Where you end and your role begins

Part of the series Findings from The Incentives Are Working. Participants are described by role and sector only.

The conversations kept pointing somewhere deeper than burnout. People stop knowing where they end and their role begins, their worth becomes contingent on usefulness, and eventually they lose contact with themselves.

The pattern is installed long before anyone enters a workplace. What schema therapy calls the self-sacrifice schema, the deep belief that worth depends on what you give and that putting yourself first is selfish, forms early as a survival strategy, and it is then confirmed by every workplace that celebrates the person who absorbs the impossible workload.

The system did not create the self-sacrifice schema. It found it, and it runs it.

One woman I spoke with went back to full-time work two weeks after giving birth, and the people around her called her Superwoman and idolised her for it. She now wishes she hadn’t felt she needed to. It was the schema, confirmed and celebrated at one of the most vulnerable moments of a life, and dressed up as admiration.

The system’s deepest move isn’t taking people’s labour but teaching them to doubt what they already know: their perception, their instincts and their expertise. People become extractable when they lose trust in themselves, which is why the work is reclamation, because a person who trusts their own signals is harder to extract from, builds differently, and stops passing the pattern on.