therapy notes

If You're Free, Am I Caged?

Shayan Salar, LCSW, LCADC · Updated November 2026 · 12 min read

There is a kind of pressure in some spiritual communities that is genuinely hard to put into words. Nobody is forcing anyone. Everyone is talking about freedom, openness, and love without limits. And yet some people come away from it feeling cornered, ashamed of what they want, and unsure whether the yes they gave was really theirs.

This piece is about one version of that: what happens when polyamory and open relationships stop being a choice and become a measure of how evolved you are, and why people high in what psychologists call dark triad traits tend to thrive in exactly that climate. It is a close cousin of what I describe in spiritual abuse in spiritual communities, with one important difference. Here the pressure often comes from the culture and from peers, not from a teacher at the top.

Polyamory is not the problem

This needs saying first and plainly. Polyamory, open relationships, and other forms of consensual nonmonogamy are a considered, honest choice for many people, and for plenty of them it works well. Nothing here is an argument against them. Plenty of monogamous relationships are coercive too, and the same dynamics described below can run inside any relationship structure. The research backs this up: a 2015 review in the Journal of Sex Research by Alicia Rubel and Anthony Bogaert found that people in consensually nonmonogamous relationships report psychological well-being and relationship quality similar to monogamous people.

The problem is not the structure. It is what happens when one structure gets attached to spiritual status, so that choosing it signals growth and not choosing it signals that something is wrong with you.

In short, the question is never whether someone is polyamorous. It is whether everyone involved could genuinely have chosen otherwise.

How freedom turns into a hierarchy

The shift is subtle. It begins when a relationship style stops being one option among several and becomes evidence of where you are on the path. Once that happens, freedom quietly becomes a ranking.

If I am free, the unspoken implication is that you are caged. If I have moved past possessiveness, then your wish for monogamy must be attachment, ego, scarcity thinking, or an unhealed wound. Jealousy is no longer a feeling that might carry useful information about how you are being treated. It is a defect to be worked through. A boundary is no longer a preference you are allowed to have. It is fear.

None of this has to be said out loud. It lives in which stories get admired, who gets called brave, whose discomfort is treated as their own work to do, and which relationships are spoken about as more conscious than others. Over time the message becomes unmistakable: the evolved people are over here, and you could join them if you would just let go.

There is research on why spiritual settings are especially prone to this. Psychologists Roos Vonk and Anouk Visser, studying more than 3,700 people across three studies, developed a measure of what they called spiritual superiority: the belief that one's spiritual development makes one more aware, more loving, or more evolved than others. It was more common among people in energy-based trainings than among mindfulness students, and it was linked to communal narcissism, the habit of seeing oneself as exceptionally caring and good. Separately, Jochen Gebauer and colleagues found in 2018 that yoga and meditation practice increased self-enhancement rather than quieting the ego, a finding a later preregistered replication largely supported. None of this means practice is harmful. It means the ego does not disappear on the path. It can simply learn to compete on spiritual terms, and openness is one more thing to compete on.

The truth is simpler and less flattering to everyone. Not everyone is built for nonmonogamy, and that is not a deficit. Some people thrive in it and some people do not, in the same way some people thrive in cities and some in the country. Neither one is further along.

Why it is so hard to name

Most of the people I talk with about this struggle less with what happened than with whether they are allowed to call it a problem. That difficulty is not an accident. It comes from three features of the situation.

First, there is usually no force. Nobody threatened anyone. The pressure is carried by language and by belonging, and those leave no marks. From the outside, and often from the inside, it looks like an adult freely choosing something.

Second, the vocabulary preempts the complaint. If the community already has a word for your objection, and the word is a diagnosis of you, then raising the objection only confirms the diagnosis. Saying I am not comfortable with this becomes evidence of exactly the attachment you were supposed to be releasing.

Third, the people applying the pressure often believe what they are saying, at least partly. That makes it harder to see as pressure, and it makes the person on the receiving end feel unkind for even suspecting it.

