Chapter 40 — Personal Sovereignty
After a lifetime of adults and institutions defining belief, memory and identity, the question of who ultimately has authority over a person's inner life.
Who Has the Authority to Define Me?
I spent much of childhood being told who I was.
A sinner.
A liar.
A problem.
A child associated with Satan.
Other people supplied explanations for me.
They interpreted my behaviour.
They interpreted my fear.
They interpreted resistance.
They interpreted silence.
Later in life, institutions could find other words.
Eventually I began asking a different question.
Who has the authority to define me?
From Obedience to Authorship
That question leads me to what I now call personal sovereignty.
I do not mean absolute independence.
Nobody lives without other people.
We depend upon one another.
We influence one another.
We accept obligations.
We live within families, communities, laws and institutions.
Personal sovereignty does not mean:
“I can do anything I like.”
It means something closer to:
“This is my life, and authority over it requires justification.”
My body is not automatically somebody else's instrument.
My thoughts do not become somebody else's property.
My beliefs cannot simply be assigned to me.
My memories cannot be replaced by an institutional record.
My uncertainty does not give another person permission to invent certainty for me.
And another person's authority does not become unlimited merely because that authority is described as parental, medical, religious, legal or divine.
Freedom Requires More Than Permission
The previous chapter considered the child's freedom of thought.
But there is something more.
It is not enough to tell a person:
“You are free to think.”
The person also needs tools with which to think.
They need information.
Alternatives.
Language.
The ability to distinguish an assertion from evidence.
The ability to recognise coercion.
The confidence to say:
“I don't know.”
And an environment in which changing one's mind does not result in terror or punishment.
Personal sovereignty therefore requires both freedom to think and the tools with which to think.
When the Developing Self Is Overridden
This matters particularly in childhood because a child is still developing a sense of self.
A child begins life profoundly dependent upon adults.
Adults provide food.
Safety.
Language.
Interpretation.
The names of things.
The explanations of things.
The child has very little independent means of testing what those adults say.
That dependence gives adults extraordinary power.
Used carefully, that power helps a child grow.
Used badly, it can interfere with the child's developing ability to know what they feel, what they think, what they experienced and what they are allowed to question.
The Friendly Deception
There are very mild examples of this which most people recognise.
The tooth fairy.
The Easter bunny.
Santa Claus.
For many children these are harmless pieces of childhood folklore.
When the truth becomes apparent, the discovery may be funny, disappointing or simply another part of growing up.
But there can also be a small moment of discovery:
The adults knew this was not literally true.
And they told me that it was.
That can become one of childhood's early lessons in the fallibility of authority.
When the Stakes Are Not Friendly
The comparison has obvious limits.
Nobody normally threatens a child with eternal punishment for doubting the tooth fairy.
The Easter bunny does not usually determine whether a child is described as sinful, evil or possessed.
A child's moral identity does not usually depend upon continuing to believe in Santa Claus.
The stakes change completely when an unverifiable claim becomes attached to identity, morality, punishment, belonging and fear.
Hell.
Satan.
Possession.
Sin.
Divine punishment.
The supposed danger of questioning.
The supposed danger of disbelief.
Then discovering that adults may not have known what they claimed to know can involve much more than correcting a fact.
The person may have to reconsider the adults who supplied the explanation, the institutions which reinforced it, the fear built around it and the identity constructed beneath it.
The Betrayal Can Be Larger Than the False Fact
That is why truthfulness matters.
The problem is not always simply:
“Something I believed turned out not to be true.”
It can become:
“Why did the people I trusted tell me that they knew?”
“Why was I frightened?”
“Why was questioning punished?”
“Why was this used to define me?”
“Why did the adults' certainty matter more than my experience?”
The loss can involve trust in other people.
It can also involve trust in one's own ability to determine what is real.
What Can Go Wrong
There is no single outcome from childhood fear, coercion, neglect or abuse.
People respond differently.
Many people survive severe experiences without developing a psychiatric disorder.
Others experience substantial and persistent difficulties.
Traumatic experiences can be associated with fear.
Hypervigilance.
Anxiety.
Shame.
Avoidance.
Dissociation.
Difficulties regulating emotion.
Problems with trust.
Difficulties in relationships.
And changes in the way a person understands themselves and other people.
