What does decolonization mean to you - and have you thought about what comes after?

Something I've been building for a while is finally ready.

You've heard about decolonization, but do you know what it actually means? Or, more importantly, what comes next?

As a Métis sociologist and systems thinker with over 22 years of experience in policy, leadership, and Indigenous worldview, I've spent years studying exactly these questions as a former dedicated civil servant turned entrepreneur and futurist.

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The answer I keep coming back to: Indigenous Systems Design, grounded in a worldview where we are all wanted, and we work together to make our communities safe and abundant.

Not a buzzword, or a trend. Instead, a practical, sustainable alternative to colonial models that aren't working for most of us.

So what is this alternative? For the last 6 years, I've explored what might work and now I want to share that with you.

I'm opening a 5-week crash course introducing Indigenous Systems Thinking and Indigenous Worldview. Since this is a survey course on a topic new to a lot of people - no prior knowledge is necessary, and questions are very welcome. We will move fast and I will share a suggested readings list.

Because this is the first time I've offered this course, I'm offering it at 50% off the regular investment, for $210. Spaces are filling fast.

In this 5 week class, you will explore

* What even is decolonization? What happens when it’s done?
* How Indigenous and Western models understand human needs differently
* Living a good life in a good way
* The Five Pillars of Indigenous Systems Thinking
* The First Law of the Hunt and what it means for leadership today

This is a high-level, fast-moving introduction designed to give you practical frameworks you can apply immediately.

Interested? Email me to register or ask questions.

All I knew was I needed clarity in my direction or I was going to have to find a job. Not because I couldn’t pay my bills, or didn’t like the work I was doing. Rather, there was a hole in my day that was affecting my wellbeing: I was growing increasingly isolated and disconnected from my community, even while the work I loved doing is in part about building healthy communities.

Lesson 1: There is a difference between isolation and separation: one can make your life more fulfilling, one will drain you.

When I worked in an office, my work life was separated from my social and family life by location and who I spent time with in each. This separation of work from my personal life created opportunities for self-reflection, hearing different opinions, and finding commonalities with people who didn’t know me outside of work.

It also created growing tension as increasingly decisions by my leadership were not aligned with my values and I was being asked to execute on things I knew were potentially harmful to our communities with little recourse for change. So I left.

Which led to isolation. I didn’t understand how to create an effective separation from work and personal life, so increasingly (in part because I work a lot) my personal life disappeared because I could always work.

Eventually I looked up and realized that I hadn’t done something not work-related for almost a year. And that isolation from my community was showing up in my work because I was feeling increasingly unable to connect with people in social situations.

Learning the difference between isolating from others and creating a separate time and space to work on my business was not intuitive, and it took some time which leads to my second lesson.

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Lesson 2: Success requires discernment: Doing business in a good way involves compromise

About four days before I was to do my pitch, a friend I hadn’t spoken to in several months called. They asked “Have you heard what’s going on? Are you still going to pitch on Wednesday?”

There had been a few events in the recent weeks that created a bit of stir in our community and I had sat with whether or not I should pitch in the days before this call but still I was caught a bit off-guard.

After consulting with some colleagues, I made the decision to pitch rather than withdraw ‘on principle’. This is why:

1. There were other people pitching who were relying on me. Behind the scenes drama is not sufficient to break my commitment to my peers

2. Opportunities to pitch are new to me, and I could not say with complete honesty that I was not withdrawing because I was afraid and using external events as an excuse

3. My business idea is a good idea that needs to be heard - but I am never going to find someone with whom I am in 100% alignment, so I need to be discerning about what I compromise on

4. The background drama did not compromise my core values

5. I would no longer allow the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I have non-negotiables in my life that are part of my decision-making process. The background drama mattered but what mattered more was the people I was doing the pitch night with and the relationships the experience built. The commitment we had made to support each other through the process.

I cannot, nor should I try to, control people and their actions. All I can do is make sure my actions align with my values in the situation I found myself in. Recognising the limits to my control and how I show up strengthened my commitment to and ability for discernment.

Finding the courage to pitch was the first hurdle. Now I had to figure out what to pitch. For years, I had been carrying an idea around but felt a bit embarrassed to share it. In the days leading up to the event though I started to trust my dream because I felt safe in what I know.

Lesson 3: When we feel safe we are capable of more than we believe

I did my pitch on an idea I have been carrying around for years, but didn’t understand how to actually start. I did not go to the pitch night with what is currently paying my bills, but rather a vision of what we could do.

My idea started small: a seminar for communities on how to create healthier personal practices and resilient workplaces, with a focus on Indigenous Systemic Design. A full day maybe, something to introduce the concepts to organizations and leadership.

As I developed it however, it grew. I started to dream about what might be possible if I went beyond seminars and teaching, to incorporating the work of Judith Herman and the practices of trauma-informed community development. What if I actually put into practice the Indigenous principle of miyo pimatisiwin (a good life in a good way) and trusted Creator?

The program I built goes beyond what I thought possible at the beginning. My Elder has given me her blessing and I have gained clarity how to execute on my ideas.

This makes it sound like once I knew what to do, it was easy-peasy and just a matter of putting the words on the paper, but that is not the case. I ended up looking perfectionism right smack in the face.

Lesson 4: Let the game come to you

This is from an old Queen Latifah movie “Taxi” when she teaches Jimmy Fallon how to overcome his driving anxiety. It was something that helped me navigate being a new mum and then I forgot this saying and moved on.

Until I began building my pitch and found myself chasing ideas, chasing the right look, trying to be the kind of person who was good at pitching. The more I acted this way, the harder it became to actually build a deck that did justice to what I wanted to say.

I was focused on form, not function and getting more lost by the hour.

As soon as I took a breath and reminded myself I knew my topic (see below), that the service is needed, and the only people there who mattered were me and my kid, I felt empowered. I decided I could say whatever pleased me since I was doing this for me, and no one else, and things began to shift.

It didn’t become easy, but it became less hard - something that was in the realm of possible. And every time I leaned into what I know, options started to present themselves for the next step.

Lesson 5: Play to your strengths, use them to overcome your weaknesses

One of my strengths is strategy and pattern recognition, one of my weaknesses is overthinking and so I had to learn:

1. When to stop thinking and start doing

2. How to stop thinking so I could start doing

I reviewed when I worked well and when I didn’t and discovered I needed an interruptor when I was doing research. The issue wasn’t I didn’t know how to execute, procrastination or “analysis paralysis” rather it was my brain diving deeply into a topic I love and wanting to understand nuance.

To provide value I also have to have customers. So just like when I began coaching, and had to learn how to tell people what I do, when building workshops I realised I needed to interrupt my desire to learn more. So I built a plan

1. I created two roles for myself: research assistant and writer/editor

2. Set a timer for research and note taking on my computer is required.

3. When the timer goes off, the research assistant takes a break

4. I get up, get a drink of water, turn on my music and sit down and edit my notes into necessary format

The auditory cue identified it was time to transition to a new task, and this kept me from getting lost in research. The key is to make sure I do both parts together. I cannot research one topic and then another successfully, instead I need to write as soon as I am done the research. (I endured several stressful weeks thinking I could do separate research days and writing days.)

My strategic thinking brain was able to see the patterns, identify an interruptor, and then plan to execute so when my research brain took over, it could only be in the leadership position for so long.

Start to notice where you get stuck, what you get stuck doing, and then when work flows. Then find ways to shift your mental state so you are able to signal when it is time to change roles.

Final Thoughts: Do the cobbler’s children have shoes?

There is a lot of work that needs to happen on my business to make my business work. A long time ago, my mum was a social worker and after a few months she stopped being a social worker. When I asked her why, she said “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” and never elaborated.

Over the years that line’s popped into my head several times but until doing this pitch I really didn’t get it. She meant that many of her colleagues expected of their clients behaviours and outcomes that the social workers themselves could not achieve.

The standard they had for others was not one they themselves met, not just professionally but in their daily life. People demanded parents never have dirty dishes in their sink while having the entire unit’s spoon collection dirty in their desk drawer.

Doing my pitch reminded me, when starting something new or hard, the things I tell people to do are also things I need to do. Not just when doing something new like a pitch, but regularly so I continue to learn and grow.

I need to challenge my routine, question my assumptions, create opportunities for reflection rather than just blindly, doggedly following previous success and expecting different results. Trying new things doesn’t always take new tactics, but it does take deploying tactics in new ways.

What I learned:

1: There is a difference between isolation and separation: one can make your life more fulfilling, one will drain you.

2: Success requires discernment: Doing business in a good way involves compromise

3: When we feel safe we are capable of more than we believe

4: Let the game come to you

5: Play to your strengths, use them to overcome your weaknesses

You Probably Want to Know: What happened with the pitch!?

It went well - better than expected. I got the words out, in order, and covered the material I wanted to cover. I stood up and shared my vision. I trusted my preparation, I spoke from my expertise, grounded in my ‘why’. The pitch may have been the goal, but the trip that taught me what I had previously missed: I wasn’t doing the work I needed to do.

So: I had a blast and I shared the stage with powerful Indigenous entrepreneurs, made connections with people in the audience, and have already set up two meetings to continue talking about what I am building. And yes, I started by telling people my experience, how awesome I am, and the person it mattered to the most was me.

I also realized that regardless of what happens next I am happy. I want to do more scary things, learn what else I can accomplish in the service of what matters to me.

• What if I fail?

• What if I succeed?

• Our fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.

• Choosing brand over substance, form over function

• Imposter syndrome

All of these are ways of trying to name what I’m starting to think is a lack of safety, no real sense of belonging. If you believe failing makes someone less valuable, that means you are only free to grow or change in already accepted ways.

When we realise none of us are special, that we need each other to be free, we are provided a sense of safety and the dignity of risk. It’s a paradox: to be special you have to accept you aren’t special, otherwise you are not safe to be yourself. Only when all of us are safe to fail, make mistakes, be bad at things and still be welcome at the dinner table, are any of us free.

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What is the dignity of risk?

Life includes failure. Failure is how we learn: no child ever stood up and walked without a hard landing at least once, the alternative is to crawl indefinitely, knowing you will never fall but also you will never run:

There can be such a thing as human dignity in risk, and there can be a dehumanizing indignity in safety.

Perske, 1974

The right to make choices that may result in injury or failure is the only way to be free to make choices that may result in wild success and transformative, needed change. To fail though, we have to trust there is something to catch us.

The risk of going to university, or moving for a job, or even just deciding to wear a different hairstyle are all possible only if we know we still have a place that we can retreat to and recover.

For many however, risk is not available because their lives are lived on very thin margins. Financial, food, health, employment, housing insecurity reduce the freedom people have to step outside of what’s acceptable if they want to continue to fit in. They do not have a place for recovery because they are not safe. So they do not, cannot, take risks.

The Security Trap

Collective security is meant to enable risk-taking for individuals. Unions are a great example. Employment security, and thus economic stability, is meant to provide the collective ability to take risks to preserve the safety of others, and enhance everyone’s wellbeing.

Unions are often misunderstood to be about worker’s wages and benefits. But at their core they are risk mitigation strategies to support the wellbeing of everyone. When a worker spots unsafe conditions or unethical practices, speaking up shouldn’t mean risking their livelihood.

Unions used to provide that safety net – they were essentially collective insurance for workers to advocate for and protect the goals of broader civil society. In the pursuit of being special however, people decided they didn’t need each other and left unions.

Now collective wellbeing has been lost and instead individual financial stability has become like a big comforter that people wrap around themselves to keep the peace. I know because I used to do it too. I used to think that I could make enough money that one day I would be free and could build my dream then. All I had to do was fit in long enough. The longer I worked to fit in however, the harder it became to find the self-worth to leave.

Learning that promotions and paycheques are often a hindrance to building big dreams has been hard because I wanted to believe that I could have security provided by someone else and also build my dream - but that isn’t how it worked, at least not for me.

