We tend to think of our psychological lives as something deeply personal. Our memories, relationships, anxieties, desires and disappointments appear to belong to us, shaped by the particular circumstances of our upbringing and the experiences that have followed. When we struggle, we often look inward for explanations, searching our histories for the origins of our distress or questioning what it is about ourselves that makes life feel so difficult.
Yet none of us develops independently of the world in which we live. We are born into societies already organised around particular beliefs about success, failure, belonging, identity and power. Long before we have the language to question these arrangements, we begin absorbing their assumptions. We learn what is valued, what is rewarded, what is considered acceptable and, perhaps most significantly, where we might fit within the social order.
Some of these messages are communicated directly through family, education, religion and community. Others are less visible, embedded in the economic and political structures that determine the opportunities available to us, the security we experience and the extent to which we believe our lives are within our control.
By adulthood, the distinction between what we have learned about ourselves and what society has taught us to believe can become difficult to recognise.
A person may experience themselves as inadequate without questioning the expectations against which they are measuring their worth. Another may feel ashamed of their financial circumstances, interpreting structural disadvantage as personal failure. Someone who has repeatedly encountered discrimination or exclusion may begin anticipating rejection even in situations where it is not immediately apparent.
These are not simply political experiences, nor are they exclusively psychological ones. They exist somewhere in the relationship between the individual and the world.
The World Health Organization (2025) identifies the conditions in which people are born, grow, work and live, alongside their access to power, money and resources, as fundamental influences on health and wellbeing. Such findings challenge the assumption that psychological suffering can be adequately understood through individual experience alone.
But statistics, however compelling, reveal only part of the story. They tell us something about the distribution of suffering, less about how social conditions become woven into the intimate experience of being a person.
How does economic insecurity become shame? How does social exclusion become an expectation of rejection? At what point does political powerlessness begin to resemble personal helplessness? And how much of what we understand as our own psychological difficulty might also reflect the circumstances within which we have learned to live?
These questions become particularly relevant in psychotherapy, where the individual arrives not only with a personal history but with the often-unspoken influence of the society that helped shape it.
Consider the psychological inheritance of social class. We might understand class primarily through income, occupation or education, yet its influence extends into more subtle areas of experience. It can shape how comfortable we feel expressing an opinion, approaching authority, occupying unfamiliar social spaces or believing that certain opportunities are available to us.
A child growing up in financial insecurity may learn to monitor the emotional atmosphere of the household, recognising when money is scarce or when asking for something creates additional pressure. They may become resourceful, independent and attentive to others, but they may also develop an enduring sense that their needs are burdensome.
Another child, growing up in materially secure circumstances, may inherit different expectations: that achievement is essential, that status must be maintained or that personal worth depends upon continued success.
Neither experience determines the adult that child will become. Yet both illustrate how economic circumstances can acquire psychological meaning, becoming part of the internal narratives through which we understand ourselves.
What makes these influences particularly powerful is that they are not always experienced as something learned. They may feel like the natural order of things, or simply who we are.
Social psychologist John Jost and his colleagues have explored how people can come to justify existing social arrangements, sometimes even when those arrangements disadvantage them. Their work on system justification suggests that accepting the legitimacy of familiar structures can help satisfy psychological needs for certainty, stability and belonging (Jost and Banaji, 1994; Jost, 2020).
This offers an intriguing possibility: that some of the beliefs we hold about our own limitations may be sustained not only by personal experience but by a need to make sense of the social world upon which we depend.
If society repeatedly communicates that success is primarily the result of individual effort, what happens to someone who works hard but remains economically insecure? If independence is celebrated as evidence of personal strength, how might someone understand their need for support? And when opportunity is presented as universally available, how easily might exclusion become interpreted as inadequacy?
The language of personal responsibility can be empowering. It recognises our capacity to make choices and influence our circumstances. But it can also become psychologically punitive when it fails to acknowledge the unequal conditions within which those choices are made.
We may find ourselves taking responsibility for circumstances over which we have remarkably little control.
This does not mean that personal agency is an illusion, or that social circumstances determine everything about us. Rather, agency is always exercised within a context. The choices available to one person may be substantially different from those available to another, even when both are encouraged to believe that their futures depend entirely upon individual determination.
Political decisions are central to this context. Housing policy, employment protections, education, healthcare, taxation and social welfare are not abstract matters confined to parliamentary debate. They influence whether people experience stability or insecurity, whether families can plan for the future and whether individuals have sufficient emotional and material resources to pursue lives beyond immediate survival.
Political arrangements help determine the conditions in which psychological life unfolds.
Paul Farmer's work on structural violence offers an important perspective here. Farmer (2004) examined how historical, economic and political structures contribute to unequal experiences of suffering, particularly where disadvantage becomes so embedded in everyday life that its causes are difficult to see.