In short, it is hard to name because it was built to be. When the language of freedom is the instrument, objecting to it sounds like objecting to freedom itself.

Who carries the most risk

The people most exposed are rarely naive. They are people at a threshold: newly arrived in the community, recently out of a long relationship, freshly sober, grieving, relocated, or leaving the religion they grew up in. These are moments when old structures have stopped working and the hunger for belonging is at its strongest, and a community that offers immediate closeness can feel like rescue. Sociologists John Lofland and Rodney Stark identified this pattern in their classic 1965 study of conversion: a turning point in someone's life and thinning outside relationships predicted who joined far better than belief did.

A trauma history adds particular pulls. If you learned early to read what the people around you wanted and to become it, you arrive already skilled at sensing what will earn approval and adjusting yourself to match. In a setting where openness earns approval, that skill gets praised as being so evolved, while the cost of it stays invisible. If love in your history came unpredictably, an environment that alternates intense closeness with sudden coolness will feel familiar rather than alarming.

Early recovery deserves its own mention. People newly out of active addiction have often been told, rightly, to surrender, take direction, and distrust their own thinking. Those are valuable instructions in the right hands. In the wrong ones they become a ready-made reason to override your own no.

Where dark triad traits come in

In 2002 psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams described a cluster of three overlapping personality traits they called the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. A caution before going further. These are dimensional traits, not diagnoses. Most people show some of them some of the time, and nothing here is meant as a tool for labeling a specific person in your life. What matters is the pattern, and whether the environment rewards it.

Two findings are especially relevant here. In 2009, Peter Jonason and colleagues found that all three traits were associated with a preference for short-term, low-commitment sexual relationships and not with long-term ones. And in 2014, Daniel Jones and Sally Olderbak found that the shared core of these traits predicted coaxing, the persistent persuasion of a reluctant partner, while psychopathy specifically predicted outright coercion. Coaxing is the important word. It describes pressure that never looks like force.

To be clear about what the research does and does not show: no study I know of has looked specifically at dark triad traits within polyamorous spiritual communities. What follows connects these findings with patterns I have seen clinically and heard described many times. It is a way of recognizing a dynamic, not a scientific profile of a type of person.

Liberation language rewards it a great deal. A person high in these traits does not need to invent a manipulation tactic in a community like this. The community's own vocabulary already does the work, and it does it with an aura of spiritual legitimacy that an ordinary manipulator could never manufacture.

Narcissism: freedom worn as status

Here the relationship style is presented as proof of development. I have done the work to move past possessiveness, with the implied second half: and you have not. Being seen as the open, unattached one in the room seems to matter as much as the relationships themselves. The polyamory is partly a performance, and it needs an audience.

Partners function as mirrors, supplying attention, novelty, and proof of desirability. Interest tends to fade when a partner stops reflecting well, which usually means when they have needs or get hurt.

Under the serenity there is often fragility. Questioned, the calm gives way to contempt, a quick "that sounds like your projection," or a cool withdrawal that punishes without leaving anything you could point to. A quieter variant presents as the exquisitely sensitive healer: I just feel everyone's energy so deeply. Their needs come first, framed as sensitivity. Yours get framed as demands.

Machiavellianism: freedom used as strategy

Here the vocabulary becomes a set of tools. Words like attachment, scarcity, shadow, triggered, holding space, and radical honesty are used to win rather than to understand, because whoever controls the language controls the frame.

Consent is gained by attrition, the coaxing Jones and Olderbak describe. There is no hard push. The subject is raised again and again, gently and patiently, until no becomes maybe and maybe becomes fine. Each conversation on its own looks entirely respectful. The pressure lives in the repetition.

Radical honesty becomes cover for disclosures timed to destabilize: details about other partners, comparisons, news delivered right before something that matters to you. Agreements are flexible when they serve this person and sacred when you are the one who broke them. We agreed to be open about our feelings applies to your jealousy, never to their withholding.