Instead, I found myself often confronting leadership that prioritised image and profit over improved outcomes and people. I doubted myself - who was I if my work required me to act in ways that protected bad decisions while sacrificing the people I grew up with? Eventually obedience became too high a price for fitting in and financial security.

Pitching and Personal Growth

Tomorrow night I am pitching my business. Something that has been in the back of my mind for a long time that I often talked about in the context of what we can build. A “What if …?” that felt too huge for me to accomplish. Something that has consumed me for the last 8 months in unexpected ways that are only starting to fit together now.

As I have been prepping my slides and speaking notes, my routine is in the trash. I am sleeping at weird times and eating donair bowls for breakfast. Yesterday I realised I hadn’t left the house since January 2 and the entire 7 seasons of Star Trek: Voyager has played through in the background.

It took me a long time to accept that when I have big things to do, 9-5 doesn’t work for me. That morning routines were great if what I was doing every day was the same but not if I was trying to create something bigger. Now I have non-negotiables: prayer, tea, food, journal.

When being ‘special’ gets in the way

Yesterday as I was working on my “why” for the pitch I realised how specialness gets in the way of taking a risk, how thinking we are special means we never belong and we also tend to avoid doing things that make our hearts race and our breath catch.

If I believe only people who are good at pitching should pitch, that means I lose the opportunity to pitch. I am taking away possibilities that need other skills to be effective simply because I acknowledge that pitching is a growth area for me.

BUT!
I also know that what I have been working on for the last 2 years is important and will work, the research is clear both academically and in the field. My Elder has given me her blessings.

People who have participated in workshops with me, taken training from me, and hired me to work in their communities have given me their time and energy and knowledge which forms the skeleton of my model.

People have trusted me with their dreams and their fears. What I have learned is that so many people have dreams for their kids, their friends and neighbours, and themselves that feel out of reach because people believe they aren’t special enough.

Maybe, like me, they struggle to put their vision into words in front of an audience. Or perhaps getting to work by 8:15am is impossible because they can’t fall asleep until 2:00am. And there is always a part of them that needs to be fixed before they know they’re accepted, they belong.

Accepting what is

I am socially awkward. Money is insufficient as a motivator. I need long periods of reflection and thinking time to do my best work. I make excellent Yorkshire pudding. I can read 250 pages of text a day with summaries and next steps but can’t start work until 10:00am. None of these make me good or bad, they just make me.

So in the process of preparing for a pitch I suspect will be awkward AF, but is also the only way to get my ideas out there in a way that matters to me, I have learned the following things about being special by being the same:

1. If you believe only certain people can belong, that means you believe only certain parts of you can belong

2. Shame inhibits growth, acceptance enables it

3. When you trust yourself you are more free to take risks

4. Trusting myself is a result of consistently making decisions that support my values, building a sustainable world for everyone through aligned actions

5. The day I stopped punishing myself to fit in is the day I became free

If you knew you were safe, that someone will still love you - catch you when you fall - what dream would you chase? What wrong would you right?

“The cruelty is the point”

“The system is working exactly as intended.”

These statements are becoming increasingly common but what do they actually mean. What system? And who’s cruelty?

These statements start something and leave questions unanswered. As though the observation of cruelty addresses the problem. Eventually people tire of reading statements that feel true but don’t have a framework or context in which they can be addressed.

In this essay, what it means when we say the system is working exactly as it’s designed will be discussed, and some steps about what you can do will be included at the end.

The system everyone is talking about is the one that creates the wound we diagnosed in the last essay: Colonial Dislocation Trauma.

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Getting Started - Colonial Dislocation Trauma

Trauma in a people looks like culture.

~ Resmaa Menakem

The idea of Colonial Dislocation Trauma developed for me after years of reading about symptom-based diagnosis that seemed consistent across multiple presentations: people who have been deprived of feelings of safety and belonging look for that in myriad ways as they grow up and this is reflected in their interactions with the broader community.

Referencing the Indicative Trauma Impact Manual, which is described as a non-diagnostic, trauma-informed guide to emotions, thoughts, and behaviour, a number of the behaviours identified as toxic, like coercive control and grooming, are represented in our workplaces and our strategic policy choices.

Furthermore, just like in individuals, the outcomes - like creating rigid rules for safety, violent and sexually violent imagery, and dependence on substances for emotional regulation - are strong indicators of a system under duress.

What are you willing to do to keep your money and power?

Many people look for a way to feel safe and fitting in is one way of doing that. In our culture, fitting in is often determined by one’s wealth, financial success being a proxy for safety and belonging.

In the last essay, we named the wound of Colonial Dislocation Trauma (CDT)—the pain that comes from living in a system that severs our connection to family, culture, and self. But what happens to the people who benefit from and perpetuate that system? What is their diagnosis?

The result of money being the goal, as we are increasingly experiencing, is a culture that rewards greed, domination and control. Selfishness, and transactional business models are the norm because these provide short-term economic gains.

Unfortunately, people who succeed in this model generally display the less virtuous character traits because being greedy, controlling, and selfish is rewarded financially. Power becomes increasingly concentrated by creating ever-narrower criteria for belonging. Perverse incentives develop.

This brings us to the great inversion, the two paths of pain that define our culture.

People with Colonial Dislocation Trauma tend to internalize pain. This leads to toxic shame, self-loathing (”dirty Indian”), addiction as a form of pain relief, and the feeling of being broken.

People with Colonial Dislocation Psychosis (CDP) externalize their pain. They believe that they should have all the good things and that other creatures—because they don’t see those who are different as truly alive—should bear the burden.

Colonial Dislocation Psychosis is the psychosis of the colonizer, a mental state disconnected from reality of their actions and required to inflict and ignore mass suffering. It is a sickness of entitlement and I suggest it is a form of hierarchical collective derealization.

The Operating System

To thrive within a colonial system is to adopt its dysfunctional operating system. It is no coincidence that the traits required for success are often the same traits used to diagnose personality disorders that are considered anti-social:

• A grandiose sense of self-importance

• Sense of individual entitlement (as seen in doctrines like terra nullius)

• A complete lack of empathy; unwillingness to consider the impact on others

• Perpetual exploitation and violence against other people, animals, and nature

• A constant need for admiration; money excuses any behaviour

• A pattern of exploitative, manipulative behaviour, using lies to accumulate power regardless of the impact.

• An inability to accept mistakes, even in the face of catastrophic consequences like climate change

• Unwilling to share

• Lack of accountability; might makes right

This psychosis is exemplified by a mindset that rewards executives with massive bonuses after causing immense harm, creating a feedback loop that bad behaviour is deserving of reward.

In an abusive relationship with a narcissist, the person in pain is punished for speaking up. Our system functions the same way.

A Modern Case Study: The Weaponization of Needs

This psychosis is not a historical artifact. It is alive and well in our boardrooms and coaching masterminds. I was in a session recently where I was talking about how money should be a tool for well-being, not the primary desired outcome. The coach responded that she loves money as much as she loves her children, all of us in the room. She loves it as much as she loves God.

We no longer work to feed ourselves or build our own homes; we must work for money in a way someone else deems acceptable to be able to meet our basic survival needs.

So many people live without a sense of confidence in the future. People are anxious the rules will change without notice and suddenly what’s in is out, and everything could be lost. Arendt carefully laid out how as people become increasingly isolated, money and rules become increasingly associated with safety and authoritarianism begins to set in.

Business under this psychosis is not about creating conditions for us all to prosper; it is about keeping people hovering at mere survival, because there is no profit in a fulfilled, sovereign population.

Colonialism and capitalism are required to weaponize our basic needs against us to ensure we continue to work at things we don’t like, not just food and shelter - but safety, esteem, and interpersonal relationships are all increasingly defined by socio-economic conditions rigged to incentivize anti-social behaviours.

The Social Symptoms of a Psychotic System

When a society is run by this dissociated, narcissistic mindset, the culture itself begins to exhibit the symptoms of the psychosis. This is the social breakdown we see accelerating around us:

• The embrace of militarization and violence as the natural order

• Rampant and increasing inequality

• An accelerating degradation of the environment

• The destruction of social bonds and contempt for community

• The sexualization of children and the rejection of elders

• The reduction of human beings to their most base motivations, with economic systems built on minimums of behaviour rather than aspirations for the collective good

• Limiting the definition of who is human by legislating away rights

• Rejecting children as autonomous being worthy of rights, nurturing, and respect

The functional goal of this psychosis seems to be to try and recreate what the universe provides freely as a way of proving dominance over nature. It is a profoundly immature and destructive worldview.

The Hollowness of the ‘Special’

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen (1899) makes clear his derision for conspicuous consumption as a terrible foundation for social organization. Cultures geared toward profit eventually do not produce useful products or healthy humans, as the pursuit of conspicuous leisure undermines social utility and perverts the human predisposition to useful production.

The ultimate expression of this psychosis is the belief that some people don’t have to work, that they are somehow special. This entitlement to a life of conspicuous leisure, as Veblen called it, can only be sustained through the forced labour *and* forced consumption of others. (Others, in this case, is us. The 99% of people who don’t own their own islands and personal jets.)

Essentially, the market will force workers to make things they don’t need, and then force us to buy what they’re selling us, even if we would much prefer something different, so we can access our basic needs like food and shelter.

As resources become increasingly scarce, these mechanisms of control will become increasingly rigid, which means our children will inherit a new form of slavery, where the necessaries of life are privatized for maximum extraction.

Sound familiar?

This stands in stark contrast to healthy humans. Healthy people like to work. They like to contribute to something bigger than themselves, being a part of the labour market is one of the number one indicators of mental health.

In our current social system built on ideas of extraction, however, social colonial dislocation results in work that controlled by people who want to limit access to resources, is not pragmatic or even really worthwhile, often results in moral injury, and is exploitative of the worker and the natural environment.

In contrast, conspicuous consumption is not only suspicious in Indigenous communities, but generosity and giving freely is seen as an act of leadership. It is why many traditional Indigenous ceremonies like the Potlatch were banned by colonial governments: these ceremonies were cultural expressions of shared responsibility and shared benefit in action.

For those with CDP, work is for others, and those others only have value as long as they are producing for the economy, regardless of the impact on them or nature.

This is the hollowness of a dislocated system: your life becomes so empty of personal meaning and authenticity, that the only goal left is to not have to participate in it at all, to be able to buy your way out of being part of the world.

Conclusion: The Next Step is Your Choice

The system that is operating as intended is one that prioritizes profit for the few over the wellbeing of everything and everyone else. This is an anti-social operating system run by people who believe their cultural entitlement is more important than our shared humanity.

This system, and the people who benefit from it, externalizes its pain, rewards cruelty, and has the desire to fully consolidate power and resources in an increasingly small minority. The result is trapping us all in a market where our survival is conditional on our obedience to arbitrary, artificial rules.

Colonial Dislocation Psychosis is the answer to the question, “How can they act this way?” The people making decisions that seem irrational to the rest of us act this way because they are living in a dissociated state. The dissociation exists in two ways

1. A belief that what is written on paper is more real than what is happening in the physical world they are standing on, a collective derealization

2. A practice of externalizing the impacts of their decisions onto others with less power by framing colonial, or leisure class, wants as needs.

The majority of people experience the psychosis as living in a system that

• prioritizes profit over people,

• values domination over connection, and

• decides the consequences of the wealthy and powerful on the world are not sufficient to change their actions

A more sustainable future that does not reward anti-social behaviours starts with you. By choosing to reject a divisive operating system in our own lives we begin to act in ways that challenge transactional economies, creating the reciprocal and restorative relationships so many of us are seeking instead.

The most powerful antidote to a system that denies our agency is to begin exercising it. We can choose to value:

• contribution over consumption,

• community over extraction, and

• empathy over entitlement.

