Remembering Ourselves

Imagine a healthy tree and what it needs: water, soil, sunlight, space, roots and time. When a tree struggles in poor soil, nobody says it should have tried harder, so ask the same of us. A healthy human needs love, safety, belonging, rest, play, purpose and to be understood, yet when a person struggles we ask what’s wrong with them instead of what conditions produced this. We understand ecology everywhere except inside ourselves.

Human flourishing isn’t the result of optimisation but of conditions in which our nature can unfold.

What conditions allow people to remain fully human inside systems that were never built to let that happen? Not what’s wrong with the people inside them, but what conditions would let them stay whole.

Where the suppression comes from

Burnout, stress and the many specific psychological injuries people carry, from moral injury to the slow erosion of feeling like yourself, can take hold in a workplace, a relationship, a family, a community or a whole culture, yet they are usually explained away as too much work or too little resilience. Few of us are ever taught why our nervous systems move outside their window of tolerance, or what they need in order to come back. We learn about the systems that run the world long before we learn anything about the most important systems of all, the ones inside us, and that is a huge oversight to our humanity.

My argument is that much of this distress is a signal of identity suppression, the gradual separation from parts of ourselves that we’re required to make in order to remain acceptable inside the systems we live in.

Carl Jung gave us a language for the shadow, the parts of ourselves we reject, suppress or disown, but the conversation usually stops at the individual. We ask what is in the shadow, but we rarely ask who benefits when parts of being human are kept there.

We are born whole, but long before we can choose, we inherit stories. Somewhere you learned that rest must be earned, that your grief had a deadline and that parts of you were too much; that your anger made you hard to love, that wanting was dangerous, and that pleasure had to be earned and kept quiet. Somewhere you learned that if you truly cared about the work you shouldn’t need to be paid well for it, and that good people shouldn’t want power, while a quiet voice still asks who you think you are. Some of these stories arrive before we can question them, and others arrive later, dressed as choice: you chose this career, you agreed to these values, this is simply professionalism. Repeated often enough, stories stop feeling like stories; they become beliefs, and beliefs become identity.

The suppression isn’t random but happens through taboo, and taboo is a governance mechanism: it decides what cannot be named, while stigma decides what we become if we name it anyway. Silence is what the two produce, and silence is load-bearing, because what can’t be named can’t be organised around and what brings shame can’t be claimed as power. This isn’t cultural etiquette but one of the ways systems reproduce themselves.

Stories are the operating system

Stories aren’t an add-on to the way a system runs; they are the operating system. They teach us which emotions are acceptable, which needs are legitimate, whose knowledge counts and which parts of ourselves belong outside the room, and by the time a person can ask who benefits from a narrative, it is already organising how they see the world.

When the filmmaker Damon Gameau joined a call on my Mastery of Systems Leadership programme, he traced the cascade, in which stories shape culture, culture shapes leaders and leaders shape policy, so that intervening at the story begins to reorganise everything downstream. The environmental scientist Donella Meadows named the paradigm, the mindset a system arises from, as one of the deepest places to intervene, and stories are how paradigms are carried from one generation to the next.

Every system runs on a story about what people are. Tell it that humans are resources and you get extraction; tell it that humans are competitors and you get hierarchy and scarcity; tell it that humans are consumers and you get engines of endless consumption; tell it that humans are relational beings and you get systems built for connection, participation and regeneration. The economy most of us work inside runs on the first story, in which worth is output, care is a cost, and the self is a resource to be spent.

What the economy counts, and what it can’t see

This came into focus for me in September 2025, in the dining room of a little country pub in Somerset, at the first retreat of a systems leadership programme. I was sitting among entrepreneurs, executives and activists, listening to the writer Katrine Kielos talk about her book, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? She spoke passionately about the story underneath capitalism, and about what patriarchy has cost women by keeping so much of their work out of sight. It felt as though a curtain had been jolted back, and things I had been trying to piece together for years, without the language for them, suddenly fell into place.

Her question is a simple one. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote that it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Yet Smith lived with his mother for much of his life, and it was she who put his dinner on the table, for reasons his theory had no room for. Care was the ground his economics stood on, and it never made it into the model.

That omission is still built into how we measure success. GDP counts what is bought and sold, so cutting down an old forest adds to it, and so does cleaning up after a car crash, while a parent raising a child, a daughter looking after her ageing father or a colleague quietly holding a team together adds nothing at all. The rules draw a boundary around what counts as production, and unpaid care sits outside it. Inside organisations the same logic becomes revenue, margin, quarterly returns and individual output that can be counted and credited to one person. Speed, scale and ownership are rewarded, while care, culture, maintenance and repair, the relationships everything else depends on, are treated as free.

