfinished work you brought with you.
The partnership doesn’t create the wound. It simply makes it impossible to ignore.
We often blame the relationship for exposing what was quietly organizing us long before we met.
I’ve come to think that unresolved fear doesn’t simply make us anxious. It reorganizes our attention. Everything begins revolving around protecting an identity.
We become preoccupied with being right, being seen, being appreciated, being chosen, being indispensable.
Without realizing it, we ask other people to reassure identities we haven’t yet learned to inhabit ourselves. We ask them to regulate anxieties they didn’t create, to walk carefully around our sensitivities, to carry tensions that belong to our own unfinished work.
Intention doesn’t change the weight of what we hand to others.
Entrepreneurship works the same way. The market doesn’t flatter you. Your co-founder sees everything. The organization reflects your inner state back at you whether you want it to or not. Like romantic partnership, it is a daily confrontation with yourself — one that keeps showing you what still needs to be resolved.
Some of that work happens in conversation. Some happens in silence. Some happens in places most people don’t expect.
I’ve worked with veterans — chain smokers, twenty years, a pack a day — who released the habit in a few sessions of clinical hypnotherapy. I’ve sat with CEOs and founders whose presenting issue was leadership, but whose real work turned out to be a story they’d been carrying since childhood. The subconscious doesn’t distinguish between a boardroom and a battlefield. It simply holds what hasn’t been processed yet.
When people enter a relaxed state, the mind sometimes produces memories — images and scenes that carry real emotional weight regardless of their origin. Whether they are past lives, archetypes, or the psyche’s own mythology, the label matters less than what the story is carrying.
In one of my own sessions, facilitated by my director more than a decade ago, I was a woman living on vast land with a kind husband. By every outward measure, nothing was wrong. And yet I was suffocating. Yearning. Driving to high ground just to look out at a city I couldn’t reach. When I finally named what that woman was carrying — the longing, the silence, the feeling of being trapped inside a life that fit everyone else’s expectations — something shifted.
The stories we haven’t named don’t disappear. They simply operate below the surface, shaping what we believe we deserve, what we’re allowed to want — and quietly determining how much of ourselves we ask others to manage in our place. They become the emotional weight other people learn to work around.
I stopped letting that story vote on what was possible now.
Every relationship leaves an inheritance. We pass along ways of speaking, ways of loving, ways of handling conflict, ways of responding to disappointment. We also pass along our fears — until someone becomes conscious enough to stop passing them on.
Our partners carry less.
Our children carry less.
Our colleagues carry less.
Even strangers carry less.
Maybe that’s why Morrison’s sentence has stayed with me.
It suggests that freedom is not simply something we possess. It is something we become for one another.
The clearest evidence that we are becoming free is not how unrestricted our own lives feel, but how free other people feel in our presence. They no longer have to shrink, manage us, reassure us, or protect us. The more consciously and honestly we inhabit our own lives, the less others have to organize theirs around us.
They are simply free to become more fully themselves.
That is what healing really is.
Not becoming a different person.
Becoming the place where something unhealthy stops—and freedom begins.