Some people develop post-traumatic stress disorder or other recognised psychological conditions.
Some experience more complicated difficulties involving memory, attachment, identity or personality.
None of those outcomes proves one particular cause.
Nor are they unique to religious environments.
But they help explain why childhood coercion cannot simply be dismissed as a disagreement about ideas.
Alice Miller and the Child's Side
Long before I had the language of trauma-informed care or personal sovereignty, I encountered the work of Alice Miller.
What stayed with me was not simply another psychological theory.
It was where she stood while asking the question.
She stood beside the child.
Again and again her work asked what adults had done to children whose later behaviour was being examined as though the difficulty had simply arisen inside them.
The Child Who Becomes What the Adult Needs
In The Drama of the Gifted Child, Miller wrote about the child's capacity to become highly responsive to what important adults require.
The word gifted in that context was not simply about academic ability.
It included the child's extraordinary ability to read the emotional environment.
What does this adult need?
What makes them pleased?
What makes them angry?
What must I hide?
What must I become?
That adaptation can look like success.
The child is good.
Helpful.
Quiet.
Responsive.
Able to become what the adult requires.
But another question remains.
What happened to what the child required?
A child who becomes expert at reading everybody else may have had very little opportunity to discover themselves.
For Your Own Good
Another of Miller's books carried a title which describes a remarkably powerful form of adult authority:
For Your Own Good.
Some of the most dangerous words an authority can use are also among the most reassuring.
This is for your own good.
The phrase makes intention appear to settle the question.
But good intentions do not determine effects.
A frightened child can still be frightened by somebody who believes they are saving him.
A humiliated child can still be humiliated by somebody who believes they are teaching humility.
A child can still be harmed by an adult convinced that the harm is discipline, salvation, treatment or love.
What Happened to the Child?
Miller's work repeatedly brought me back to a distinction which has become central to this book.
There is a difference between asking:
“What is wrong with this child?”
and:
“What happened to this child?”
The first question can locate the problem entirely inside the child.
The second requires us to examine the environment.
Both questions can sometimes matter.
But an institution which asks only the first can fail to notice what the adults around the child have done.
Miller Was Not Another Authority to Obey
Alice Miller gave me ways of looking at childhood which were enormously important to me.
That does not require every conclusion she reached to be correct.
Some of her broader causal interpretations went further than the evidence I would now be willing to accept without testing.
That distinction matters.
Think for yourself, question authority also applies to the people who teach us to question authority.
Miller helped me ask better questions.
The answers still have to earn confidence.
Trauma and Recovery
Other researchers and clinicians carried parts of the discussion further.
Judith Herman's work on trauma placed safety, remembrance, mourning and reconnection within a broader understanding of recovery from interpersonal violence and captivity.
That was an important development.
The issue was no longer simply identifying what had happened.
The person also needed some means of regaining safety and participation in their own life.
That moves very close to the idea of sovereignty.
When the Body Enters the Story
Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score later brought another layer of trauma into widespread public discussion.
The story was no longer confined to what a person consciously remembered or could explain in words.
Traumatic experience could also be reflected in fear responses, hypervigilance, avoidance, emotional regulation, relationships, attachment, bodily sensations and the person's continuing sense of safety.
That challenged a very simple model of human experience.
Something happens.
It ends.
The person remembers it.
Then life continues.
Human beings are considerably more complicated than that.
Trauma and the Loss of Agency
One of the important themes in trauma research is helplessness and loss of control.
That connects directly with personal sovereignty.
A person may know intellectually that an event has ended while emotional or physiological responses continue to behave as though danger remains.
The consequences can extend beyond conscious memory.
They can affect the ability to feel safe.
To trust.
To tolerate closeness.
To interpret threat.
To make choices without fear dominating the choice.
To know what one feels.
And sometimes to feel that one's body and life genuinely belong to oneself.
Seen from that perspective, restoring agency is not merely a philosophical exercise.
It can become part of recovery.
The Body Keeps the Score — But We Still Test the Score
Van der Kolk's title became famous because it expresses something many people affected by trauma recognise.
The effects of traumatic experience may continue long after the event itself.
But a powerful metaphor is not proof of every scientific claim which may be placed around it.
The same test still applies.
What is the claim?
What is the evidence?
Can another explanation account for it?