Many people already make these choices everyday. The proof is in the collective action taken in our daily lives:

• People who volunteer, donate to foodbanks, or buy from school bakesales.

• After disasters, many people open their doors to displaced people

• Volunteers clearing up after community events, sending letters to and phoning politicians, people driving others to vote

We are not powerless, but the path forward requires us to see the system for what it is—and then choose to build something different. How? Decide which values matter to you and then take action, and find someone to do these small steps with, have fun along the way. If trauma in a people looks like culture, then healing in a people looks like community in action.

This is Part 3 in a series introducing the framework of Colonial Dislocation Trauma. In the last essay, we diagnosed the cultural wound. Today, we diagnose the psychosis of the system that created it. In the next essay we will introduce some common experiences of people living in a sick system, and ways to begin to create safety for yourself.

Why does naming this matter?

For too long, many of us have operated on the assumption that the people making destructive decisions simply needed more information.

But the system is not broken; it is a successful machine designed to protect the entitlements of a few. We cannot heal it by providing more data to those who benefit from the sickness.

We can only heal it by building something new.

This is where the real work begins. The antidote to a system of dislocation is community. The antidote to a life of meaningless work is to find the work that reconnects us.

If this conversation is one you want to be a part of, I invite you to subscribe to my newsletter.

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Two mums are catching up while watching their boys at a basketball practice.

The first mum, (Black), says “I heard Connor made the honour roll. Congratulations, you must be so proud!”

Conor’s mum, (White), says “Oh, we are. Connor’s done so well. His dad and I are delighted. And you, I heard that Jake got a full-ride scholarship. How wonderful!”

Jake’s mum says “Yes he did, thank the good Lord, because basketball’s about all that boy can do right!”

When Dr. DeGruy told that story, I was struck by how much pain we carry may have had a protective origin. On the surface, the mums react very differently. Jake’s mum sounds dismissive. Connor’s mum is obviously pleased. The two kids, hearing this, might very well think Jake’s mum is not as proud, leading to feelings of shame and confusion.

But, as Dr. De Gruy points out, when we step back and look at the legacy of enslaved families being torn apart when children were strong, obedient, and did well, Jake’s mum’s reticence to celebrate her son makes perfect sense. Even if she herself does not understand why she answers compliments with dismissal, her body and her intergenerational memory remind her: “Don’t let them know your son is a good boy,” because the outcome could be bad.

We have all sorts of syndromes or disorders named after the experiences of people in psychological pain. This may be an effective tool for helping individuals, but it does so within existing social norms. “What’s keeping you from participating in a socially acceptable way?” is the underlying question.

What might a sociological perspective reveal after decades of diagnosing symptoms for individuals with little long-term change? What if we located these various syndromes in the context of our culture?

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Identifying a Systemic Wound

That kind of cultural context is exactly what sociology is designed to analyze: “the study of human relationships, the rules and norms that guide them, and the development of institutions and movements that conserve and change society.”

As a sociologist, I looked at the commonalities across these psychological manifestations and identified a unifying causal event enduring over time: a culture of dislocation from home and family as a result of colonial or capitalist endeavours.

I propose naming the social trauma created by this cultural imperative: Colonial Dislocation Trauma (CDT). By giving the source behind the symptoms a name, we provide the right target to address.

By renaming the symptoms as a result of colonial and capitalist structures and systems, two things happen:

1. Normal, human responses to the pain caused by bad or abusive treatment are not pathologized,

2. the root cause of the problem as systemic means systemic solutions can be leveraged.

Leveraging collective solutions such as appropriate mental health and wellbeing supports rather than incarceration, and making sure everyone has the basics like food and a safe place to sleep, creates broader social improvements. Every person who’s ever gone through recovery knows: first we have to accept we have a problem and then identify the problem correctly.

There are three different psychologically accepted syndromes that informed the development of CDT:

1. Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome

2. Residential School Syndrome

3. Boarding School Syndrome

These syndromes, born from specific historical atrocities, might seem like isolated events that impact only a segment of the population.

But they become suggestive of a wider cultural malaise when we see their symptoms mirroring the distress we are all experiencing in the general population:

1. Growing wealth inequality and the use of police and prisons to protect the comfort of the few.

2. Deteriorating working-class communities (including those who believe they are the pretend thing called the “middle class”).

3. Rising levels of psychiatric disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

When the general population begins to show patterns of distress that reflect the trauma of those with documented experiences of institutional abuse, a sociological explanation is no longer just a reasonable next step—it is a necessary one. (The specific connection between these modern psychiatric diagnoses and CDT will be explored in a future essay, but it is crucial to name them here as part of the wider pattern of evidence.)

1. The Beginning

Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, named by Joy DeGruy, Ph.D in 2003, is a response in the physical, psychological, spiritual, and mental wellbeing of individuals and communities to long-term enslavement.

Multigenerational trauma together with continued oppression and absence of opportunity to access the benefits available in the society.

Joy De Gruy, Ph.D, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome

The work on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS) creates a lens for the trauma and pain many Black people carry. But intercontinental abduction and enslavement is not a shared experience.

Behaviour Patterns in PTSS

1. Vacant Self-Esteem: people experience feelings of hopelessness, depression, and engage in self-destructive behaviours

2. A propensity for Anger and Violence: This includes feelings of extreme distrust of others and feelings of suspicion. There are violent eruptions toward self, others, and property.

3. Racist Socialization/Internalized Racism: a sense of aversion for one’s self, community and culture, and heritage, with particular emphasis on physical characteristics. This, coupled with a loss of cultural and ethnic traditions and rituals undermines any sense of safety. Community cohesions, literacy and agency are negatively impacted.

2. We Never Left Our Land

For the Indigenous Peoples of North America however, the story of our dislocation happens even though we never left our lands. Rather First Nations were corralled on the land, still living and loving on them but unable to care for them the way stewardship requires. As Vine Deloria says, “on Turtle Island our God is Red.”

A lot of the focus on the Indigenous experience is Residential Schools. This resulted in Brasfield (2001) proposing Residential School Syndrome (RSS), a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptomology of RSS includes:

• as with post-traumatic stress disorder, the person has undergone or witnessed some degree of trauma and received insufficient care and support to recover, resulting in flashbacks, hypervigilance and dissociation.

• interpersonal relationships are characterized by detachment and friction

• Additionally:

  • loss of connection culture and language

  • a persistent tendency to abuse alcohol or other drugs

  • substance use is associated with violent outbursts of anger.

  • also highlights possible deficient parenting skills.

I am not the first to propose that the symptomology should focus on the perpetrators of the violence. Figure 2* shows that when Residential School Syndrome was first being proposed, many already thought it made no sense to put the weight of change on the victims rather than the people who implemented these policies.

There are attendees of residential schools who have gone on to be very successful: “I was surprised that many Saskatchewan chiefs and councillors were of the opinion that these schools had contributed to their success.” (Roberston, 2006). While uncommon, these stories of success cannot be excluded, as they are often used to defend the very system that created so much harm.

3. Colonial Success Does Not Prevent Pain

But these two separate psychological assessments do not create a pattern allowing for a broader systems theory. Until I heard about Boarding School Syndrome, something more common among those who have both the money and the desire to send their children away to school.

What was remarkable to me was the similarity of symptoms to both PTSS and RSS. Joy Schaverien is a psychotherapist who coined Boarding School Syndrome and describes the symptoms as:

• Abandonment: the child has been left with strangers

• Bereavement: more than just homesickness, the child is bereaved

• Captivity: the child is captive in their new environment, often having to follow strict rules

• Dissociation: when the child is unable to come to terms with the pain of their bereavement, they often cut off and dissociate from their feelings

People seeking mental health supports after attending boarding school report similar problems – marital difficulties, feelings of isolation, substance abuse – to those who survived other institutional systems of dislocation. Substance use, inadequate parenting skills, and mood disorders are also common.

What is notable however, is the many people who have left these boarding schools and thrived in our current capitalist culture of greed. One expert, Piers Cross, in the field notes that many of our corporate and government leaders are graduates of the same institutions he attended, and the treatment they received was no different from the treatment he received.

Syndromes and Victim-blaming

The similarities across these different Syndromes led me to question whether I was falling into the same trap at a community and cultural level that happens at the individual level when we ask women “What were you wearing?”: diagnosing the trauma but believing I’d identified the cause.

There is a Guardian headline, ‘Breaking our spirits was the plan’: the lifelong impact of having gone to boarding school’ that could have been written by any Indigenous child, or Black child but is instead a quote from an economically and socially privileged boarding school attendee.

The trauma is inherent in the system itself, poisoning the whole structure by requiring people to sacrifice their empathy to achieve success. This framework, therefore, is not just about the wounds of the oppressed; it is about creating a container for the pain in all of us caused by dislocation from our shared humanity.

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Colonial Dislocation Trauma

Indigenous, or community, systems understand that our culture creates our people, and our people in turn sustain our culture, so communities must be healthy. We are both subject to and creator of the world we live in.

We are wanted in the world, and our community supports our wellbeing by ensuring everyone has food, shelter, and companionship and in turn we all contribute to our community to maintain and enrich that relationship. We are permanently located in a system and we know where we belong.

This is not the case in a colonial and capitalist system because extraction can only operate under coercive control. People understand that their ability to buy food and shelter is dependent on their ability to please their boss and keep their job, no matter how unfulfilling or undignified.

Therefore, we do not belong in a system, but rather have to constantly prove we fit in by pleasing someone with whom we have only transactional exchanges. We are dislocated from the outcomes of our work, and for many their needs outstrip what they are able to acquire because of systemic norms.

Some manifestations of Colonial Dislocation Trauma in all people affected by it:

• Maladaptive Daydreaming: because of trauma, individuals create a fantasy world to escape into where they have more control. Because people are not safe to exercise their will in real life, they do so in fantasies.

• Unacknowledged Grief and Shame for Grieving: There is an endless hole of loneliness when everything is ripped away and it is not acknowledged. Trauma and healing from trauma are relational. Without language for dislocation from the loss of familial relationships, and resulting grief, people can instead become angry. “Mad is sad in disguise.”

• Gendered Violence: the violence perpetrated by those in power is modelled down the hierarchy, and environmental destruction has long been tied to violence against women. Resource extraction and large scale infrastructure projects, and the man-camps needed to undertake them, are closely tied to gendered violence.

• Loss of connection to the real: In order to be successful in colonial states, you need to be able to ignore what your senses tell you and only believe what is written down and approved by the decision-making authorities. However this requires us to ignore what our senses tell us whenever we go outside, thus creating a split between what is known and what needs to be believed for survival in an imposed make believe hierarchy.

• Perverted relationship with work: leisure as a result of hoarding and displaying wealth becomes the desired outcome of work, rather than participating in creating your life and the work of community. The impacts of business decisions on community members and the environment are ignored or covered up if businesses show profit.

Conclusion: What the Pattern Reveals

For too long, we have treated these traumas as separate tragedies. We have studied the pain of the enslaved, the Indigenous, and even the privileged elite as if they were unique, isolated events. But when we look at the mechanism—the foundational tactic—the pattern becomes undeniable.

Whether the goal was to create a compliant labour force, assimilate a “savage” population, or forge an emotionally detached administrator for an empire, the strategy was identical: break the bond between the child and their family.

This reveals a profound truth: the trauma is not a bug in our system; it is the system’s primary feature. It is a technology of disconnection designed to produce a population that is compliant, disconnected from its own heritage, and therefore easier to control.

Colonial Dislocation Trauma is the name for this feature. It is the diagnosis for the operating system itself. The manifestations we see—gendered violence, maladaptive daydreaming, perverted relationship with work, loss of connection to the real—are not our personal failings. They are the predictable, adaptive human responses to living inside a system that runs on our dislocation.

The ubiquity of these mental and social ills is not evidence of mass personal failing, but of a real and present cultural wound. Now that we have named it, we can begin to heal it.