They are often well connected: the person who hosts, facilitates, or sits close to the teacher. Anyone who complains is up against someone everyone likes and trusts. And they tend to find newcomers, people who do not yet know the norms, badly want to belong, and want to look evolved, and for whom being invited in feels like being chosen.

Psychopathic traits: freedom without conscience

Here impulsivity is reframed as authenticity. I follow my desire. I do not suppress what is alive in me. A lack of impulse control becomes a spiritual value.

Connection arrives with startling speed and intensity: long eye gazing, I have never felt this with anyone, talk of soul recognition in the first week. The depth comes too fast to be real, which is precisely what lowers the other person's guard.

When partners are hurt or leave, the damage registers as evidence that they were not ready for this level of freedom. There is little visible guilt. The ending is followed by an immediate move to someone new, often in the same community, which makes the person left behind look unstable by comparison.

The everyday mechanics that hold it together

Whatever the traits involved, the same daily mechanics keep showing up.

Reframing. Every hard reaction you have is turned back on you as material to work on, so the other person's behavior never becomes the subject.

Bypassing. Difficult conversations are skipped with a return to love, or with the idea that everything is perfect as it is.

Performed consent. Check-ins and consent rituals are visible and sincere looking, while the social pressure underneath them goes uncounted. A yes given out of fear of being left out still gets counted as a yes. Researchers call this sexual compliance: agreeing to sex you do not actually want. Emily Impett and Letitia Anne Peplau's 2003 review found it is common in ordinary committed relationships, and that people who comply in order to avoid a loss, such as conflict or abandonment, tend to fare worse than those who agree for positive reasons. A community where saying no costs you belonging produces exactly that kind of avoidance-driven yes.

Relocated responsibility. The person who was hurt is asked to process, sit with it, or do shadow work. The person who caused the hurt is rarely asked to change anything.

A high price for leaving. Stepping out of the relationship often means losing the community, the friendships, the retreats, and an identity along with it. That makes no very expensive.

The test that cuts through it

Two questions do more work than any checklist.

The first: can you say this is not for me and keep your belonging, your standing, and your sense of being a serious spiritual person? A choice that is genuinely free can be declined without losing anything. If declining gets reinterpreted as being unhealed, it was never really a choice.

The second: in which direction do the costs and benefits flow? In a healthy arrangement both are shared, unevenly at times but in both directions. In a coercive one they keep flowing the same way. One person collects the novelty, the choice, and the moral high ground. The other is left with the processing, the adapting, and the self doubt.

In short, freedom that has to be proven, defended, or pressed on someone else is not functioning as freedom.

If you are the one feeling pressured

Your preference is information, not a symptom. Wanting monogamy, or wanting more time, or wanting to stop, does not need to be healed before it counts.

You do not owe anyone a timeline. Being told you will get there, or that you are not ready yet, assumes a destination you never agreed to.

Notice whether your no is respected the first time, or only tolerated until it can be revisited. That difference tells you more than anything that gets said in the conversation itself.

Talk to one person outside the community, someone with no stake in what you decide. Pressure that holds up inside a closed vocabulary often loosens quickly when it is described in plain words to someone who does not share it.

And settle anything important while you are in an ordinary state. Decisions about sex and relationships made during ceremony, retreat, breathwork, or substance use are made with reduced capacity to consent, which is the same principle I write about in psychedelic harm reduction.

If you are the one who is free

Nothing here asks you to be less free. If nonmonogamy fits you, that is a good thing to have found. The only ask is that your freedom not depend on other people sharing it.

Being free does not make anyone else caged. It makes them different. You can describe what works for you without ranking it, invite rather than recruit, and treat another person's no as a complete answer rather than an opening position. Letting people choose for themselves, at their own pace or not at all, is not a compromise of the values of openness. It is what those values actually require.

What therapy can help with

Therapy is not there to decide what relationship structure is right for you. A therapist who has a preferred answer has simply become a new authority telling you what you should want.