Has the finding been independently reproduced?
How large is the effect?
Does it apply to populations or can it genuinely explain one individual?
What changed as better evidence became available?
A trauma-informed approach should also be evidence-informed.
When Childhood Reaches Into the Body
At some point the question became larger than psychology.
If experiences in childhood could influence fear, memory, relationships and behaviour, could they also be associated with physical health?
The research on adverse childhood experiences made that question difficult to ignore.
At population level, increasing exposure to adverse childhood experiences has been associated with increased risk across a range of later health outcomes.
Research has also reported associations between cumulative childhood stress and some autoimmune diseases later in life.
That does not mean:
Trauma causes autoimmune disease.
Human biology is not that simple.
It means that early experience appears to belong somewhere within a much larger biological story.
There Is No Single Pathway
The more I read, the less convincing any single explanation became.
Human biology works through interacting layers.
Genetics can contribute susceptibility.
Infections can contribute triggers.
Hormones matter.
Environment matters.
Nutrition can matter.
Chemical exposures can matter.
The microbiome may matter.
Stress physiology matters.
Behaviour matters.
Age matters.
And chance remains part of biology.
What interested me increasingly was how those layers communicate with one another.
Genes Are Not a Complete Answer
Genetics can change probability without determining outcome.
A person may inherit susceptibility and never develop the disease with which that susceptibility is associated.
Another person may encounter environmental factors which interact with that susceptibility.
This is one reason biology cannot always be divided neatly into:
genetic
or
environmental.
The two continually meet.
Infection and Susceptibility
Infection provides one example.
Some infectious exposures have been investigated as triggers or contributors to autoimmune processes in susceptible people.
The same infection does not produce the same outcome in everybody.
The same genetic susceptibility does not produce disease in everybody.
The interaction is the important part.
Epigenetics
Epigenetics helped me understand why the old argument between genes and environment could be misleading.
The DNA sequence can remain unchanged while biological mechanisms affect how genes are expressed.
DNA methylation is one such mechanism.
Histone modification is another.
Regulatory RNA also plays a role.
Research has investigated whether adverse childhood experiences may be associated with some of these regulatory changes.
That research remains complicated.
An observed epigenetic difference does not automatically establish what caused it.
Nor does it mean that every stressful experience permanently rewrites a person's biology.
But it provides one of the possible mechanisms through which environment, development and inherited susceptibility may interact.
Telomeres and Biological Ageing
Then there were telomeres.
Telomeres are protective structures associated with the ends of chromosomes.
Their length changes with cell division and ageing and is influenced by many biological and environmental factors.
Research has found an association, on average, between greater early-life adversity and shorter telomere length.
The association is not simple.
Study methods matter.
Age matters.
Smoking matters.
Health conditions matter.
Medication may matter.
Genetic influences matter.
So shorter telomeres cannot be read backwards as proof that a particular person was traumatised.
Nor can they establish that trauma caused an individual's illness.
What they add is another reason to investigate how prolonged adversity and biology may become associated over time.
Risk Is Not Destiny
This distinction is essential.
An association is not a diagnosis.
A risk factor is not destiny.
A person with severe childhood trauma may never develop an autoimmune condition.
A person with autoimmune disease may have had no significant childhood trauma.
Population research cannot simply be reverse-engineered into certainty about the cause of one individual's illness.
That would replace one oversimplification with another.
The Body Is Not Separate From the Story
The larger lesson was nevertheless important to me.
The person experiencing fear is not a mind floating separately from a body.
The brain is biological.
The nervous system is biological.
The stress response is biological.
The immune system is biological.
Memory is biological.
Development is biological.
The environment in which a child grows therefore becomes part of the conditions under which that biology develops.
That does not give us permission to explain every illness through trauma.
It gives us good reason not to pretend that experience and biology are unrelated.
Before I Know I Am Afraid
Another area I found fascinating concerned the speed with which the brain can respond to possible danger.
The conscious mind does not necessarily get the first vote.
The visual system is continually sampling the environment.
Movement.
Contrast.
Facial expression.
Changes at the edge of vision.
Something new appearing.
Something moving towards us.
Research has identified rapid subcortical pathways involving structures including the superior colliculus, pulvinar and amygdala which can contribute to orienting towards possible threat.
