Power, Systems, and the Stories We’re Living Inside: Reflections on Foucault
Discipline and Punish & The History of Sexuality
Reflections on Michel Foucault's work on power, identity, and the stories systems tell us
(Read 2007 & reread 2025)
Some books change the way you think, even if they never mention therapy.
Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality are those kinds of books for me.
I was first introduced to Foucault while I was at Williams College. At the time, I'll admit, parts of his writing felt incredibly dense. (Honestly, they still do.) Recently I found myself curious enough to go back and reread Discipline and Punish, and I was struck by how many of the ideas landed differently nearly two decades later.
They're not books I would recommend to everyone. They certainly aren't self-help books, and they're definitely not light reading.
But they have quietly influenced the way I think about people.
More specifically, they've influenced the way I think about shame, identity, power, belonging, and the invisible systems that shape all of us long before we ever walk into a therapy office.
Asking Different Questions
Foucault invites us to become curious about things we usually take for granted.
Questions like:
Where did our ideas about "normal" come from?
Who gets to decide what's considered healthy?
Why do some identities become accepted while others become pathologized?
What assumptions are built into the institutions we move through every day?
Those questions don't always have simple answers.
But I think they're worth asking.
One of the themes you may notice about me is that I'm fascinated by stories. Not only the stories we tell ourselves, but also the larger cultural stories that quietly shape how we understand ourselves.
Foucault outlines a truth, sometimes the stories we believe about ourselves didn't actually begin with us.
Discipline and Punish: Learning to Watch Ourselves
One of Foucault's best-known books, Discipline and Punish, traces a fascinating shift in how societies maintain order.
Centuries ago, punishment was often public and dramatic. Executions, torture, and visible displays of state power were meant to send a message. Over time, those visible forms of punishment became less common. Instead, systems developed that relied less on fear and more on observation. We are familiar with them as schools, hospitals, prisons, factories and our workplaces. Institutions began organizing people through schedules, evaluations, rules, expectations, and constant measurement.
One of the most memorable ideas in the book is the Panopticon, a prison design where people never actually know whether they're being watched. When I told my partner I was reading this book his first response was something like “ah yes, the panopticon.”
As people feel that they never know when they are being watched, they begin behaving as though they're always being watched. The surveillance becomes internal.
That's the part that has stayed with me.
Because I don't think this only happens in prisons. I think many of us carry our own internal panopticon.
The Inner Critic Isn't Born in a Vacuum
Reading Discipline and Punish, I found myself thinking less about prisons and more about therapy.
So many people I work with carry an internal voice that's constantly evaluating them.
Am I doing enough?
Am I productive enough?
Am I successful enough?
Did I say the wrong thing?
What will people think?
Shouldn't I be doing better by now?
Those questions can feel deeply personal. But Foucault invites us to wonder whether some of them were learned. Not because someone explicitly taught them. But because we spend our lives inside systems that reward productivity, comparison, achievement, and self-monitoring. Of course, this isn't the whole story. Our inner critics also develop through family relationships, trauma, attachment experiences, and countless other influences. I don't think there's ever a single explanation for why people struggle. But I do think it's helpful to remember that our environments shape us in ways we don't always recognize. Sometimes what feels like a personal failure makes much more sense when we widen the lens.
The History of Sexuality: Who Gets to Define "Normal"?
If Discipline and Punish explores how people become disciplined, The History of Sexuality asks a different question.
How do societies decide what kinds of identities exist in the first place?
One of the assumptions Foucault challenges is the idea that sexuality was simply hidden for centuries and then eventually became free to express itself. Instead, he argues something much more interesting. As medicine, psychology, law, and other institutions developed, they didn't simply discover different kinds of sexuality. They began categorizing them, naming them, studying them and defining them. Those categories influenced not only how other people understood identity, but also how people understood themselves.
