Escaping Symbolic Entrapment, Maintaining Social Identities

Symbolic entrapment—which refers to when a person is prevented from taking courses of action because these actions threaten symbolic boundaries that crucially define important and salient social identities—is a ubiquitous part of social life. Previous research suggests that individuals either remain symbolically entrapped or disavow their identities in efforts to escape. By using the case of conservative Christian victims of spousal abuse who divorced their abusive husbands yet remain conservative Christians, I theorize that people escape symbolic entrapment while also maintaining their identities using normative, transforming, and neutralizing vocabularies of motive that make certain courses of action seem appropriate in terms of a group's culture. These motives help individuals escape symbolic entrapment by relieving cognitive dissonance and by providing people with arguments that convince fellow group members of the appropriateness of action. I conclude with empirical, theoretical, and practical implications of this research.