At the same time, visual cortex and other cortical networks are also processing the scene.
The modern picture is therefore more complicated than one primitive pathway firing first and a rational brain arriving neatly afterwards.
There are multiple pathways.
They interact.
And they can influence the organism before I have consciously formed the sentence:
“I am in danger.”
The Edge of Vision
Peripheral awareness is particularly interesting.
The edge of the visual field can be very effective at detecting movement and change.
It may tell us that something important has happened before we have identified exactly what that thing is.
The first useful message does not have to be:
“That is a dangerous person standing three metres to my left.”
It may initially be closer to:
“Something changed.”
“Pay attention.”
For survival, that may be enough to begin orienting towards possible danger.
The Same Scene Has More Than One Meaning
The remarkable part is that the environment is also being evaluated at other levels.
Who is this person?
What does that expression mean?
Have I seen this before?
Am I safe here?
Can I leave?
Will resistance make things worse?
What response will preserve the relationship?
What happens if I say no?
Prefrontal and other cortical networks contribute context, memory, expectation, social meaning, regulation and possible responses.
The biological alarm and the social interpretation are not separate worlds.
They are interacting parts of one organism trying to remain safe.
Fight and Flight Were Never the Whole Story
Most people have heard of fight or flight.
It is a useful description.
It is not the complete defensive repertoire.
Sometimes the organism prepares to fight.
Sometimes it prepares to escape.
Sometimes movement is inhibited while attention becomes intensely focused.
That is commonly described as freezing.
When danger becomes overwhelming and neither fighting nor escaping appears possible, more profound forms of immobility can occur.
These are not moral decisions.
They are defensive responses produced by biological systems concerned with survival.
Freeze Can Include Losing the Ability to Speak
Freezing does not always look dramatic.
Sometimes a person simply cannot respond.
They may know what they want to say.
They may understand what is happening.
But speech does not come.
That inability may last moments during an overwhelming event.
Other people can find that particular experiences or subjects remain extraordinarily difficult to speak about for much longer.
Profound defensive immobility can include suppression of vocal behaviour.
That does not mean every period of silence is a freeze response.
There are many reasons a person may be unable or unwilling to speak.
But it gives us another possibility to consider before interpreting silence as consent, indifference, agreement or evidence that nothing happened.
Fawning and Appeasement
There is another response which many survivors recognise immediately.
Fawning.
The scientific literature more often discusses related behaviours in terms such as appeasement or affiliative survival strategies.
I would not give fawning exactly the same established neurobiological status as fight, flight or freezing.
But the behaviour itself is easy to recognise.
The threatened person becomes agreeable.
Helpful.
Reassuring.
Polite.
Compliant.
They watch the other person's mood closely.
They try to become whatever will reduce the danger.
For a child who cannot fight an adult and cannot leave, appeasement may be an extraordinarily intelligent survival strategy.
Survival Can Look Like Personality
That possibility matters later in life.
A response practised repeatedly during development can eventually look like part of the person's personality.
The person is described as overly agreeable.
Avoidant.
Hypervigilant.
Unable to say no.
Excessively concerned with other people's reactions.
Those descriptions may accurately identify behaviour.
They do not necessarily explain where the behaviour came from.
What appears to be personality may sometimes contain an old solution to an old environment.
That does not mean every personality characteristic is caused by trauma.
It means the history of the adaptation may matter.
The Brain Learns the Environment
A nervous system repeatedly exposed to threat learns something about the world in which it has to survive.
Which sounds matter.
Which movements matter.
Which expressions matter.
Which changes in tone matter.
Which adults are unpredictable.
Which questions are dangerous.
Which rooms are unsafe.
Which forms of resistance increase risk.
Which forms of compliance reduce it.
The resulting response may later appear excessive in a safer environment.
But it may once have been accurately calibrated to a dangerous one.
What Saves Us Once Can Limit Us Later
There is another feature of survival which I found particularly important.
If a response helps an organism escape or reduce danger, there is good reason for that response to be learned.
Avoiding the dangerous person worked.
Remaining silent worked.
Not entering the room worked.
Becoming agreeable worked.
Not thinking about the event worked.
At the time, those responses may have been remarkably successful.
They helped the person survive.
The difficulty comes later.
A response which once protected the person can continue after the original danger has passed.