In the next part of this series, we will examine the results of the progressive denial of pain of dislocation and how it might explain part of how we got where we are. Subscribe now to get it in your inbox

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You can read part one here

References

Most are linked throughout the essay, but additional information is here:

For Figure 2: Chrisjohn R, Young S, Maraun M. The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books Ltd., 1997:87.www.treaty7.org/document/circle/circle5.htm

For more on historic trauma and syndrome, Robertson, 2006 is a great discussion on whether historic trauma is actually a syndrome

I have two daughters. When I was assaulted at work—and then forced to continue working under the man who did it—I wanted to burn the whole place down. Instead, I got a diagnosis: Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. C-PTSD.

I did the rehab, and then became a trauma-informed coach, driven to help people navigate the very challenges I had faced. I wanted to help them keep working, if they chose to, while healing. But as I worked with more and more people, a pattern emerged. They all echoed the same profound sense of “something just isn’t working,” regardless of how obediently they had followed the professed rules of the game.

They were disillusioned but hopeful, just as I had been. As they progressed in their careers, they either witnessed, were asked to participate in, or were on the receiving end of unethical behavior in the name of profit—all while social inequality grew around them.

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It’s all in your head

It is confusing as a worker, at the least, when the profits we help make are used against our communities rather than to support and enrich them. How did we get to the point that the people in pain were the ones who were diagnosed with the problem?

My search for an answer began with Judith Herman’s landmark 1992 book, Trauma and Recovery where I learned something about Freud that began a cognitive shift, permanently altering my perspective on healing, wellness, and power.

The Domination of Women

As part of the rise of the anti-clerical movement in France in the late 19th century, more investigation into hysteria was undertaken. Not to alleviate the suffering of women, but to show that science could triumph where religion had failed.

Herman revealed that Freud, in his early work on “hysteria,” discovered a simple, powerful truth. When his female patients could speak about their experiences of abuse and have those experiences validated, their symptoms began to alleviate. Anna O., one of the most prominent patients, called it the “talking cure”. Freud developed his theory of psycho-analysis as he interviewed these women.

But Freud’s research uncovered an endemic pattern of premature, incestuous, and abusive sexual exploitation of women across all social classes. Although “The Aetiology of Hysteria” was published in 1896, within a year, Freud repudiated his own findings.

This truth was not the key to enter the social elite he craved to join; it was a threat to their entire structure. So instead, he repositioned the issue as “Penis Envy”, thus pathologizing victims.

The Allegiance of Men

The allegiance of men to this system was cemented during the World Wars. Soldiers returned from the front with feelings they weren’t supposed to have: sadness, fear, constant anxiety. This “shellshock”, a completely normal human reaction to the horrors of industrial warfare, undermined the propaganda of glorious empire. It proved that men, in fact, do not enjoy killing other people for amorphous goals.

In fact, men’s completely normal reaction to the horrors of war was considered proof of failure, not humanity.

We know this because Yealland, in his 1918 book “Hysterical Disorder of Warfare” based his entire treatment regimen on browbeating the soldiers - for laziness, for cowardice, for failing their fellow soldiers. Electric shock therapy was suggested and used.

By World War Two, loyalty was weaponized. Men experiencing profound mental distress were shamed back to the front lines, told their vulnerable, under-staffed units needed them. Love of their comrades was used as a tool of coercion.

A year after WWII, two American psychiatrists concluded that one cannot “get used to combat” and that after 200-240 days of war, even the most committed person will experience psychiatric casualties but this information did not inform training or treatment of soldiers.

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Consciousness Rising

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a growing awareness of the impact of domestic violence on women’s well being combined with burgeoning economic independence. Women began to go to consciousness raising groups to talk about their lives and experiences. These groups created a sense of solidarity as women learned they were not alone in experiencing violence.

Similarly for men, initiated by Vietnam veterans who had been ostracized on their return home, rap groups grew where men could come and share their stories and be witnessed and believed by others, reducing isolation.

These groups are examples of people who have survived things many want to ignore supporting each other in peer-to-peer relationships. Such relationships are empowering because the isolation and self-blame are replaced with purpose as new skills are developed and others are supported in their journey.

Where we are now in understanding trauma

In 2008 Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts changed the conversation around substance use, bringing the idea that addiction is a response to pain—not a personal failure—into the mainstream. Since then, research and publications on the impacts of trauma have become increasingly common.

Yet the system’s tendency to locate trauma within the individual remains. The goal is still to “fix” the person so they can return to being an economically productive member of society. This isn’t a pathway to healing. It is a form of gaslighting, designed to make you believe that your wellness is the same as your economic productivity for someone else.

My Revelation

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place for me during a somatic embodiment course with Linda Thai. She shared this simple but powerful progression in understanding healing:

• Colonial: What is wrong with you?

• Trauma-Informed: What happened to you?

• Cultural safety: What happened to your people?

• Liberation: What happened and continues to happen to you and your people?

This was the bridge. I started to think about what it meant for me having had a childhood I needed to heal from, and how I probably wasn’t the only one. So what was it that was creating so much harm in our lives? If creating harm and separation was our normal state, how did we ever leave the caves?

As a sociologist trained to recognize social patterns, I realized the endless, discreet diagnoses given to individuals were too similar to be a coincidence. They were not individual failings; they were symptoms of a systemic wound at a cultural level.

This is the pattern I named Colonial Dislocation Trauma, and its end stage, Colonial Dislocation Psychosis.

I invite you to join this exploration. If this piece sparked something in you, I would be honored to hear about it in the comments.

This series is the beginning of a necessary conversation, and it starts with my own story. For the next week, I will be publishing a multi-part series to introduce a new framework for understanding the systemic trauma that poisons our work and our world. It’s called Colonial Dislocation Trauma.

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Originally titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”, a New York Times opinion writer is now asking if ‘liberal feminism’ ruined the workplace.

You know what? The answer is yes. Yes, we did. Let’s stop pretending that we didn’t ruin the 1950s workplace, and the ‘60s workplace, and the ‘70s workplace.

We ruined them because they sucked. They only worked for white men of a certain age and disposition—for everybody else, they were a nightmare.

This workplace we supposedly ruined: women weren’t allowed to have decision-making input or resist male advances, Black people didn’t even have the vote until 1965, and most immigrants were relegated to crappy jobs unless they came over as professionals—and then they were tokenized.

The majority of the work was designed to extract free female labor, so men could hang out, drink scotch, and objectify women while pretending humans weren’t real things that needed care and consideration.

When we challenge this system, we’re told it’s just about qualifications and merit, and our lack thereof. Let’s have a look at the current state of our economies and communities though, and they don’t seem to be doing great right now.

If women working for free running a household and taking care of children and making sure everyone is fed and the school bake sale doesn’t poison people is required for the economy and our communities to be healthier, why are women the ones who are dumb?

And if men are so smart, and women have ruined the workplace, why don’t men just leave since it’s so awful now, and go garden.

Or start community groups to replace what us callous women have left behind?

The Pipeline Excuse

For years, we’ve been fed the line that C-suites and senior executive positions were mostly white men because “there just wasn’t enough talent moving up.”

Let’s decode that excuse. Yes, hiring practices were part of it, but there’s a deeper truth: women, Black people, Indigenous people, and Asian people were not willing to sell out their values to get promoted.

Why would you want to advance in a system designed to kill your spirit?

So we left. Then the next generation tried, and some stayed, but many left too. It’s not that there isn’t a pipeline—it’s that the pipeline is full of sewage, and people with dignity choose not to swim in it.

And this is where the real resistance to change becomes clear.

What We’re Really “Ruining”

And here’s where it gets interesting. The real challenge isn’t about competence or qualifications—it’s about power.

People (coff, coff, men) in the executive suite are refusing to let go, convinced they have a divine right to be treated like princes and kings while viewing the rest of us as livestock. Did women ruin that system? I certainly hope we did, and I hope we keep ruining it.

Because what we’re really talking about isn’t ruining work—it’s reclaiming it for our dreams, and the dreams of our families and communities.

Work as Medicine vs. Work as Poison

Our work is the most powerful thing we have. It’s how we make manifest our purpose here on earth. It’s how our gifts are developed. It’s how we heal. Our work is the avenue through which we make our dreams real. Or at least, that’s what it should be.

Instead, we’re trapped in an economy that reduces this sacred exchange to mere transactions, paying us poultry money to build some lunatic sociopath’s dreams of becoming a trillionaire, all while sacrificing time with our families and communities.

Resisting the temptation to make work about money and instead embracing its true value in building our lives is the path to freedom. Because our power lies in this knowledge, we have been told that money is more important than time with your children or clean water and healthy ecosystems.

The Real Resistance

This is where the machinery of oppression kicks into high gear. Look at how hard AI is being pushed, despite widespread resistance.

Why? Because it’s another tool to avoid accountability, to maintain control, to keep building their dream—not ours. Our work is being turned against us, twisted into something that serves their vision rather than our communities.

That future is maintained through violence, intimidation and fear which is one reason it feels inevitable and also why so many of us are bent under the yoke. There is an alternative though.

The Future We’re Building

Our work is our medicine. With correct focus, and a few community lunches, it’s the way we heal ourselves and our communities.

Liberal feminists, and all the people that colonization and colonialism keep trying to silence have been saying this for generations.

To all the influencers who say “I can’t believe nobody said this before”—get over ourselves. People have been saying this since Columbus hit the ocean, and actually probably before that. What we need to say is “Following a long tradition of people who refuse to be controlled, I resist my work and my worth being commodified.”

So when they ask if we ruined the workplace, the answer is “Yes. Thank you for noticing.”

Embrace the “Ruining”

We ruined it by wanting to be respected. We ruined it by demanding time off. We ruined it by speaking up when we disagree. We ruined it for the men who think they are gods, and I am here for it.

I am absolutely here for ruining any workplace that requires our souls as admission price.

The frustrating irony: this “ruining” might actually save the men who resist it most. Look at the male loneliness epidemic. It will definitely start to address the youth mental health crisis.

These are direct products of the toxic workplace culture we’re dismantling and the unsustainable future it was building. By “ruining” their playground, we might just help them find their humanity again.

I don’t even need to read the article to know that whatever this person with an opinion wrote about whether women ruined the workplace, the answer is yes. And we’re not done ruining it yet.

Want to be part of the rebuilding and not sure where to start?

I have 2 spots open for November to get tailored coaching from me.

Building something new can be intimidating, for support for you or you know someone, book a call with me here https://tidycal.com/trisha2/30discover

Isn’t Indigenous thinking full of nepotism? I’ve heard that you only get roles through your family.

This question has sat with me for a few weeks. At first, I thought it was an easy answer but every time I sat down to write it, the ideas weren’t flowing. How does one explain that relational or heredity roles are not nepotism, but western approaches are. In part because in Canada on reserve we see a lot of rampant nepotism.

First and foremost because the idea of nepotism in an Indigenous worldview makes no sense: we are all related so obviously we work with our relatives.

That said, I know that is a slippery answer – one that doesn’t wrestle with the stickiness of who is in charge and how that happens.

In almost every Indigenous community we know family names. We have a pretty good idea of where the Ribbonlegs fit compared to the Saddlebacks, or the Carrieres to the Chartrands.

It’s no different than the Hiltons compared to the Trudeaus, or Churchills compared to say, Smith or O’Malley.

So yes, nepotism and favouring relatives is rampant. On smaller reserves it is more visible because there is a smaller, more isolated population. Thus, small numbers effects make it appear more common, as does the fact it fits with our interpretation of history. Hereditary lines traced through the mother, the power is subjective a result of nepotism, but when lines are traced through the father representing an institution[i], the power is objective and merit based.

This framing supports the idea that Indigenous systems are somehow more ‘primitive’ or provably less civilized because of the subjectivity.

But that doesn’t capture the underlying ontology that creates it in the first place.