Care is treated like clean air: essential to everything, and counted as free.

The numbers on the uncounted side are vast. Oxfam estimates that women and girls do 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work every day, worth at least US$10.8 trillion a year, and in Australia a 2017 analysis by PwC valued unpaid work at around a third of the formal economy, with women doing around 72 per cent of it. When care does move into the market it tends to arrive at the price it had at home, which is part of why the people who teach our children and look after our parents are paid so little for how much depends on them.

The cost lands on whoever carries what the economy won’t count. The parent who steps back from paid work to care pays for it in income, progression and retirement savings for decades. The person who holds an organisation together absorbs its conflict and repair until something gives, and is then told she needed better boundaries. This is the mechanism underneath everything else here: a system that runs on care it doesn’t pay for will always draw most heavily on the people who care most, and it will teach them to call the cost a personal failing.

The economist Kate Raworth’s doughnut draws two edges: an ecological ceiling beyond which the living world can’t sustain what we take from it, and a social foundation below which people go without life’s essentials. What my research keeps documenting is a more intimate inner edge, the point beyond which a person can’t sustain what is taken from them. Neither limit is built into the way we count success, and both enforce themselves eventually, one as ecological collapse and the other as human depletion, which shows up as exhaustion and illness, as anxiety, grief and numbness, as the loss of meaning and of a sense of self, and as families and communities stretched thin. They are the same accounting error at two scales.

The dark, the crack and the light

When the people in my research study, The Incentives Are Working, described what purpose-driven work had cost them, their answers kept landing in the same territory: the parts of themselves they had set down to remain acceptable, and the parts through which they found their way back. Those parts weren’t united by topic but by mechanism, each one a part of being human made difficult to name through taboo, protected by stigma and maintained through silence, and mapping that territory is where the map on this site began.

Each part moves through the same arc. The dark is the inherited story, installed through repetition until it feels like reality rather than narrative, telling us that grief has a deadline, anger is unprofessional, need is weakness, rest must be earned, the body can’t be trusted and difference is disorder, and in time these stories become walls between people and their own nature.

The crack is where truth gets through anyway. The signals from within us, what the body knows before the mind will admit it, keep pressing against the stories that constrain us, and the suppression is never complete: the body refuses, grief witnessed in community moves, anger named accurately becomes clarity, and neurodivergent knowing turns shame into information. Every crack is a moment of awareness, something we already knew finding its way into the light.

The light is the new story, a more truthful account of what human beings are and what they’re allowed to need; not a happy ending, but a return to conditions where identity no longer depends on self-abandonment.

The arc is an old one. Cultures that kept their rites of passage tended to mark the same three movements, which the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep named over a century ago: a separation from the old identity, a threshold where the old story has ended and the new one hasn’t yet formed, and a return with something that wasn’t there before. Western culture dismantled most of those rites, which leaves many of us crossing the biggest thresholds of our lives, from grief and burnout to menopause and the end of a career, without ritual or witness, and the crossing is far harder to make alone.

We don’t come to believe a new story because we understand it intellectually but because we practise it in relationship, in conditions where the previously unspeakable can be named without shame, until the body begins to trust it. Every time the unnameable is spoken aloud and survives, the wall weakens.

One finding anchors all of this. Across every conversation in my study, people named the same core values, honesty, trust, care, fairness, collaboration and autonomy, and not one person named money, status or achievement. The parts of us that systems push into shadow are the ground those values grow from, which is exactly why they threaten the stories that sustain extraction.

The deeper system

We’re led to believe these are personal failings when far more often they’re the failings of a system. The exhaustion, the numbing and the slow loss of feeling like yourself are predictable outputs of the wrong conditions, whether that’s a job, a marriage, a family or a culture you were simply born into, and you can change the circumstances entirely and still carry the same pattern of silence with you, because the real shift happens further in, in how you relate to your own grief, anger, need or shame.

The pattern is installed long before anyone enters a workplace. What schema therapy calls the self-sacrifice schema, the habit of meeting other people’s needs at the expense of your own because putting yourself first feels selfish, forms early as a way to survive, and is then confirmed by every workplace that celebrates the person who absorbs the impossible workload. The system didn’t create it; it found it, and it runs it.

Its deepest move isn’t taking people’s labour but teaching them to doubt what they already know: their perception, their instincts, their expertise and their reality. People become extractable when they lose trust in themselves, so the work is reclamation, helping people recover the identity, purpose and self-trust they were trained to trade away. That isn’t a therapeutic goal so much as a structural and political one, because a person who trusts their own signals is harder to extract from, builds differently, and stops passing the pattern on.