Avoidance Can Teach Itself
Avoidance can become self-reinforcing.
Something produces fear.
The person avoids it.
The fear decreases.
The nervous system receives a powerful lesson:
Avoidance made me safe.
So avoiding the same thing becomes more likely next time.
The strategy succeeded according to the immediate measurement available to the organism.
The danger went away.
Or appeared to.
But the same strategy can later restrict life after the original danger has disappeared.
Survival Strategies Can Outlive the Danger
This is one reason I am reluctant to describe every persistent behaviour simply as a defect.
A behaviour may have begun as a successful solution.
Silence may have prevented punishment.
Fawning may have reduced anger.
Avoidance may have prevented another encounter.
Hypervigilance may have provided warning.
Dissociative responses may in some circumstances help a person endure an experience which cannot readily be escaped.
The problem is not necessarily that the organism learned badly.
It may have learned extremely well from a dangerous environment.
The problem is that the old lesson can remain active after the environment changes.
Updating Survival Knowledge
Recovery therefore cannot always consist simply of telling somebody:
“Stop doing that.”
The nervous system may need new evidence.
This person is safe.
This room has an exit.
I can say no.
I can speak.
I can leave.
I can disagree without being harmed.
The danger is not happening now.
In that sense, part of recovery can involve updating survival knowledge.
Safety Has to Be Experienced
This also means that telling somebody:
“You are safe now,”
may not be enough.
The conscious statement and the automatic threat system do not necessarily update at the same speed.
Safety may have to be experienced repeatedly.
Choice may have to be restored.
The ability to leave may matter.
Predictability may matter.
Control over one's own body may matter.
Being listened to may matter.
Being believed may matter.
Being allowed to say no may matter.
That is where neuroscience, trauma-informed practice and personal sovereignty begin to meet.
The Buttons Did Not Matter
There is an example which has stayed with me for years, although I still need to recover the original case before identifying it precisely.
My memory is of a very young girl giving evidence concerning sexual abuse in a legal proceeding associated with Toowoomba.
She described an abuser undoing buttons on her clothing.
She was then expected to say how many buttons he had undone.
She could not.
As I remember the case, that inability was treated as significant in the assessment of her evidence.
Until I locate the original material I leave the identifying details open.
But the problem illustrated by the example is independently important.
Why Would the Child Count the Buttons?
Consider what the child's brain would have been required to do in order to answer that later question.
She would have needed to reconstruct the clothing.
The movement of the offender's hands.
Which buttons had been closed.
Which became open.
And then provide their number.
But during the event, why would the number of buttons have mattered?
The child's immediate problem was not arithmetic.
It was safety.
Who is doing this?
What is happening?
Am I in danger?
Can I stop it?
Can I get away?
What happens next?
Those matters have survival significance.
The number of buttons may have had none.
Memory Is Not a Video Recording
Modern research on memory has repeatedly challenged the idea that a person stores a complete recording of an event which can later simply be played back.
Attention is selective.
Encoding is selective.
Retrieval is reconstructive.
Stress can alter what receives attention and what is later retrievable.
The fact that an event is important or traumatic does not guarantee perfect memory for every surrounding detail.
Central and Peripheral Detail
A threatening event may concentrate attention on matters central to danger while incidental details receive less attention.
Who was there?
What were they doing?
Where was the danger?
What happened to my body?
How can I escape?
Those may matter more to the organism than:
How many buttons?
What time was it exactly?
What colour was an object in the corner?
How many times did something occur across a prolonged period?
A person may remember the central meaning of an event without retaining a courtroom-ready inventory of peripheral detail.
The Wrong Test of Truth
A legal system can therefore make a serious mistake.
It can ask a traumatised child for a detail which may never have received significant attention in the first place.
When the child cannot supply it, the absence can be interpreted as a failure of credibility.
The assumption becomes:
If this really happened, you should remember everything.
But human memory does not work that way.
Children should not be evaluated as though frightened human beings become video recorders.
The Royal Commission Had to Address This
Many years later, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse commissioned research specifically examining misconceptions about memory and complainants' evidence.
The researchers identified common assumptions which did not match the scientific understanding of memory.
Among them was the expectation that memory should be complete, stable and photographic.
They also examined the mistaken assumption that gaps or inconsistencies in an account necessarily establish that the account as a whole is inaccurate.
