the AA cage, secondhand
and like in AA they say they’ll love you till you can like love yourself and accept yourself, so you don’t care what people see or think anymore, and you can finally step out of the cage and quit hiding.
Context
Gately paraphrasing the Program's promise in his own newcomer's grammar — they'll love you until you can love yourself, and then you can step out of the cage — is the doctrine at its most naive and its most load-bearing at once. He offers it as a fumbling analogy for why anyone would join a fellowship, but the sentence carries the theme's central figure whole: recovery as the door of a cage, the borrowed love that precedes self-love, the hiding one gets to quit. He does not know he is quoting scripture.