This is why the personal and the systemic are the same conversation, held at different scales. Each time one of us catches a story we were handed and chooses a truer one, we stop passing it on, and the people around us get a little more room to do the same. Systems don’t change because they’re persuaded; they change when the cost of not changing becomes more visible than the cost of changing, when enough of us stop quietly carrying that cost and start naming it out loud, and discover, together, that it was never just us.

The nesting doesn’t stop at the edge of an institution. Human needs can only be met for long inside the limits of the living world, and the living world is only tended well by people who feel connected to something larger than themselves, so I’ve stopped thinking of the spiritual, the ecological and the social as a ladder to be climbed in order. They sit inside one another. When the intention behind a system falls out of step with what life needs, the damage travels outwards into the land and inwards into the people, and when all of it lines up, flourishing stops being an exception we have to fight for and becomes what the system is for.

Regulation makes transformation possible

You cannot build regenerative systems on dysregulated nervous systems. The nervous system is the ground everything else stands on, and when it spends years outside its window of tolerance, braced for the next demand, even well designed structures start producing outcomes that contradict the values they were built on. Decisions get made from reactivity rather than clarity, brave conversations become impossible to hold, and the stories a group tells itself narrow around threat.

That’s why I treat breath as infrastructure rather than a wellness supplement. Breath is one of the most direct ways we have of steadying the nervous system, and a team or an organisation that builds regulation into the way it meets, decides and recovers is building the capacity for everything else it hopes to change. The nervous system isn’t a private wellness matter but leadership infrastructure, and a practice of regulation feeds a loop in which clearer decisions build trust, and trust makes it safe to keep practising.

I initially thought of regulation as something that had to come first. Building a business of my own, working through real crisis situations within other organisations and observing other people taught me otherwise, because there is rarely a before: nobody gets to step out, find their calm and come back ready, so steadiness has to be built into the work itself. Under that kind of pressure it is mostly relational, which is why I think of relationship as infrastructure too. A leader whose calm is real, colleagues who have each other’s backs and time protected for people to be together do more for a team in crisis than any resilience course, and the structural choices an organisation makes, from how it staffs a crisis to how it handles redundancies, decide whether that fabric holds or tears.

Regulation makes transformation possible, but it is never a substitute for structural change. A person can shift their state and rewrite their story, but if the structure still rewards their extraction, the system wins, which is why the work always holds all three layers together. It applies to everyone attempting the change, including me, because the person trying to create new conditions is the first place those conditions have to begin.

Wholeness, integrity and coherence

Three words carry this work, and they aren’t interchangeable. Wholeness is the north star, the state in which nothing essential has been abandoned, suppressed or traded away to be acceptable to a system, and it isn’t a destination arrived at cleanly so much as the direction the work points. Integrity is the quality of movement towards it, the alignment between what is said and what is done and between stated values and the incentives underneath them. Coherence is how closely state, story and structure line up, from one person out to the institutions around them, and it’s what makes integrity visible.

A system can be coherent and still exploitative, since coherence without integrity is efficiency in the service of harm, so the question is never only whether something is working but whether it’s working in the direction of wholeness. The lived form of wholeness is sovereignty: staying in relationship without abandoning yourself, and taking part in a system without being owned by it.

What it looks like when it changes

People are not the problem. Conditions are. In a system that has made this shift, the first question asked when someone is struggling is what conditions produced this, and the answer changes what gets built.

In practice that looks like a board that holds itself accountable for the wellbeing of the people it governs as well as for mission and money, funders who ask about the conditions inside the organisations they back, leadership development that begins with the nervous system, and workplaces where the person who says what isn’t working is thanked for it.

None of this arrives through one programme or one book. A paradigm shifts when enough people and organisations are living the other story that the original loses its authority, which is slow work and the only kind that lasts.

Remembering

Healing isn’t only an individual task but a systems design challenge, and the same question runs through every system we build: education that protects curiosity rather than standardising it, healthcare that asks what happened to you and not only what’s wrong with you, justice that repairs rather than only punishes, technology that strengthens agency rather than capturing attention, economies that meet everyone’s needs within the limits of the living world, and communities where belonging doesn’t require self-abandonment.

Older traditions never pulled these questions apart the way we have. Many Indigenous and contemplative ways of knowing hold the care of people, the care of land and the care of spirit as one practice, and they kept that knowledge alive in myth, ritual and rites of passage long before anyone called it systems thinking. Part of remembering is recovering that wholeness at the scale of a culture, and not only in a single life.

Everything a kinder world needs already exists somewhere, in a crack. The vision is the cracks, widened until they join, one person and one true sentence at a time.

Wholeness is not something we construct. It is something we remember.

Healing is not becoming someone new. It is remembering who we were before we learned what we were not allowed to say.