The fact that such guidance became necessary tells us something about the way legal systems had sometimes been evaluating human memory.
The Court Can Help Create the Inconsistency
There is another difficulty.
Repeated or highly specific questioning can pressure a child to supply an answer even where memory contains no reliable answer.
The child may assume that the adult asking the question expects something.
They may guess.
They may revise an earlier answer.
They may become confused.
The resulting inconsistency can then be used against them.
The process intended to test reliability can sometimes contribute to the appearance of unreliability.
“I Don't Know” May Be the Best Evidence Available
That is why the words:
“I don't know,”
matter.
They may be evidence of uncertainty rather than dishonesty.
They may indicate that the person refuses to invent detail which memory does not contain.
A system genuinely interested in evidence should value that distinction.
Silence Is Not an Empty Space
This connects directly with freezing.
A child who cannot speak is not necessarily a child who has nothing to say.
A child who cannot supply peripheral detail is not necessarily a child who does not remember the central event.
A person who does not disclose immediately has not thereby demonstrated that nothing happened.
A person who struggles to speak about one subject while speaking easily about another has not necessarily become unreliable.
The missing information has to remain missing until evidence permits us to go further.
We should not automatically fill the gap with an accusation of dishonesty.
Why Trauma-Informed Practice Matters
This is where trauma-informed practice becomes more than fashionable language.
It changes the starting question.
Not simply:
“What is wrong with this person?”
But:
“What happened to this person?”
“What is happening now?”
“What makes this person feel unsafe?”
“What response may once have protected them?”
“What choices have been taken away?”
“What would help restore safety and agency?”
Behaviour which looks irrational, oppositional, avoidant or uncooperative may make more sense when its history is understood.
Trauma-Informed Does Not Mean Believing Everything
There is an important qualification.
Trauma-informed practice should not mean abandoning evidence.
It does not mean every account is necessarily accurate in every detail.
It does not mean every behaviour has a traumatic origin.
It does not mean every diagnosis is wrong.
It means the possibility of trauma and adaptation is considered rather than ignored.
And the evidence is examined without relying upon myths about how a traumatised person is supposed to behave.
Rights Are Not Decorative Language
This helps explain why rights matter.
Rights are not decorative language added after harm occurs.
At their best they form part of the architecture intended to prevent one person's authority from overwhelming another person's developing self.
The right to bodily integrity matters because powerful people can act upon bodies.
Freedom of thought matters because powerful people can attempt to control belief.
The right to speak matters because powerful institutions can prefer silence.
Procedural fairness matters because authorities can be wrong.
Access to evidence matters because certainty can be manufactured by those who control information.
Belief, Claim and Evidence
Personal sovereignty therefore requires more than the right to hold a belief.
It requires some understanding of what kind of proposition a belief is.
There is a difference between somebody saying something is true and demonstrating that it is true.
There is a difference between:
an assertion,
a belief,
a report,
testimony,
evidence,
and a conclusion which has survived systematic attempts to test it.
Those distinctions should not be reserved for scientists and lawyers.
Children can begin learning them in age-appropriate ways.
What Evidence Does
Scientific thinking does not begin by deciding which answer we would prefer.
It begins with a claim which remains vulnerable to examination.
Can it be observed?
Measured?
Tested?
Compared with alternative explanations?
Independently checked?
Does it make predictions capable of failing?
Where repetition is possible, can the observation be reproduced?
Some scientific questions concern events which cannot literally be repeated.
A geological event does not have to occur again before it can leave testable evidence.
The important feature is that the explanation remains exposed to evidence which could support it, modify it or show it to be wrong.
The One-Off Miracle
A miracle provides a useful example.
Suppose somebody recovers unexpectedly from illness.
The recovery may be real.
Medical records may establish that it occurred.
Doctors may genuinely be unable to explain why.
Then somebody says:
“God caused the recovery.”
That is an additional claim.
The absence of another explanation does not by itself establish this one.
An unexplained event remains unexplained until evidence allows us to go further.
Can Religion Be Trauma-Informed and Evidence-Informed?
A religious organisation can use evidence-based knowledge.
It can become trauma-informed.
It can use what psychology, medicine and child-development research have learned about fear, attachment, coercion, memory, consent and safety.