Reading this today, I found myself thinking about many of the conversations I have with clients around identity. Not because diagnoses or labels are inherently harmful. They can be quite helpful! Sometimes having language for an experience is profoundly validating. (Just ask many autistic or ADHD adults what finally receiving a diagnosis meant to them. )
But labels also have power. They can open doors. They can close doors. They can help us understand ourselves and sometimes they can become stories that feel impossible to step outside of.
What I've Continued to Think About
When I think about these books together, what stays with me isn't any single argument Foucault makes.
It's the invitation to become curious.
Curious about the stories we've inherited.
Curious about the systems we've learned to navigate.
Curious about the beliefs we've come to accept without ever asking where they came from.
I've noticed this same kind of curiosity showing up across many of the books I've been reading lately, even though they come from very different places. Whether I'm reading Foucault, Jenny Odell, Gabor Maté, Brené Brown, or Richard Schwartz, I find myself asking similar questions.
What shaped this person?
What environments have they adapted to?
What messages have they internalized?
And perhaps most importantly...
Do those messages still serve them?
Those feel like deeply therapeutic questions.
Not because they give us easy answers.
But because they create room for compassion.
How This Connects to Therapy
One of the things I appreciate about therapy is that it gives us permission to hold multiple truths at once. Someone's anxiety may be connected to childhood experiences. It may also be shaped by the culture they grew up in. Perfectionism might have roots in family dynamics. It may also be reinforced by schools, workplaces, productivity culture, and social media. Shame may grow from trauma. It may also reflect years of living in environments that repeatedly communicated, directly or indirectly, that parts of who someone was weren't welcome.
I don't think it's ever as simple as saying, "The system caused this." And I don't think it's ever as simple as saying, "This is only about individual choices."
Usually it's both.
That's one of the reasons I find myself returning to systems thinking again and again. It reminds me that people don't exist in isolation. Neither does suffering.
A Personal Reflection
One of the reasons I've continued returning to Foucault over the years is because I've always been fascinated by the stories that shape our lives. When you have an author that shapes or reflects how we as a society think and act it is worth understanding how this story lives in our lives.
Stories are everywhere.
Most of the time we don't even notice them because we've grown up inside them.
What I appreciate about Foucault isn't that he gives us the "right" answers. In fact, I think parts of his work feel incomplete by today's standards. Since these books were written, so many scholars have expanded these conversations through feminism, disability studies, queer theory, trauma research, critical race theory, and lived experience. I'm grateful for those voices too.
Rather than replacing Foucault, I think they continue the conversation. (After all I would not have read Foucault had it not been cited in other books I have read) One of the things I enjoy most about reading broadly is that I don’t have to love every book.
No single author has the whole picture.
Each one simply offers another lens.
For me, books are not valuable because they teach me how to do therapy. They are valuable because they encouraged me to keep asking better questions.
Questions like:
Where did this belief come from?
Who taught someone this story?
Who benefits from it?
Does it still fit?
I don't think therapy is about questioning everything simply for the sake of questioning it. But I do think healing often begins when people realize that some of the stories they've been carrying were never entirely their own.
Digging Deeper
If this post resonated with you, you might also enjoy exploring:
Culture, Power & Belonging – Looking at how systems, identity, and culture shape our experiences and influence mental health.
Narrative Therapy – Exploring how the stories we inherit influence the way we see ourselves, and how those stories can evolve.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) – Understanding how protective parts develop in response to our environments and experiences.
Identity Work – Reflecting on the many influences that shape who we become and making space for authenticity.
Trauma Therapy – Understanding trauma through the lens of the nervous system, relationships, and the contexts in which it develops.
Neurodiversity, Trauma & Compassionate Care – Looking beyond behavior to understand the needs, adaptations, and experiences underneath.
How to Do Nothing – A reflection on attention, productivity, and reclaiming agency in a world designed to pull us in every direction.
Contact Me – If you'd like to explore any of these ideas together, I'd be happy to connect.