15/02/2026
People often notice it in their thirties or forties. They hear themselves dismiss an idea before it has a chance to form. They hold back a need in a relationship and then feel resentful that it wasn’t met. They stay quiet in a meeting and later complain about being overlooked. The pattern repeats until it becomes hard to deny: the barrier isn’t only outside. It lives inside us.
Tori Amos described this realisation while speaking about her 1998 album From the Choirgirl Hotel. She had already built a career on telling difficult truths. In the early 1990s she wrote songs about sexual assault, religious control, female anger and desire at a time when women in pop were expected to smooth their edges. She trained as a classical pianist, grew up the daughter of a Methodist minister, and learned early how to translate intense feeling into music. By the time she reached her thirties she’d also faced public scrutiny, industry pressure and a miscarriage that deeply affected her. When she spoke about becoming your own jailer, she was naming a psychological shift she had felt in herself.
The problem she identifies is self-silencing. It begins as protection. A child learns that certain feelings upset a parent. A teenager learns that ambition makes others uncomfortable. A young woman learns that anger invites punishment. So she stores parts of herself away, edits her speech and swallows objections. She calls it maturity, diplomacy, kindness but very often it is about survival.
Over time the original authority figure fades, but the rule remains. The external critic takes up residence inside the mind, polices tone and questions memory. It mocks risk. You don’t need anyone to silence you because you’ve memorised the script. This is what psychologists call internalisation. It’s also close to what Freud described as the superego, though in ordinary language it feels less clinical. It feels like shame and like the fear of being too much.
There’s a painful clarity in recognising that the face of control has changed. At first the blame sits outside. Parents were strict. A partner was dismissive. A church was rigid. An industry was hostile. Those things may all be true. But at some point you notice that even in safer conditions you still shrink. No one is interrupting you, yet you stop mid sentence. No one is forbidding you, yet you don’t begin. That’s when responsibility shifts. Not in a moral sense, but in a practical one. If the guard now lives inside, then the key does too.
The real shock comes when you notice the control no longer comes from outside. It means admitting that you’ve cooperated in your own confinement. It means facing how often you’ve mistrusted your own instincts. Many people respond first with anger at themselves which can often harden into self-contempt. Yet Amos’ wider body of work argues for something more compassionate. Her songs rarely punish the wounded self. They confront it, argue with it, sometimes rage at it, but they don’t discard it.
Culturally, women are trained early to monitor themselves. They assess their bodies, their tone, their emotional range. Writers like Virginia Woolf wrote about the need to kill the angel in the house, that inner figure who demands sweetness and compliance. Amos updates that idea for a late twentieth century audience. The jailer isn’t always a single moral ideal. Sometimes it’s the demand to be endlessly productive, endlessly agreeable, endlessly desirable. The mechanism remains the same. You pre-empt rejection by restricting yourself.
The quote resonates because it turns responsibility inward without denying past harm. It asks for self examination and to notice when you’ve dismissed your own voice before anyone else had the chance. It asks you to see that growth isn’t only about confronting others. It’s also about dismantling habits of self-censorship.
In practical terms, this means tolerating discomfort. Speaking when your throat tightens and admitting you want something. Writing the difficult sentence. Setting a boundary without over explaining it. The first attempts feel unnatural because the old guard still shouts warnings. Yet each act of expression weakens that authority. You gather evidence that the world doesn’t collapse when you show up fully.
Amos’ music from that period pulses with this struggle. It carries grief and fury, but also defiance. She presents liberation as ongoing work. The insight that you’ve become your own jailer is the moment you realise the door has been unlocked from the inside for some time, and that stepping through it requires courage you already possess.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: Justin Higuchi from Los Angeles, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