How We Understand Our Place in the World

What is the worldview that makes people reject their family as an organizing unit? Providing instead the impossible goal of needing to meet an external standard set by some vague authority to whom someone somewhere is probably accountable somehow?

Once we have a worldview, we also need a way of understanding whether what we believe is legitimate and sustainable, is it knowledge? This is our epistemology and we interpret our experience through what we know.

How do these fit together? Well, if we believe humans exist, and these humans are fundamentally flawed, we will look for evidence that supports our perspective to create knowledge. Once we identify what we consider flaws, we will develop mechanisms to enforce what we believe is “good” behaviour on others by rewarding them for behaving ‘properly’.

If, however, we believe humans are fundamentally good but malleable, we look for evidence that supports people’s ability to correct mistakes when they have the proper resources and their ability to self-govern when their communities are supportive and safe. Once we identify people who are struggling we collectively look at what might be needed to create behaviour that is self-regulated.

These are the substructures that determine whether family accountability and responsibly are a sufficient or insufficient organizing paradigm. These different philosophies need to be addressed to begin to address the difference between Western and Indigenous Systems Thinking and understand how to navigate the transition.

First, what the feck are ontology and epistemology?

At the most basic, as I understand these concepts and how I will use them as I discuss this material are:

Ontology – Worldview

• What exists?

• How do I know what I believe exists is what actually exists?

• How do I relate to what exists?

Epistemology - Knowledge

• How do I know what exists is sustainable over time?

• How does what exists relate to me?

• What else is there to know?

Philosophically, ontology is the way you understand existence, your place in it, and how your relationship to the rest of creation. Practically, ontology is the structural framework in which you create and hold knowledge.

Epistemology is a way of understanding whether what you know is actually what you know and if it is a true understanding of the world. Think of “There are unknown unknowns, known unknowns, known knowns, and unknown knowns” and basically this is epistemology.

Our knowledge is interpreted through our worldview, just as our ontology is impacted by our epistemology.

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Shaping the Systems

At the most basic, every worldview starts with a belief about the nature of being and beings[ii].

The first crucial difference between Western thinking and Indigenous thinking about the nature of being and whether it is fixed or evolving. There is substantial literature on how the different understandings on the nature of being but for today’s purposes, these are summarised as Established Binaries and Emergent Spectrums.

Established Binaries

In the current dominant system, the majority of issues are approached from a black and white perspective: yes and no, good or bad, done or undone, fixed or broken. There is a cultural understanding that these binaries are established and fixed by a trusted authority and enforced by appropriately vetted representatives who are decision-makers for everyone.

A fundamental assumption is there is one way to behave. Safety is a function of fitting in on the correct side of pre-established, generally very narrow, definitions of success. There is only one good way.

Emergent Spectrums

Indigenous systems do not start, in general, with established binaries but rather view life as a continuous unfolding, an emergence. Multiple perspectives and interpretations provide a spectrum of possibilities for people to engage with.

The way to move forward is determined by what is known to be true through observation of all the parts of the world that will be impacted. Not just people, but land and animals, structures and traditions.

A fundamental assumption is that there are diverse ways to behave that all add to the world, and each person can choose for themselves within the boundaries of community wellbeing and cultural respect. Safety is a function of each person being sovereign in their decision about what is a good way for them.

Note the fundamental differences between Established Binaries and Emergent Spectrums and the impact how systems operate. The operating system ultimately stems from engrained assumptions about human nature and our relationship with the world around us.

These core beliefs about self and nature shape not just how we make decisions, but how we understand what it means to be human in relationship with others and our environment.

Views on Self and Nature

There are fundamental differences between Indigenous and Western or colonial worldview on the nature of people and the universe that shape how people interact with the world and how people make decisions.

When your worldview starts from the premise that human nature is fundamentally corrupt, you are starting at a deficit. It doesn’t matter what a person does, they can never make up for that is essentially wrong with them at the core.

Because this worldview starts by believing humans are inherently flawed, no one is deserving of support or assistance until they are already successful, and thus worthy of the resources necessary to maintain and grow that success.

In this view, belonging is not inherent but rather based on how well you perform the externally set rules.

Nature is only considered in this worldview with regard to how successful people can profit.

The belief that humans are both separate from and superior to nature, puts an incredible burden on each individual as well as on the community at large.

The aim, generally, is to make up for being less than good enough by conquering other things that are not good enough to prove that one is, at least, better than the wretched beings that you just conquered. Everyone is always in competition.

With this worldview, decisions are made to control and prevent sharing resources. That which is considered unworthy cannot benefit from that which is valuable. Various tools are used to ‘save’ resources from being wasted by people who have not proven their success.

The alternative is starting from the premise that humans are part of nature, and we cannot live a good life without acknowledging and honouring this interdependence.

Wahkohtowin

This interconnected worldview is embodied in the Metis concept of wahkohtowin, which describes our nature of relationships, natural law, and mutual obligations.

We understand all aspects of life - people, land, ancestors, future generations, and all living beings – are a web of relationships carrying reciprocal responsibilities. Thus, decision-making is grounded in honouring and strengthening these relationships.

When we understand wahkohtowin, we see that what appears as ‘nepotism’ in Western systems is actually part of a sophisticated framework of multi-generational responsibilities and accountability. Family members in leadership roles aren’t simply benefiting from connections; they’re carrying forward long-standing obligations to their community, land, and future generations.

Wahkohtowin in Practice

This shift helps us to understand there is enough for everything because we all work together to create safety and wellbeing.

Actions are taken based in long-standing and thus sustainable, cultural practices that support the community. Supporting the community in turn creates safety for people to respect what others need for their wellbeing.

There is no need to take more than you need today, because it means there may not be enough for someone else. In this way, the community creates safety and trust for individuals to ask for what they need.

Since we trust in each other and the universe, there is a cultural understanding that if an individual is acting in a way that does not align with their wellbeing, the community also has a responsibility to understand why the pain?

Self-actualization grows in communities that create safety for everyone because people are able to make decisions based on what they need to feel they are living a fulfilling, responsible life.

Success is an internal experience that is supported by being part of a community that acknowledges obligation to each other[iii].

Thus, our worldviews shape our interpretation of what we experience. For example, Indigenous worldview shapes our experience of the world, it is how we understand the world and how the world understands us in relationship. This worldview understands we exist as part of something larger.

Ontology – Indigenous Worldview

• What exists? I exist. All I can see and experience exists.

• How do I relate to what exists? When I interact with what exists, I experience outcomes I want more or less of

• How does what exists relate to me? When something interacts with me, I experience outcomes I want more or less of

In colonial worldview, there is limited understanding that we interact with the world. Disturbingly, as I was preparing the image below, I realised that for a colonial or forced worldview, understanding that the what exists relates to people is outside the acceptable boundaries because it suggests a world that is not human-centric.

Ontology – Colonial Worldview

• What exists? Things have been proven by people who know more than me

• How do I relate to what exists? Interaction has prescribed rules based on success of acting appropriately, as decided by a human authority

• How does what exists relate to me? I do not understand the question

These fundamental differences in worldview directly impact how roles and responsibilities are assigned within communities. When humans are seen as inherently flawed, extensive, artificial validation systems become necessary to maintain an illusion of ‘separate from” the flaws of people.

In contract, when humans are seen as inherently good but malleable, community observation and relational accountability become the natural methods for understanding how everyone contributes to the wellbeing of the community as and when needed.

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Hereditary Responsibilities or “Merit-based” Roles

We have arrived at the observation and question that started all this based on the concept of Relational Accountability (”Trust flows through relationship, not roles. Responsibility is shared, not assigned):

In the work I’ve done with employees (Native and non-Native) at places of tribal employment, I often hear people saying nepotism is a big problem. Perhaps you have some insight?

Short answer: Yes. Currently nepotism in First Nations is a problem. The structures put in place to meet the administrative demands of the colonial culture they must respond and report to create the conditions for nepotism.

The current model is filled with extraction and self-protection. There are a lot of places where the paid work is filled with family members of elected councillors or long-standing employees. And there are a lot of places where money is missing with nothing to show for it.

This is also true in jurisdictions governed through Western Systems Thinking.

The growth of nepotism mirrors that the practices in the colonial states that imposed these structures. Monarchy, anyone?

Nepotism is a big problem in all economies where the only goal is power, usually as measured thought money.

The Western interpretation of Indigenous hereditary roles as ‘nepotism’ fails to recognize how traditional Indigenous systems create community wellbeing through interconnected responsibilities.

Embedding leadership within a framework of relational accountability creates multi-generational obligations that extend far beyond individual benefit. Leaders are accountable not just to today’s community members, but to past teachings and future generations.

Thus, the wellbeing of the people and community they live in, coupled with long-term cultural sustainability, demonstrate whether leaders are upholding these responsibilities and contributing to the collective wellbeing of the community.

This stands in stark contrast to Western corporate nepotism, where family connections often serve to concentrate power and wealth without corresponding obligations to the broader community.

The difference lies not in whether family members hold positions of influence, but in how that influence is expected to serve and to whom people are responsible to: the greater good or individual enrichment.

Traditional Leadership Selection vs. Western “Merit-Based” Systems

Hereditary Indigenous leadership selection processes reflect a fundamentally different understanding of merit and capability. While Western systems rely heavily on credentials, competitive assessments, and individual achievements, traditional selection processes often unfold through long-term observation of character, demonstrated wisdom, and community service.

Future leaders are identified early, not through formal applications or interviews, but through their demonstrated commitment to community wellbeing and their ability to understand and honor complex relationships.

For example, potential leaders might be observed for years by elders and current leaders, who assess not just their decisions, but how they make those decisions. Do they listen to all perspectives? Do they show patience in conflict? Do they demonstrate an understanding of how their choices affect the broader community? This stands in stark contrast to Western merit-based systems that often reduce leadership potential to measurable metrics like profit generation or efficiency improvements.

There is also a competitive edge to Western systems that undermines true community because the goal is to win, not to thrive.

Why Context Matters for Interpretation

Western researchers and thus the broader public miss that nepotism is common across western economies, it’s hidden with euphemisms: “followed in her mother’s footsteps” or “His dad and uncles are all firefighters too.”

“Good at business” is a way of ignoring/erasing the broader, cultural nepotism and power dynamics that enable the accumulation of capital such that others are excluded from having their basic needs met.

Cultural artifacts also obfuscate nepotism through phrases like “Alumni clubs,” blinding us to the social networks that impact people’s access to post-secondary education. Because these external institutions have data-driven entrances standards, and networks are often invisible, there is an illusion of objectivity. This illusion obscures how people’s ability to navigate these systems is grounded in personal relationships, to name one example.

Indigenous peoples are going to act in the ways that are expected and modelled, particularly when trying to integrate the western systems thinking imposed on top of traditional governance models to meet culturally-imposed administrative demands.

When these actions are layered on top of both traditional community practices and the use of western interpretation to explain them, claims of nepotism seem to be reasonable because the argument of ‘family bias’ can be made, obscuring that Indigenous worldview that embeds long-standing obligations that are missing in Western worldview.

Anything removed from context is incomprehensible

The fact that many Indigenous Nations are/were matrilineal, and western anthropology as a discipline tends toward language like “hereditary” when speaking about different social roles as identifiers plays on and embeds the interpretation of relationships being traded for positional power.

Importantly, this western interpretation does not understand that the role is secondary to the inherent responsibilities people carry when they are in these roles. Responsibilities that are discussed and advanced based on the input from the community by youth councils, elder councils, and broader discussion.

Western Systems do not have a worldview where obligation and community wellbeing are the foundation and therefore interpretation will always be coloured by the hyper-individual competitive urgency that informs much of the systemic design.

In this way, the importance of relational structures is overlooked. In large part because there was no desire to create a theory of knowledge that was expansive enough to accept it may not be the best way to interpret the world.

