|I suspect, as we get older, we all do that: limit your contact with people that try to block your line of flight. On hubski we call this muting and ignoring.

I'm sure this wasn't what you were thinking, but I've recently been reading into Rogers' Person Centred Therapy and it came up with something very similar to this in the concept of a person. You have your urge to develop yourself, your Organismic Valuing Process, against your Social Mediation; how much you limit yourself to keep your social life.

So someone might want to move to America because it'll benefit themselves developmentally, but their family in the UK would prevent that move. In this case their social mediation limits their OVP and they don't go. If the family didn't exist they would develop more from moving, but with the family moving might lead to less development because of the problems that comes with moving an entire family rather than one person.

Some people don't have these in balance. They're either too happy to risk the happiness of others to help themselves develop, or they risk their own development to please other people. Rogers' original theory had your side of it as more prominent; some people are unhappy because their development is blocked by others and so their mediation must be cut down so they can become happier.

Then they realised that it has to be a balance. Blocking your line of flight is sensible if you're trying to fly into the sun, but that's a risk for less people. Too many people find themselves pinned down because their opinions differ.