What it can do is help you separate your own preference from the one the community taught you to have, which is often harder than it sounds after a long time inside a strong culture. It can help make sense of why you stayed or kept saying yes, including the kind of attachment that forms when warmth and withdrawal alternate unpredictably, which Donald Dutton and Susan Painter described in 1981 as traumatic bonding. Approaches like Internal Family Systems are well suited to the part of you that wanted to belong and the part that knew something was off, without making either one the enemy. And if substance use was part of the scene, it can be addressed alongside everything else rather than as a precondition.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can polyamory in a spiritual community become coercive?

It can, though polyamory itself is not the problem. It becomes coercive when one relationship style is framed as more evolved, so that wanting monogamy gets read as attachment, ego, or an unhealed wound. A useful test is whether you can say this is not for me and keep your belonging and standing. If declining costs you those, it was not a free choice.

Is polyamory unhealthy?

No. A 2015 review in the Journal of Sex Research by Rubel and Bogaert found that people in consensually nonmonogamous relationships report psychological well-being and relationship quality similar to monogamous people. The concern is not the relationship structure but whether everyone involved genuinely chose it.

What are dark triad traits?

The dark triad is a cluster of three overlapping personality traits described by Paulhus and Williams in 2002: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. They are dimensional traits rather than diagnoses, so most people show some of them to some degree. Research links them to a preference for short-term relationships and, in the case of their shared core, to coaxing a reluctant partner rather than respecting a first no.

What is spiritual superiority?

Spiritual superiority is the belief that your spiritual development makes you more aware, loving, or evolved than other people. Vonk and Visser developed a measure of it in 2021 and found it was linked to communal narcissism. It helps explain how a relationship style can turn into a status marker in spiritual communities.

How can I tell if I am being pressured into an open relationship?

Notice whether your no is respected the first time or only tolerated until it can be raised again, whether your hesitation is described as a wound or a fear to work through, and whether the costs and benefits of the arrangement keep flowing in one direction. Describing the situation in plain words to someone outside the community is often clarifying.

Can therapy help me figure out whether nonmonogamy is right for me?

Yes, as long as the therapist has no preferred answer. The useful work is separating your own preference from the one a community taught you to have, understanding why you kept saying yes if you did, and making any decision from your own values rather than from pressure in either direction.

Research referenced

Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. L. (1981). Traumatic bonding: The development of emotional attachments in battered women and other relationships of intermittent abuse. Victimology, 6, 139–155.

Gebauer, J. E., Nehrlich, A. D., Stahlberg, D., Sedikides, C., Hackenschmidt, A., Schick, D., Stegmaier, C. A., Windfelder, C. C., Bruk, A., & Mander, J. (2018). Mind-body practices and the self: Yoga and meditation do not quiet the ego but instead boost self-enhancement. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1299–1308. doi.org/10.1177/0956797618764621

Impett, E. A., & Peplau, L. A. (2003). Sexual compliance: Gender, motivational, and relationship perspectives. Journal of Sex Research, 40(1), 87–100. doi.org/10.1080/00224490309552169

Jonason, P. K., Li, N. P., Webster, G. D., & Schmitt, D. P. (2009). The dark triad: Facilitating a short-term mating strategy in men. European Journal of Personality, 23(1), 5–18. doi.org/10.1002/per.698

Jones, D. N., & Olderbak, S. G. (2014). The associations among dark personalities and sexual tactics across different scenarios. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 29(6), 1050–1070. doi.org/10.1177/0886260513506053

Lofland, J., & Stark, R. (1965). Becoming a world-saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective. American Sociological Review, 30(6), 862–875.

Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556–563. doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00505-6

Rubel, A. N., & Bogaert, A. F. (2015). Consensual nonmonogamy: Psychological well-being and relationship quality correlates. Journal of Sex Research, 52(9), 961–982.

Vonk, R., & Visser, A. (2021). An exploration of spiritual superiority: The paradox of self-enhancement. European Journal of Social Psychology, 51(1), 152–165. doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2721