It can alter practices when evidence shows that they cause harm.
It can listen to survivors.
It can place child safety above institutional reputation.
None of that requires abandoning religion.
But using evidence-based practices does not automatically transform supernatural claims into scientific findings.
Those are different categories.
A church can be evidence-informed in the way it protects a child while continuing to hold beliefs which belong to faith rather than empirical science.
Critical thinking requires us to understand the difference.
The Right to Say “I Don't Know”
One of the most important freedoms I know is extraordinarily simple.
I don't know.
Those words leave room for evidence.
They leave room for another person.
They leave room for correction.
They leave room for discovery.
An authority which cannot tolerate:
“I don't know,”
often replaces uncertainty with obedience.
Personal sovereignty allows uncertainty to remain uncertainty.
The Right to Change My Mind
Sovereignty also includes the right to change.
A conclusion reached at twenty does not have to become a prison at seventy.
New evidence can arrive.
Old evidence can be re-examined.
A memory can become clearer.
A memory can also become less certain.
A document can contradict what I thought.
Another explanation can become stronger.
Changing one's mind in response to better evidence is not weakness.
It is one of the purposes of thinking.
My Body
Personal sovereignty begins somewhere very physical.
My body.
Other people may sometimes have legitimate reasons to intervene.
Emergency medicine provides obvious examples.
Children require protection and care.
Law can sometimes constrain bodily freedom.
But intervention requires justification.
Authority over another person's body should never be assumed merely because somebody occupies a professional, parental or religious position.
Consent matters.
Capacity matters.
Information matters.
Necessity matters.
And the ability to say no matters.
My Mind
The same principle applies to thought.
Other people can influence me.
Teach me.
Persuade me.
Challenge me.
Give me evidence.
Point out that I am wrong.
They cannot legitimately manufacture belief merely by demanding it.
A mind is not made sovereign by never being challenged.
It becomes more sovereign by gaining the capacity to examine challenges and respond to them.
My Memory
Memory presents another difficulty.
Personal sovereignty does not require me to pretend that my memory is perfect.
Quite the opposite.
It requires me to know the difference between:
what I remember directly,
what somebody later told me,
what a document records,
what I infer,
what seems probable,
and what remains uncertain.
That distinction has become one of the methods of this book.
The Record Is a Layer, Not the Person
Institutions create records.
Medical records.
Police records.
School records.
Court records.
Psychological reports.
Church records.
Those records can be enormously valuable.
They can preserve information I have forgotten.
They can establish dates.
They can contradict me.
They can support me.
But a record was still produced by a person or system.
It can contain error.
Interpretation.
Omission.
Assumption.
A record is evidence.
It is not automatically the entire truth about the human being described inside it.
The Label Is Not the Person
The same applies to labels.
A label can be useful.
It can allow people to describe a pattern.
It can open access to treatment or support.
It can make communication easier.
But the label should remain answerable to evidence.
It should not become an identity imposed upon a person irrespective of what later evidence shows.
The person does not become the word written about them.
The Outside Door
Sovereignty also requires some means of comparing explanations.
A person enclosed entirely within one system may have very little opportunity to see the system itself.
That is why the outside door matters.
Other books.
Other people.
Other cultures.
Other religions.
People without religion.
Science.
History.
Independent advocates.
People who can hear a question without requiring a predetermined answer.
An outside perspective does not have to tell us what to think.
Its first value may simply be showing us that another way of thinking is possible.
Freedom Is Not the Absence of Influence
Nobody reaches adulthood uninfluenced.
Parents influence us.
Schools.
Friends.
Religion.
Culture.
Advertising.
Politics.
Doctors.
Books.
Science.
Technology.
Chance encounters.
Personal sovereignty cannot mean eliminating influence.
It means developing the capacity to recognise influence.
To examine it.
To keep what survives examination.
To modify what needs modification.
And to reject what does not.
Sovereignty Is Not Domination
There is another boundary.
My sovereignty does not give me ownership of anybody else.
Freedom does not mean:
“I am now entitled to impose my certainty upon you.”
The principle has to be reciprocal.
If I want the freedom to reject another person's religion, I have to recognise their freedom to hold it.
If I want my body respected, I have to respect another person's body.
If I want my questions tolerated, I have to tolerate questions directed at me.
