Having described the partner who abused me as an "emotional capitalist", this tracks. The idea that you could have something better outside of the system that you exist in right now is dangerous and has to be shut down.
I'd never experienced anything like it in my life until I was neck-deep in it. The way you wind up suffocating your own dreams, your own capacity to imagine something better - that's just capitalist realism. And the abuse I was getting at home happened to mimic the dynamic at my workplace pretty much one-to-one. Shrink yourself down. Your only value is what you can provide, what can be extracted from you. Expecting anything is dangerous. Any day, any time, I might be getting written up for something banal that happened months ago. Everything you do is surveilled, fuel for discipline. There really was no escape. I forgot how to engage with people without being prepared to get hurt in the process.
Since I got out I've been relearning how to interact with people in a healthy way. I keep noticing ways I've internalized that garbage that I didn't even consider so long as I was in it. That this same dynamic has been normalized at a societal level has some really unsettling ramifications for What Is To Be Done.
There's so much to say about this. Maybe an effortpost sometime.