His work was primarily concerned with health inequalities and the material consequences of structural injustice, rather than psychotherapy itself. Nevertheless, it invites an important question for psychological practice: what might we overlook when we focus exclusively on the suffering individual without examining the conditions that contribute to their distress?
A person experiencing persistent anxiety about losing their home may benefit from exploring how uncertainty affects their relationships, sleep and sense of safety. Yet that anxiety may also be an understandable response to a genuine threat. To interpret it solely as an expression of earlier insecurity would risk overlooking something essential about their present circumstances.
Equally, someone who has experienced racism, homophobia, transphobia or other forms of discrimination may carry the psychological consequences of repeated encounters with exclusion. These experiences can influence trust, self-expression, identity and the anticipation of danger.
Their impact cannot always be separated neatly into past and present. Earlier experiences may sensitise us to future threats, while contemporary experiences may confirm fears that developed long before.
There is also a danger in treating culture or identity as a complete explanation for someone's psychological world. People who share an ethnicity, religion, sexuality or social background may have profoundly different experiences. Cultural traditions can provide belonging, continuity and resilience as well as expectations that feel restrictive. Social identity intersects with class, family history, geography, gender and countless other circumstances.
The task is not to assume what an identity means, but to remain curious about what it has meant for the person living it.
These considerations become more complicated when we turn towards the increasingly polarised political environments in which many of us now find ourselves. Political disagreement has always existed, but contemporary forms of communication can make conflict feel immediate, relentless and difficult to escape. Questions of identity, immigration, inequality, national belonging and social change are frequently presented through competing narratives that invite certainty rather than reflection.
Within this atmosphere, political differences can become entangled with deeply personal questions about safety, recognition and belonging.
A disagreement between friends or family members may be experienced not simply as a difference of opinion but as a threat to connection. Someone may withdraw from conversations because they fear rejection, while another becomes increasingly confrontational, perhaps experiencing disagreement as evidence that they are not being heard.
Our personal histories inevitably influence these encounters. Someone who learned in childhood that disagreement threatened attachment may experience political conflict with particular intensity. Another who grew up feeling powerless may find that institutional indifference evokes something painfully familiar.
Yet it would be equally mistaken to reduce these experiences to childhood alone. Political decisions can have direct consequences for people's rights, security and everyday lives. What feels theoretical to one person may be experienced as an immediate threat by another.
The relationship between inner and outer reality is therefore neither simple nor one-directional. Our histories shape how we encounter the world, while the world continually reshapes the meanings we attach to those histories.
Perhaps one of the more unsettling consequences of contemporary political life is the gradual erosion of people's belief that their participation matters.
We are exposed to extraordinary amounts of information about conflict, economic instability, environmental uncertainty, inequality and human suffering. Much of it asks us to care, to respond, to form opinions and to remain informed. Yet the opportunities to influence these events can feel remote.
There is a psychological tension in being continually made aware of problems while experiencing little capacity to change them.
For some, this produces anxiety or anger. For others, a growing sense of exhaustion, withdrawal or indifference. What appears to be political apathy may sometimes be something more complicated: a form of resignation emerging from repeated experiences of perceived powerlessness.
The question What difference does it make? may begin as a response to political events but gradually extend into other areas of life.
Why participate if nothing changes? Why express an opinion if nobody listens? Why imagine a different future if the conditions required to create it appear increasingly inaccessible?
Over time, the loss of perceived influence can become a loss of possibility.
We should be careful not to assume that every expression of political disengagement represents psychological distress. People withdraw from political discussion for many reasons, including thoughtful disagreement with its terms, competing priorities or a deliberate wish to protect their attention.
Nevertheless, there is something worth exploring in the relationship between collective disillusionment and personal hopelessness.
When people cease to believe that their voices matter, the consequences may extend beyond political participation. Their sense of themselves as active contributors to the world can begin to diminish.
And yet the opposite response is also possible. Uncertainty may encourage people to seek greater certainty, stronger group identification or more definitive explanations for complicated social problems. The wish for belonging and coherence can make simple narratives particularly compelling when the surrounding world feels difficult to understand.
Neither withdrawal nor certainty necessarily tells us what lies beneath a person's political position. Both may express attempts to negotiate anxiety, vulnerability and the need for meaning.
This is where a deeper psychological understanding becomes valuable, not to explain away political beliefs, but to recognise the emotional experiences that may accompany them.
The psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró, whose work emerged from the political violence and social inequalities of El Salvador, questioned psychological approaches that separated individual suffering from its historical and social context. His liberation psychology challenged practitioners to consider whose experiences were being recognised, whose perspectives were being privileged and how psychological understanding might inadvertently reinforce existing inequalities (Martín-Baró, 1994).