If I want evidence to matter when somebody makes a claim about me, I have to allow evidence to matter when I make a claim about somebody else.
Agency Brings Responsibility
Personal sovereignty therefore contains responsibility as well as freedom.
As capacity increases, so does responsibility for the choices we make.
I may be influenced by my history.
That does not automatically make every later action somebody else's responsibility.
Understanding causation is not the same as abolishing accountability.
It can instead help us create better choices.
The Right to Reject the Story Written for Me
Many people encounter stories about themselves which existed before they had any opportunity to answer them.
The difficult child.
The bad child.
The sinful child.
The sick person.
The unreliable person.
The person who always causes trouble.
The person whose account should not be believed.
Personal sovereignty includes the right to examine those stories.
Some may contain truth.
Some may contain misunderstanding.
Some may contain evidence.
Some may be nothing more than inherited judgement.
I am entitled to ask which is which.
The Right to Tell My Own Story
That does not give me exclusive ownership of reality.
Other people may remember events differently.
Documents may contradict me.
Evidence may require correction.
But I am still entitled to participate in the account of my own life.
I do not have to disappear beneath the records other people created about me.
Nor do I have to replace those records with an equally rigid personal myth.
The purpose is not to win every contradiction.
It is to preserve the layers.
Between the Layers
That returns me to the method of this book.
Memory is one layer.
The record is another.
What somebody told me is another.
Later interpretation is another.
Science can add another.
Historical evidence another.
What I understand today may differ from what I understood yesterday.
The reality may not sit completely inside any single layer.
Sometimes it emerges between them.
I Do Not Need to Know Everything
Personal sovereignty does not require certainty.
That may be one of its greatest freedoms.
I can say:
I remember this.
I am uncertain about that.
This document says something different.
I have not resolved the contradiction.
I once believed this.
I no longer do.
I do not know.
Those statements do not weaken sovereignty.
They demonstrate ownership of the question.
The Freedom to Become
The child begins surrounded by other people's explanations.
That is unavoidable.
The task of development is not to emerge untouched by them.
It is to become increasingly capable of examining them.
Some inherited things may become deeply valued.
Some may be discarded.
Some may be understood differently.
Some questions may remain open for life.
The important thing is that the developing person eventually has a meaningful part in deciding.
What Personal Sovereignty Means to Me
Personal sovereignty means that my body is not simply available to authority.
My mind is not communal property.
My beliefs are not inherited obligations.
My fear is not evidence that somebody else's supernatural claim is true.
My silence is not automatically consent.
My compliance is not automatically agreement.
My uncertainty is not somebody else's licence to manufacture certainty.
My memories can be incomplete without somebody else acquiring ownership of them.
Records about me can be important without becoming more human than I am.
Labels can describe without being allowed to imprison.
Evidence can correct me without humiliating me.
And changing my mind does not require me to apologise for having learned.
The Right to Become Oneself
The preceding chapters began with a child threatened by Hell.
They moved through Satan.
Exorcism.
The God I had been told about.
Other ways of thinking about God.
The teaching of fear.
What children are taught now.
When religion becomes abuse.
And the child's freedom of thought.
For me, those questions eventually lead here.
A child should not have to become the person an authority requires in order to remain safe.
A developing human being should have the opportunity to discover who they are.
To think.
To question.
To compare.
To learn.
To reject.
To accept.
To change.
To say no.
To say yes.
And to say:
I don't know yet.
Personal Sovereignty
Personal sovereignty is not freedom from every influence.
It is the growing ability to recognise influence, understand its effects and decide what authority it should continue to possess.
It is not certainty.
It is ownership of the question.
It is not isolation.
It is participation without surrendering the self.
It is not the right to dominate others.
It is the right not to be unnecessarily dominated by them.
It is the restoration and protection of a person's capacity to know what they think, distinguish evidence from authority, recognise coercion, understand their own responses, make choices, revise those choices and remain an author of their own life.
That, more than obedience, is where I now locate freedom.
Explore Your Own Personal Sovereignty
The questions in this chapter are not limited to my life.
Readers who would like to examine some of them in relation to their own experience can continue into the Personal Sovereignty project.
It is an opportunity to explore authority, belief, consent, coercion, memory, autonomy and the influences which have helped shape your own life.