From a sociological standpoint, it’s fascinating to me how quick we are to see behaviours we have been taught are irresponsible in others but blind to our own versions. Different names, comfort level, degree of familiarity are all a part of interpretation, as is how able we are to say “I don’t know.”

A Season of Reclamation is Here

To be clear, there are also a lot of Nations where nepotism is not an issue, where governance has begun to reorient toward community and responsibility once again. This return is rapid and powerful. We see it in the rising matriarchy movement and growing calls for wholisitic models of social and personal wellbeing and development.

Connecting Community Wellbeing to Leadership Effectiveness

Leadership effectiveness in Indigenous systems is inseparable from community wellbeing metrics that extend far beyond financial measures. These metrics include the community’s physical and mental health, the strength of cultural practices, the vitality of traditional languages, the health of the land and water, and the wellbeing of future generations.

When leaders make decisions that negatively impact any of these elements, their effectiveness is questioned regardless of any economic gains because there is an understanding that economic gains made at the expense of the community are not sustainable.

This holistic approach to measuring leadership success creates a natural accountability system that Western metrics, focused primarily on financial outcomes and short-term gains, often fail to capture.

Other indications include the growing number of legal actions, as well as the resurgence across cultural, economic, environmental and territorial, and food sovereignty movements.

This rising commitment to more sustainable ways of governance and decision-making is supported by emerging western science supporting how best to address macro, the growing ecological uncertainty, and micro, the number of people experiencing loneliness, challenges.

One that serves and enriches the community it is a part of rather extracting resources for an absentee landlord.

What Now?

There may be claims, as these new frameworks emerge, of nepotism and favouritism. There will probably be accusations of fraud or misuse of funds. What I mean is: There will be bumps. Some will be brutal betrayals that we need to recover from.

Betrayals exist now. These are built into the systems and we are experiencing the results in such profoundly unsettling ways right now.

The crucial difference? In the current western model, betrayals are either hidden to avoid reputational damage that may affect profits or are celebrated because they have enriched the correct stakeholder because the system prioritizes profit.

In the indigenous model, each of these betrayals provides opportunities for growth because of the commitment to accountability and truthfulness across the system because the system prioritizes relationship.

Relational Accountability in Practice

Relational accountability operates through multiple interconnected layers of responsibility and reciprocity. Leaders must regularly engage with various circles of accountability: immediate family, extended family, community elders, youth councils, and the broader community.

This practice cannot be reduced to a checklist for efficiency, because people are not efficient. Decisions are not made in isolation but through continuous dialogue and consultation.

These principles of community accountability are increasingly visible in contemporary Indigenous governance. For example, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke has implemented a Community Decision Making Process that combines traditional consensus-building with modern governance needs. Major decisions include extensive community discussion, ensuring decisions reflect collective wisdom rather than individual authority.

Indigenous communities are reclaiming traditional accountability systems, more decisions are made with full awareness of their ripple effects across relationships and time with the intent of strengthening the web of relationships that holds people, builds community, and sustains culture over time.

Unlike Western systems where accountability often means quarterly reports and annual reviews, Indigenous relational accountability is continuous, dynamic, and embedded in daily interactions.

When a leader strays from their responsibilities, they face not just formal consequences but the immediate feedback of damaged relationships and community trust - a powerful motivator for maintaining integrity in decision-making.

Start. And Keep Going

Such a reclamation takes time and commitment, and for a long time it can look aimless – hopeless even – as a small group of people continue on guided by a common goal. Others work in isolation, driven by vision of something different and seeking others.

As this reclamation work gains momentum these smaller groups connect, more people begin to learn about alternatives to what for many years has been the status quo, and the friction starts to generate more interest.

Learning alternatives is one thing, living them is another. One of the dangers of Western Systems Thinking is how quick it is to declare failure: two missed quarters of expected results and the search for a new strategy is underway.

Thus any transition, personal or public, to a new way of relating to the world, each other, and ourselves, requires a new framework for understanding progress. An iterative approach that is grounded in community observation and connection rather than timetables.

These sorts of frameworks are less generalizable, often growing out of the community they are in and rooted in what the community needs. As frameworks are built, more and more stories will be told about strategies and weak spots to others who are working toward a sustainable, community-wellbeing model. The stories will inspire others, but not direct them.

Any questions that get us thinking about how systems operate in our communities and on our culture are important. Engaging with what we see with curiosity offers us opportunities to develop a broader worldview.

Based on this, discussion I offer the following for consideration:

1. Where do you see nepotism in your workplace or community?

2. What are the benefits and drawbacks of nepotism?

3. Is hiring your child in your business nepotism? Or is it part of building a family?

4. What kind of community do you want to live in?

5. How do your actions support the kind of community you want to live in?

[i] I know this seems like a bit of a leap, but when I say that patrilineal inheritance is institutional, what I mean is it needs something other than the woman’s word that the child is who she says it is. It is one way of removing sovereignty from women and thus, their children. It is why the Indian Act stripped status from women who married colonizers or settlers, and why women and their children continue to fight to have their ancestry acknowledged.

[ii] Please note that, as much as possible in this discussion, I am going to avoid discussions on how time is understood in these systems because it adds an unnecessary, I believe, layer of unnecessary complexity. I am also going to avoid, as much as possible, any discussions on spirituality, faith, or the divine beyond what is necessary.

[iii] I notice as I write these paragraphs, in the back of my head, there is a voice saying “well, what if Joe is fulfilled by hurting someone?” like this is some gotcha, rather than an example. My response to myself is the reminder that in a relational worldview, if Joe is fulfilled by hurting someone, it is because there is something hurting in Joe and the community will act to both protect the community while also addressing Joe’s pain with dignity. This approach reinforces relationship while maintaining dignity because human nature is essentially good, but malleable.

Despite the multiple thank you cards and commendations, there was a moment, as a fiercely loyal civil servant, when I realized work was poison for me.

It was later than you might expect for a labour market theorist who has spent her career thinking about meaningful work. But that’s the way with systems we’re born into—we often can’t see them clearly until we’re forced to step outside.

In part because I never really took a break to reflect on whether my values were reflected in the outcomes of the work I was doing.

Part 1: The Awakening

My journey through the civil service led to a gradual awakening, ending with a sharp kick in the teeth. At first, professional momentum coloured everything—my sense of value, my perception of impact, my belief in the importance of my work. Like many, I got caught up in wanting to please my boss and impress my colleagues. In government service, that’s not always aligned with serving the public good.

The cracks in my belief system started showing when I stayed in one senior management position long enough to see the patterns. Before that, I’d moved roles every 12-14 months, too quickly to witness the full cycle of institutional amnesia and intentional undermining that plagued our work.

What do I mean?

During a major legislative overhaul, my team made a deliberate policy decision not to build an app for assessing the affected administrative limits under new legislation. The reason? Liability.

HUGE liability.

We had received multiple legal opinions and drafted an explicit statement, agreed to by three ministers and their deputy ministers, that an app would not be considered to preserve the legislation’s integrity.

There was an unexpected twist: the government’s strategic policy coordination office partnered with a policy group to hold an innovation competition and someone submitted the idea for the very same app we had just ix-nayed.

Ironically, I had started this policy group when I joined the civil service. Though no longer an active member, I was still involved in discussions. When I saw the app listed as a finalist on the competition website, I reached out to the organizer.

I explained the legal issues and why the submission needed to be disqualified. Instead, they not only kept it in the competition—they awarded it first place for innovation. This despite our team’s proven legal concerns and the submission’s lack of any subsequent legal due diligence.

Unsurprisingly, the app never got built because legal refused to clear it. None of the other, genuinely innovative policy proposals received any attention. The competition died, and with it, a little more belief in the possibility of change died among participants.

BUT! The senior manager did get a promotion for their “commitment to policy innovation,” so all good.

This experience made it crystal clear: there was no institutional memory. Worse still, there was no desire for one. No intention to mitigate harm or build a cohesive civil service. There was only the dance of constant approval-seeking, with a made-up urgency dressed up as progress.

Part 2: The Breaking Point

Few people spoke up about their concerns and dissatisfaction in the civil service when I was a worked there because the repercussions were often dire. I experienced this firsthand in my position before leaving government. And from what I hear from former colleagues, it’s even worse now.

The breaking point came when my government employer defended misogynistic behavior and engaged in blame-the-victim games. That’s when I realized there was no organizational integrity left—no commitment to doing right by employees.

How Good People Get Caught

Let me be clear: I’m not saying there are no good people in government. The civil service is full of incredibly talented, committed individuals who go home every night struggling to understand why obvious, necessary changes are just. not. happening.

The data is clear

Solutions to social issues are widely understood

And most front-line and professional staff are deeply committed to making life better for humans. That’s why they became civil servants.

(As an aside, since leaving government I have learned that most people choose their jobs because they want to make life better for their communities and do something they enjoy. This isn’t, in my experience, always true for those leading in large consultancies, large corporations, or unfortunately, government leadership.)

But what happens is the endless recycling of the same decisions with different messaging. This devastates employee engagement, life satisfaction, and trust in the organization while concurrently undermining the population’s trust in their institutions ability to provide the right programs.

A lot of people eventually just kind of give up and start counting down the days until retirement. Legit, some people have a retirement countdown clock on their desktop. But when employers are always telling the public that the civil service needs to be cut and don’t deserve regular pay increases, why would workers give anything else?

The Executive Bubble

How does this happen?

Most bureaucrats in executive positions are captured by capital’s interests because they rarely spend time with people making under $100,000 a year (except those high-potentials marked for future leadership). Instead, they’re spending time with others in their income bracket ($250,000+) and higher. Lobbyists and consultants have endless event invitations and corporate accounts.

To be clear, this often is not intentional but rather a function of social dynamics and how power operates. In Power for All, the authors provide a case study of Vera, an NGO founder who slowly accumulated her own power, eventually alienating those she originally wanted to serve. She began to cut people off, focused on attending awards dinners rather than tending the community.

She was fortunate, she had friends, colleagues and family members who called her back into the circle. Reminding her of who she was, and she listened. Battilana and Casciaro offer this wisdom: “Having once been wary of power is no guarantee you will be immune to abusing it.”

Over time, executive civil servants’ interests align more closely with the capital class than with the population they’re meant to serve. They interpret information and make decisions with this perspective. Not because they’re bad people, but because it’s human nature to adjust your perception of “normal” based on those around you.

Even more, when an organization doesn’t believe its employees deserve good treatment, it rewards executives who share that view. And if an organization doesn’t value its own employees, it certainly has no genuine regard for the population it’s meant to serve.

“If my boss is interested, I’m captivated”

I witnessed this pattern play out in a colleague’s story—a woman who had been a vocal advocate for servant leadership and strong employee rights.

Smart and ambitious, she hit the classic ceiling: unable to make the leap from senior middle management to executive leadership. I knew the frustration well, having spent years watching less qualified people advance while I remained stuck.

I believed I could make change once I was an executive. Once I left government I realised I should have been paying attention to the current rate of change executives were achieving to understand my frustrations. So When I finally heard her introduction speech to her new team, everything became clear. I could predict:

· How she got the job

· What it cost her

· What the next 6 months would look like

My predictions proved mostly accurate. Her shift to micromanagement and “my way or the highway” thinking meant her formerly high-producing team was looking for work within a month. Within six months, most were gone, almost a quarter on medical leave.

This “didn’t bother her” because “it happened at her last job when she took over too.”

Why? Because toxic workplaces, grounded in extraction and profit-driven mentality, demand we sacrifice our integrity—our sovereignty—to be ‘successful’.

I know because I did it once too.

Part 3: The First Steps

When I first left government, fresh from what I’d call an economics-driven approach to rehabilitation, I was consumed by anger. I was convinced this had happened because no one had figured out how to address it before.