His work raises questions that remain relevant beyond the particular circumstances in which it developed.
When we describe someone as anxious, are we sufficiently curious about what they are anxious in response to? When we understand someone as lacking confidence, have we considered the experiences that may have taught them their voice carries little authority? And when we encounter hopelessness, are we always attentive to the difference between an internal conviction that nothing can change and a realistic assessment of severely constrained circumstances?
These distinctions matter because the language of psychology is never entirely neutral. The ways we understand distress influence where we locate responsibility, what we believe requires attention and which possibilities for change we are able to imagine.
Psychotherapy has much to offer through its exploration of personal history, unconscious processes and relational experience. Understanding the influence of childhood, attachment, loss and earlier relationships can illuminate patterns that otherwise remain difficult to recognise.
But there is a risk when these perspectives become the only explanations available to us.
If every experience of helplessness is understood as a repetition of childhood powerlessness, we may overlook the realities of a person's present life. If every difficulty with authority is interpreted through parental relationships, we may miss the significance of encounters with institutions that have genuinely failed or excluded them.
Equally, it would be reductive to explain every psychological difficulty through politics, class or social structures. People retain complex internal lives, personal histories and individual ways of responding to their circumstances. Social conditions influence us, but they do not produce identical psychological experiences.
The challenge is to hold these perspectives together without allowing one to erase the other.
This requires therapists to remain attentive to their own social positions and assumptions. Our understanding of security, opportunity, authority and belonging is shaped by our experiences too. What appears manageable from one social position may feel profoundly threatening from another.
Even the therapeutic relationship exists within a wider context of power, access and inequality. The ability to afford therapy, find time for it, trust a professional or speak openly about private experiences cannot be assumed.
A person's hesitation may reflect their earlier relationships, but it may also arise from experiences of discrimination, cultural expectations about privacy or understandable caution towards professional authority.
The therapist's task is not to arrive with a political interpretation, but to create sufficient space for these different possibilities to be explored.
Nor should therapy become a place where the therapist's political beliefs are presented as psychological truths. Our responsibility is to remain curious about the meanings clients attach to their experiences, including when their understanding of the world differs substantially from our own.
Perhaps the deeper challenge is to recognise that psychological understanding requires more than looking inward.
We are not simply individuals who happen to live within societies. We are formed through relationships with families, communities, institutions, histories and cultures. We inherit ways of thinking about ourselves that may have existed long before we were born. We respond to political and economic circumstances that influence our opportunities, our sense of security and our capacity to imagine a future.
Some of these influences become conscious beliefs. Others remain largely unexamined, appearing instead as shame, ambition, fear, resignation or a persistent feeling that something about us is insufficient.
To recognise these connections is not to deny personal responsibility or diminish the importance of individual psychological work. It is to question whether our understanding of responsibility has sometimes become too narrow.
Therapy cannot resolve economic inequality, political polarisation or the social conditions that contribute to suffering. It cannot offer security where material insecurity remains, nor can insight alone overcome structural exclusion.
What it can offer is an opportunity to distinguish between what belongs to our personal histories, what has been shaped by the world around us and how these different experiences have become entangled.
Such recognition may not remove the difficulties we face. But it can alter our relationship with them, allowing us to question assumptions we have carried as personal truths and recognise possibilities that were previously difficult to imagine.
There may be something quietly significant in discovering that an experience of inadequacy is not necessarily evidence of personal failure, or that feelings of helplessness do not always indicate an absence of strength.
And perhaps there is a wider question here, extending beyond psychotherapy itself.
If we increasingly understand psychological wellbeing as an individual responsibility, what happens to our collective responsibility for the conditions in which people are expected to live?
The answer cannot be found entirely within the therapy room, any more than it can be found solely within politics. But the question belongs in both.
For the world we inhabit does not remain outside us. It becomes part of how we understand ourselves, what we fear, what we believe we deserve and what we imagine might still be possible.
To understand the world within us, we must also be willing to examine the world around us.
References
Farmer, P. (2004) ‘An anthropology of structural violence’, Current Anthropology, 45(3), pp. 305–325
Jost, J.T. (2020) A Theory of System Justification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jost, J.T. and Banaji, M.R. (1994) ‘The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(1), pp. 1–27.
Martín-Baró, I. (1994) Writings for a Liberation Psychology. Edited by A. Aron and S. Corne. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
World Health Organization (2025) World Report on Social Determinants of Health Equity. Geneva: World Health Organization.
Sean Kelly, MBACP — integrative psychotherapist and counsellor working in London W1, Hastings & St Leonards, and online. Registered member of the BACP.