I was sitting at a bar with one of my besties who’s currently navigating a divorce. But what struck me wasn’t the typical post-breakup bitterness—it was his accountability. He didn’t launch into a tirade about his ex. Instead, he said,
“We both held so tightly to the beliefs we had about each other’s roles in the relationship that we never left room for who we were becoming.”
Holy introspection.
My friend had always taken the lead—booking travel, managing finances, making plans. Not maliciously. Just out of habit. Out of love, even. He assumed his partner wanted that. But what felt like protection to one became control to the other. And that slow erosion of autonomy left his partner feeling invisible. Over time, rebellion set in—not with fireworks, but with silence. A shutdown.
It wasn’t about blame. It was about stagnation. The inability—or unwillingness—to let each other evolve.
And it got me thinking about all the ways we keep people stuck in the boxes we built for them.
We love to talk about personal growth. We want others to see how far we’ve come. But when the people around us start changing, we often resist it. Not because we’re cruel—but because we’re wired for certainty. There’s cognitive ease in knowing who someone is. It makes life feel less chaotic. But that certainty can become a prison for them—and a blind spot for us.
Psychologists call this identity foreclosure. It happens when we make a premature, rigid judgment about who someone is and then cling to it—despite new evidence. Especially in families, where we’re typecast early: the responsible one, the rebel, the peacemaker. You return home for the holidays and suddenly, you’re 15 again, arguing about curfew like you don’t pay your own mortgage.
Even when someone does change—quits drinking, sets new boundaries, starts therapy, or dares to pursue something bold—we often can’t reconcile the new version of them with the version we’ve stored in our mental archives. So we keep treating them the same way. And just like that, they’re forced to choose between shrinking to fit or breaking the relationship.
This is why some friendships fade. Why marriages dissolve. Why family reunions sometimes leave us feeling hollow. Not because of malice—but because we keep relating to who someone was, not who they are now.
Here’s the twist: we can take accountability for our role in these dynamics without swallowing the whole blame sandwich. My friend didn’t say, “It was all my fault.” He said, “I didn’t adapt as we evolved.” That’s a power move—owning your part without owning the entire collapse.
Because relationships—of every kind—require ongoing consent. Who we were when we entered them might not be who we are now. And that’s not failure. That’s evolution.
So what do we do?
We get curious. We update our data. We stop assuming we know people just because we’ve known them a long time. We let others out of the boxes we’ve built—and maybe, finally, we step out of the ones they built for us.
Psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer offers a brilliant approach to this kind of relational mindfulness. She says if you want to truly see someone—especially someone you think you already know—observe three new things about them. That’s it. Three new things. Their laugh. Their silence. How they’ve started saying no when they used to say yes. Langer’s work reminds us that mindfulness isn’t meditation—it’s noticing.
And when you start noticing, you disrupt the autopilot lens you’ve been using to view that person. You become more present. More engaged. You allow for the possibility that maybe they’re not the same version you filed away years ago. And you create space—for them to be who they’re becoming.
If you’re doing the work to grow, but still being treated like the version of yourself from five years ago—or five minutes ago—don’t internalize it. They’re seeing you through the lens of outdated information. That’s their disruption to work through.
And if you’ve been guilty of keeping someone boxed in, ask yourself: What if I’m wrong about them? What if they’re no longer the person I decided they were?
Because no one gets to stay the same forever.
Not if they’re truly living.
Disruption doesn’t always look like grand gestures or radical reinvention. Sometimes it’s as subtle—and as powerful—as letting go of the version of someone you thought you knew, and making room for who they’ve become. Or maybe… who they were always becoming.
Onward and upward, my fellow disrupters.
KZ