But I was obviously smarter than everyone and knew how to fix it (spoiler: I’m not smarter than everyone else, thinking that is like the number one clue I still had some learning to do).

I was going to prove to everyone that I was right and my employer was wrong.

Beyond Right and Wrong

Except… then what? What was going to get better by proving someone else wrong? Wasn’t I just doing the same thing they were and refusing to be accountable for making things better?

Through reading and research, I (re)discovered that obviously other people had had answers in the past, there was policy already in place to address the exact situation that had happened to me - and thus countless other people before me. It wasn’t lack of policy and legislation in place, it was lack of will.

Here’s a curious phenomenon about human nature: knowing something intellectually and knowing it as lived experience are completely different things. If you’re reading this thinking, “Gosh, how did Trisha not know this?”

I’d said that exact same thing about others… until it happened to me.

My initial response was predictable: anger, self-righteousness, and a burning desire to prove everyone wrong. But that’s just another form of the same poison—focusing on winning rather than healing.

The Safety Equation

So what now? Proving people wrong when an organization is designed to protect them is self-destructive. I was stuck in assigning blame and playing by the rules of the very organization that had harmed me.

Why would I want to keep engaging with the group that hurt me? I’d been doing that for decades, ending up in the same place again and again. (I’d been bullied at more than one job—it’s fairly common, check out the research from the Workplace Bullying Institute.)

Looking back now, I can see how that self-righteous anger fueled me through the fear of doing something most people don’t do: leaving a permanent government job and pulling their pension when they’re a single mom with two kids and a complex post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.

I did it because I slowly came to understand that I didn’t feel safe returning to that employer. Everyone’s attitude seemed hostile: “What’s the big deal?”

That’s when it hit me—if my employer couldn’t care for its employees, how could it effectively and respectfully administer programs and services for the population it was supposed to serve?

The Real Data

Recent data from Gallup’s State of the Workforce (2025) report shows I wasn’t alone. Employee engagement has fallen to barely more than one in five (21 percent), with middle management engagement dropping from 30 percent to 27 percent.

Since managers are among the most influential factors for non-supervisory employees, Gallup warns that if manager engagement continues to decline, it won’t stop there—the productivity of the world’s workplace is at risk.

This research isn’t new. Wellbeing has always been linked to having meaningful work. Understanding how our labour market currently functions to make us ill sent me on a path to discover what makes us well.

Part 4: The Medicine of Meaningful Work

This journey led me beyond trauma-informed approaches to what I now call dignity-centered work—where the focus isn’t just on avoiding harm but on creating spaces where people can thrive.

Beyond Scarcity Thinking

When I started coaching people, I was still operating from a scarcity mindset—how to get more money, work harder, push more into each day. I believed success meant constant striving, that my value was tied to productivity.

Despite investing tens of thousands in coaches and programs, something still felt off. It wasn’t imposter syndrome or low self-esteem exactly. The usual suspects—fear of failure, anxiety, public speaking fears—didn’t quite fit.

I kept showing up, doing the work, trying to understand what was keeping me stuck. I had two mantras I used almost hourly:

“I am worth the work” ~ Me

“Everyone here thinks he or she is special but to be truly

special you have to know you are nothing.” ~ Mother Meera

Patterns of Healing

The breakthrough came during an inner child meditation on First Nations land. A part of me emerged that had been waiting for the right moment—not from vulnerability, but from strength and self-preservation.

She had stayed hidden until I was ready to create the safety she needed. This wasn’t just about healing old wounds; it was about reclaiming work as a way of expressing the gifts given to me by Creator rather than as mere survival in a toxic system.

I saw this pattern everywhere once I knew what to look for. I saw it in my stepdad, a political refugee, and his friends—how meaningful work helped them reclaim their place in a new community.

Those who found purposeful employment healed faster than those who didn’t. I witnessed it among my unhoused neighbours: those who found ways to contribute—picking up trash, shoveling walks—tended to fare better than those who remained isolated.

Understanding the Pattern

The research backs this up. Drake and Wallach found that “unlike most mental health treatments, employment engenders self-reliance and leads to other valued outcomes, including self-confidence, the respect of others, personal income and community integration.” It’s not just about having a job—it’s about having meaningful work that connects us to something larger than ourselves.

My growing appreciation for Indigenous ways of knowing revealed a fundamental truth: work isn’t meant to be just about monetary exchange. All Indigenous thinking, and indeed most spiritual traditions from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, recognize that we need each other and that work is how we support and build our communities.

This understanding cracked me open to see how monetizing labour had hidden work’s deeper meaning. Western capitalism sold us the lie of leisure while stealing our most precious resource—not the profits from our labour, but its meaning and connection to community.

When I was assaulted at work in 2019, I knew staying on disability until retirement would trap me in a different kind of prison.

True healing required reclaiming work’s transformative power. My work has given me more than purpose—it’s provided drive, focus, and ways to create new relationships across many communities.

Part 5: The Path Forward

This is what I mean by “Work as Medicine”—not just employment, but meaningful contribution that helps both the individual and community heal. When we approach work from this perspective, we move beyond trauma-informed practices to dignity-centered work, where we create spaces for people to thrive.

This stands in stark contrast to conventional wisdom, like Gallup’s suggestion that executive leaders need to ensure “middle managers are in lock-step with the executive vision”—an approach that hearkens back to early 20th century Taylorism practices requiring command and control leadership.

New Metrics for Success

Such approaches won’t work for people who want their work to have meaning. People are increasingly understanding the connection between extraction and sustainability, and they’re voting for sustainability with increasing speed. This requires a new kind of leadership and a new vision of work.

Writing this feels bizarre sometimes, 28-year-old me would totally roll her eyes and then go have a beer—because I used to have a real ‘suck it up’ mentality. The me I carry now would have been too much for that younger version. I was still in too much pain then to create something bigger than myself.

That cynicism and focus on what I could get brought me to Ottawa, then England, and eventually here. I travelled all over the world believing the job or the paycheque would change me.

Until I arrived here, in true sovereignty about how I spend my time and who benefits from my work, after a lot of growing up and a deep desire to live a life free of self-loathing.

The Transformation Blueprint

My kids were and continue to be part of that journey—how do you create a house of love if the money comes from doing things you hate?

Finally, I saw it in myself when I could hold both my most vulnerable and strongest parts without shame or anger—only gratitude for the freedom this understanding brought. When I understood that saying “I went through it and I’m fine” was the number one indicator that I was not fine.

The transformation of work from poison to medicine isn’t just about individual healing—it’s about collective liberation. When we are free, it becomes our responsibility to help free others. This is the true medicine of meaningful work.

We can start where we are, and when enough of us begin this journey, workplaces will transform themselves. Because money isn’t power—it’s control.

And when we find ways to support each other in having more control over the things that work is buying from us, when we stop allowing basic needs to be weaponized against us, money becomes less relevant.

Collective Liberation Through Work

The path forward isn’t about destroying current systems—it’s about transforming them through conscious, intentional action.

It’s about creating workplaces where dignity isn’t just a buzzword but a foundational principle. Where success is measured not just in profits but in the wellbeing of our communities.

Because ultimately, work isn’t just what we do, it’s how we contribute to the world. And when we reclaim it as medicine, we don’t just heal ourselves, we help heal the world.

Part 6: What I’ve Learned

Here are 6 lessons I’ve learned after leaving what I truly believed would be my forever career and doing a bunch of other, hard things:

1. Some people say “Starting is the hardest part.” In my experience that is a lie: every part is the hardest part. But that’s what makes it worth it, because…

2. Life truly is remarkable when it is an adventure requiring us to meet ourselves.

3. I will live in a box on the street before I will willingly return to working for someone who disrespects their employees and their community - not because I am not afraid of the street, but because I am more afraid of the future without change now.

4. None of us live in the same world, even if we live on the same planet and in the same community, and most people have no idea.

5. Most people do want good things for their neighbours and are super confused why things keep getting worse.

6. Working to prove something about myself fails, working in service of a dream too big to be realized in my lifetime creates deep fulfillment. All of us deserve the experience of reclaiming our work to build our dreams.

REFERENCES

Battilana, J., and Casciaro, T. ( 2021) Power for All: How it really works and why it’s everyone’s business. New York: Simon&Schuster Paperbacks

Drake RE, Wallach MA (2020). Employment is a critical mental health intervention. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 29, e178, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S2045796020000906

Insights from the State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report https://www.gallup.com/learning/event/4907504/EventDetails.aspx

Lundqvist J, Lindberg MS, Brattmyr M, Havnen A, Hjemdal O and Solem S (2025) Associations between employment status, type of occupation, and mental health problems in a treatment seeking sample. Front. Psychol. 16:1536914. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1536914

The other day I was asked whether, based on my expertise, Indigenous Systems Thinking, a new book from Jesse Grey Eagle, represents how Indigenous people think.

The question was “Is Indigenous Systems Thinking how all Indigenous People think? Is it fair to say that these views and ways apply to all Indigenous Peoples in North America or across the world?”

When I answered this question directly, I missed one key component - Indigenous or Western Systems Thinking is not about how each individual thinks, but rather the underlying mental models of the world in which people exist and the decisions made based upon beliefs about what the purpose of our time, and our work, here is.

Although each person’s thinking may resemble one or the other, systems thinking is more about how the community functions, how decisions are made for the collective, and the culture that results.

Systems Thinking about governance could be Indigenous in Spain just as much as they could be in Alberta, because it is about recognition of the interdependence of wakohtowin (a Michif Cree concept/word meaning all our relations, we are all related and need each other), or whatever the equivalent might be in Spain. It is a matter of reestablishing reciprocity in relationship, rather than extraction, with the people and the land the decisions impact.

So, because I suspect more people wonder the same thing when they consider Indigenous Systems Thinking, and because many people may not know what systems thinking is, this is the response I would like to give, with more thought about how the individual/community difference plays out in our experience of the world.

What is Systems Thinking?

First, we need to understand what systems thinking is, in general, without an adjective in front of it. According to a (very thorough) 2015 paper, the best definition of systems thinking is:

Which doesn’t mean a lot to me, even after having read the paper because it doesn’t tell me what it means in words that relate to the real world. (It’s linked here if you want to dive deeper into why this is a good definition, because it is - it’s just hard to understand in real life, like when you pick the store where you buy milk.)

Barry Richmond, a well-known leader in the field of systems thinking and systems dynamics, is credited with coining the term “systems thinking” in 1987. He writes (1991):

As interdependency increases, we must learn to learn in a new way. It’s not good enough simply to get smarter and smarter about our particular “piece of the rock.” We must have a common language and framework for sharing our specialized knowledge, expertise and experience with “local experts” from other parts of the web. We need a systems Esperanto. Only then will we be equipped to act responsibly. In short, interdependency demands Systems Thinking. Without it, the evolutionary trajectory that we’ve been following since we emerged from the primordial soup will become increasingly less viable.

Another definition comes from the Prevention Centre, Australia:

Systems thinking is defined as a way to make sense of a complex system that gives attention to exploring the interrelated parts, boundaries and perspectives within that system.

Rather than a systematic approach, system thinking takes a systemic approach. Research can be more effective if you use a balance of both the systematic and systemic approaches (Prevention Centre)

So (recognizing this is a simplistic breakdown) basically systems thinking examines the world and determines the way decisions are made about:

• how the milk gets to the store

• where that store is

• who owns the store

• how far it travels (also: why to a store, and not a community league)

• who you are drinking the milk with

• how you got the milk (barter, trade, cash)

• when drinking milk is acceptable

• is it cow goat or oat milk

  … and why are you drinking milk anyway?

And then it considers how these different aspects interact in creating a future that is beneficial to the group for whom the decisions are being made.

Most definitions presume that the default focus for decision-making is universal, and that worldview - demonstrated through how people engage in their activities and how decisions are made at the community and governance level - is the same for everyone, or same enough that it does not need to be questioned.

