Easing Out of the Lion’s Mouth
There’s a saying my grandmother used to repeat: “When you’ve got your head in the lion’s mouth, ease it out.”
That one idea offered guidance when I felt lost. It’s simple, but it carries a deep kind of wisdom. There are situations that don’t pose imminent danger but still threaten your mental and physical health if you continue to engage with them in the same way you always have.
Maybe you’re in a toxic job, a difficult relationship, or enduring a painful chapter of life that feels necessary to complete. Resolution isn’t always found in just walking away. This impossible bind, needing to leave but feeling unable to, is what many clients describe as feeling “trapped.”
In this “trapped space,” there’s often a sense of powerlessness, the feeling that things are being done to you and that you can’t defend or free yourself. In short, you don’t feel safe, whether emotionally, psychologically, or physically. That trapped feeling often doesn’t come out of nowhere; it’s usually the echo of something learned long before.
So How Did You Get Trapped?
I think it’s important to take a minute and name how a person might find themselves in a situation they’re desperate to escape.
See, What Had Happened Was… On-the-Job Training!
“Growing up” while trying to live life at the same time is rocky. You learn as you go, usually the hard way, by making mistakes, learning from them, and moving forward.
Trauma comes in many forms. It isn’t always the obvious or dramatic events you imagine. Occasionally it’s the slow accumulation of fear, instability, or emotional neglect that teaches your nervous system that the world isn’t safe.
The truth is, some people can’t even bring themselves to use the word “trauma,” even when something dramatic or catastrophic has happened to them. Instead, they’ll tell themselves, “It’s not that bad,” or “Other people had it way worse.”
But the things you never acknowledge don’t disappear. The body and psyche remember. The unspoken experiences keep shaping how you see yourself and the world, how you love, how you protect yourself, how you carry responsibility, how you let people in, and even what you expect from life.
Over time, those unseen wounds can land you in situations that cause pain or imbalance, even while feeding some deep, familiar need. (Enter “learning while you live,” what I like to call on-the-job training.)
Sometimes it looks like caring too much for others and not enough for yourself. Sometimes it looks like trying to earn safety through perfection, performance, or control.
These patterns don’t mean you’re a masochist or someone who isn’t very bright. You’re not trying to hurt yourself or anyone else. It’s just that becoming a healthy, self-regulating human is complicated. It’s difficult to learn how to take care of yourself while also showing up for others, especially when you didn’t have a model for it.
And this is how a person with even the best intentions might find themselves in the lion’s mouth, feeling powerless, trapped, confused, and desperate to escape.
Now What?
When you finally realize you’re in the lion’s mouth, the first impulse is usually to do something, anything, to escape the discomfort. And in our modern world, you have endless ways to temporarily numb that feeling.
First Comes TikTok, Anyone?
Everywhere you turn, someone’s preaching healing and self-care like it’s a Nike commercial: “Just do it.” Just quit. Just change. Just say no. As if relief only comes from bold exits and dramatic transformations.
But here’s the truth: for many people, those big moves can be just as messy and destructive as what they’re running from. Scrolling through TikTok or the ’Gram, binge-watching your favorite shows, zoning out for a minute (or thirty), those things may not heal you, but sometimes they hold you long enough to catch your breath. That’s your nervous system buying time.
It’s like when you were a kid and something difficult happened, and you just shut your eyes tight as a way of coping with what felt impossible. The work isn’t about shaming the coping; it’s about learning how to move from temporary comfort to choices that actually sustain you.
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The Power of Planning and Agency
Creating a plan gives you power and agency when you feel trapped. It turns vague hope into direction.
A plan doesn’t have to be grand. It can be as small as naming one next step, setting one boundary, or reaching out for one form of support.
Planning is an act of faith. It says, I may not be able to leave this moment yet, but I’m preparing for the moment I can. That preparation is where strength builds and transformation begins.
Agency grows in those small, steady moves, the moments where you stop reacting and start responding. It’s how you remind yourself that even in challenging circumstances, you still have a say in how you live.
The Role of Therapy in Change
Therapy plays an important role at this stage of the change process. As much as you might wish things could shift with a single insight, a burst of intention, or a radical act, it rarely works that way.
The early process of change and reclaiming peace from difficult situations is often physically and emotionally overwhelming. Examining how your patterns may have led you into this state of mind is crucial. Understanding those patterns can enhance your awareness of past choices, and the past is a valuable indicator of future behavior and certainly the present.
Determining what needs to change to create a more satisfying life requires fortitude, courage, and honesty, but also clarity in recollection. It means understanding not just what you felt at the time, but why you made the choices you did. Can you lead yourself into clarity?
Approaching this process requires gentleness, self-compassion, endurance, and often solitude and sadness, along with kindness and respect for both the person you were when you made those past decisions and the person you are now, who no longer thinks or reacts the same way.
Even after insight arrives and the decisions about what changes need to be made become clear, operationalizing those changes can be challenging. Therapy offers a space for gentle accountability, a space where someone helps you stay mindful of how old habits quietly sneak in to derail your best efforts to live differently.
Healing isn’t just intellectual; it’s embodied. It’s a daily practice of catching yourself with compassion and choosing differently, again and again.
Easing Out With Support
This is the kind of work therapy holds space for, not the performance of being okay, but the process of becoming whole.
It’s about understanding yourself so well that you can free yourself not only from a difficult situation but also from the mindset that placed you there, whether those decisions were made at a different stage of life or shaped by unresolved trauma.
With support, awareness becomes direction. Direction becomes movement. Movement becomes freedom.
That’s how you ease your head out of the lion’s mouth, slowly, wisely, and with care.
When You’re Ready
Every person’s “ease out” looks different, but the goal is always the same: to move toward safety, freedom, and self-respect, one careful step at a time.
When your head is in the lion’s mouth, you don’t jerk away. You move carefully, intentionally, and with respect for what’s holding you. You ease out.
That’s not weakness. It’s wisdom.
And in that process, you rediscover something stronger than escape, the power to decide, on your own terms, how to live again.
Note
This article addresses situations that feel emotionally or psychologically trapped. If you’re experiencing imminent danger to yourself or others, please reach out to emergency services or a crisis hotline immediately.
When You’re Ready for Support
I’m here when you’re ready to explore what your “ease out” might look like. Whether you need help creating that first small plan or support in understanding the patterns that brought you here, we can work through it together, one gentle step at a time.
👉 Schedule a consultation to begin your journey toward freedom, on your terms, at your pace.