But how we understand ourselves, the world and our relationship to it changes how we view and interpret systems. It’s the water we swim in, the skin we live in. It’s how our minds understand the world as interpreted through our bodies and then transmuted into a culture.

The system we live in influences what we believe about ourselves, and what we believe about ourselves helps to create (maintain) the system we live in.

Some of this worldview is definitely influenced by our education and schooling, our own curiosity and interests, our families of origin but for many of us, our worldview is rarely questioned. And that is totally reasonable - how do you know there is something to question if you don’t know there is some sort of substructure to how our minds interpret the world?

These different ways of understanding connection (or not) shows up everyday, often in ways we don’t notice until our assumptions are challenged. Sometimes innocent questions shock us into the awareness that our worldview is not universal, even with people who appear to think the same way as us.

This sounds ridiculous - surely these are the same thing, aren’t they?

I remember a few years ago, my girlfriend and I were sitting down to dinner and she said “You know, I’ve started to wonder if maybe animals have feelings. Like, my cat snuggles with me because he loves me.”

She was silent for a moment. “What do you think?”

She had been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” and we’d talked about it several times, how it had influenced some of her daily decisions, so this question shocked me.

I got really still for a moment, thinking I misheard the question “I’m sorry, what? Can you repeat that?”.

“Weellll, do you think, like - do animals maybe have feelings?”

She was nervous asking this question. Her vulnerability made it clear this was not lightly asked, it had been sitting on her heart for a while. And so our dinner conversation was one I never even knew was needed.

It started with me saying “Absolutely. I absolutely believe animals have feelings, you sound nervous. Let’s talk about this.”

Reflecting later, I began to understand I did not see the world the same way other people did. It had never occurred to me that animals did not have feelings and preferences. The idea that a living creature didn’t experience the world through their body and interpret that, influencing their actions in the exact same way I do, was incomprehensible to me.

I started asking other people whether they thought animals were sentient. And more than I expected either didn’t know, or thought they weren’t.

A Quick Word on Why this Matters

Any sort of systems thinking is not about individuals and how they think about the world, although it does influence them.

Rather, systems thinking - regardless of adjective - is the worldview that is supported and maintained by the decisions that are made at the governance level, and then enacted through the daily implementation.

Going back to the definition above, systems thinking is the understanding of and lens for interpreting the world as it is experienced in the community you live in and the dominant culture it creates. Most people are completely unaware of how their daily actions either contribute to or challenge the system they live in.

This is reasonable. If we were all constantly evaluating the systems we live in, we wouldn’t be doing a lot of living.

It is, however, reasonable to reflect on whether our actions are creating the world we want, and if not - what might need to change to achieve a different outcome? Part of that is being introduced to the idea of different systems for making decisions.

Returning to the original question:

Does Indigenous Systems Thinking represent all how all Indigenous People think?

My answer: yes and no.

First, the No

Just like Western Systems Thinking both does and does not represent how all white people experience the world - there are a lot of Canadians and Americans who believe that governance should be located on and for the land and people it is making decisions about - Indigenous Systems Thinking is not how all Indigenous people experience the world - there are some who believe that profit matters more than people and it’s better to make decisions based on separation from land.

Whatever is the dominant thinking, regardless of who is making the decisions, will drive understanding of impacts and what matters in the process.

The challenge in trying to generalize anything enough for broader discussion and application is that it erases the stories and the memories that create the context for how we interpret the world. Which is what Jesse Grey Eagle is naming in his book.

Indigenous Systems Thinking is about how decisions are made for the people, land, and communities where the decisions are implemented: The collective. It takes into consideration the lived reality of the moment, is focused on the long-term wellbeing, and the sustainability of the decisions over time for the environment and the people.

The foundation is reciprocity to ensure long-term success rather than ‘how much can we take?’, there a balance between benefit and accountability asking ‘how can we work together?’

And now the Yes

The above said, IST does represent the teachings I’ve studied as Metis woman, as a mixed-culture kid raised by an Indigenous political refugee from Chile, and as an Irish woman raised among people who still follow the old ways. IST aligns with what I know through prayer, meditation, and ceremony to be a good life in a good way - miyo pimatisiwin - because it is what feels right.

The ‘yes’ is how our systems are internalized and create our own view of the world. An Indigenous worldview starts from a fundamentally different perspective on the nature of people.

When I live this way, I don’t question if I am a good person because I have evidence. What is the evidence? Shifting from a western worldview to a Flow, or Indigenous worldview required some tools and those, for me, are the values in the Red River Cart Wheel Teachings of the Metis Nation as what makes a good life.

These values inform how I think explicitly as well as how I interpret the world. In part, I believe, because I have made a conscious decision and a consistent effort to change how I understood my relationship to the world during my personal healing. To stay well these values, from a worldview of people being fundamentally good, are how I make decisions.

So, my decisions inform the community I am a part of and how that community makes decisions. Collective (System) values guide community decisions by ensuring we take concrete action that embody these values.

• Are resources stewarded?

• Is community stronger?

• Is there balance between all parties involved?

• Can this be sustained?

These community values can only be held in place by people who have these same values and the integrity to uphold them.

Putting this into Context for Decision-Making

Thus, leadership needs a framework for decisions that ensures our values remain concrete, rather than becoming abstract principles and this framework is grounded in the land and in time. The framework has to be both internal - a commitment to personal values, and external - making public decisions that align with those values.

Shifting from a Force, or Western worldview to a Flow, or Indigenous worldview required some tools that create ways of assessing progress that goes outside of the transactional (profit-oriented) nature of Western Systems Thinking. Above I referenced the Cartwheel teachings. These are twelve values that I use for all of my decisions and that I reflect on every week.

(Ben Franklin did this too.)

NOTE: The Red River Cart was invented by the Metis to endure long, tough travels carrying belongings and goods for sale. It was the engine of our Nation, so it makes sense that the teachings that guide us were built into what kept us moving forward. This is another example of how culture is reinforced.

As I practiced liking myself, I used the values in the Cart Wheel teachings to assess my behaviours each week and determine whether I was acting in ways that aligned with the values I say matter to me.

Through this work the voice in my head went from shaming to loving, and how I understood work transformed. I began to understand that to do good works is why we are here, the only guarantee we have is there is work to do to care for others so that we in turn may be cared for. That for me, healing was part of that work.

This is, of course, not the only way to see the world so anyone who says they believe differently just sees the world in a way that is different from me. While I believe long-term results speak for themselves, both in my personal and my professional experience, this observation is not a judgement. We all live in the world we want to live in.

The reason I choose to see the world as an interconnected whole is because when I live in the world this way, I experience moments of true and overwhelming joy that were not available to me when I believed the delusion that I was separate from the world. At that time, I felt deeply alone and unsure of how to handle the pressure of being all-the-things to myself.

When I returned to what is, for me, correct thinking to have a good life, that anxiety and fear began to dissipate. Slowly at first as I remembered how to trust the world but the more I leaned into this worldview, the quicker my anxiety resolved into a desire to work toward something greater than where we are right now.

Why This Matters:

If the results we experience do not align with our expectations, failure and then disappointment of at least one group is the usual result. In Western Systems Thinking people often blame themselves for systemic failures. This is by design: if your worldview is that humans are evil, any failures you experience are a result of your lack.

In a system that sees aggression as courage, and you are not aggressive, this is a failure on your part and your perspective will not be considered in discussions or decisions. Similarly, if community wellbeing is less important that personal gain, decisions will reward people motivated by personal reward even if it is at the expense of community well-being.

However, the reverse is also true. If you believe people are fundamentally good, just needing guidance, then decisions are made to support community and create safe environments where everyone can flourish.

This worldview requires that nature be included because wellbeing is directly related to the health of our planet: clean air, clear water, healthy animals and plants and all other beings.

Final Thoughts

Systems thinking is about the fundamental worldview that shapes how communities and organizations make decisions which in turn shapes how people think. Whether Indigenous or Western in approach, these mental models determine how we understand our relationship with the world around us and, consequently, how we make decisions and what we expect from outcomes.

Indigenous Systems Thinking creates a framework for discussing our collective future, as well as what kind of life we want for ourselves.

1. Community: Leaders and decision-makers see themselves embedded in the system instead of separate from it and understand they are responsible for the impacts of their decisions. Regularly assessing how actions align with core values creates deeper integrity of action.

2. Harmonious Relationships: relationships are reciprocal and relational, not transactional. This shift ensures we are thinking about the impacts on the broader web of relationships and interdependencies, not just the immediate stakeholders.

3. Long-term Stewardship: True systems leadership means moving beyond short-term metrics to consider regenerative outcomes. This involves asking not just ‘What will this achieve?’ but ‘What kind of world will this create?’ People, their families,

   and their communities benefit from the work being done, ensuring long term sustainability and abundance.

As individuals, we can only control what we do. The more of us who begin to trust the world, rather than fear it, shifting from a WST to an IST world view, means we also need to spend time

1. Reflecting on how our actions align with our values, and whether our actions had the intended consequences.

2. Developing an awareness of how everything is interconnected in our daily life helps us develop our decision-making capacity. Asking questions like ‘what community do I want to be a part of?’ is a great start.

3. Accepting that we can change our worldview and thus our relationship with our with thought conscious effort and regular practice.

Until I began the personal process of decolonizing my worldview and how I understand myself in the culture we live in, I did not understand how much I questioned my own perspective in a world that consistently seemed to reward bad behaviours.

We need to understand ourselves not only as impacted by the world we live in but active agents of change to create the world we want. Indigenous Systems Thinking then becomes a framework for implementation.

Eventually I understood: In our current culture most people don’t have an internalized belief system about how the world operates that supports them in their wellbeing.

In fact, it often does the opposite: Western Systems Thinking extracts from people and the environment in the maintenance of a far-away amorphous Them (empire?). It does this by providing promises that fail to appear and framing our neighbours as the problem.

The model that recenters community wellness, sustainability, and a culture of dignity for everyone is grounded in Indigenous Systems Thinking. This model supports a personal worldview of people being fundamentally good and our work is an active contributor to building the long-term wellbeing of our communities in sustainable, regenerative ways.

It is our work that builds the world we live in and determines the services we receive, I believe we should benefit from our efforts. Nature, organizations, communities, families, and people are healthier which makes our future sustainable.

I never expected work to be both my saviour and my nemesis and yet that is what I got.

I love work - being a part of something, contributing to building a better, sustainable community for all of us.

And work almost killed me because my workplaces, through “he’s a good guy” leadership tactics when reporting an assault and colleagues protecting their promotions, were toxic - designed to force obedience to extractive practices and policies.

We all need to eat, and entrepreneurship is likely not the answer for everyone (I’m still unsure if it’s the answer for me, even 4 years in) so what do we do?

Our workplaces are only safe if we make them that way so how do we do that? In this episode Virginia and I talk about lessons learned, actions we now take regularly, and what comes next.

Three lessons:

1. integration takes time

2. you cannot be collaborative and competitive at the same time

3. taking risks requires some safety

Three actions:

1. conduct a personal safety audit

2. practice setting boundaries when you feel comfortable

3. be intentional about who you collaborate with

For example - steer clear of bad faith actors, you can’t change them. Remember your worth is who you are, not what you produce.

And the more of us who speak up about what good, healthy work looks like and provides, the more people will be able to imagine something different, something better.

Let me know below, what do you do to feel safe at work?

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Workplaces are not the havens of productivity and camaraderie that we wish they were. Leadership doesn’t always know what their role is in creating safety and in fact, may not be all that interested in safety if it means their KPIs are threatened.

What’s a person to do? Today Virginia and I talk about

• How middle management impacts feelings of safety

• The strange experience of being told that change is coming and then watching 30 years of nothing happen

• How we can create safety for ourselves and people we care about, even in toxic workplaces

• The need for an exit strategy, the value of support

One of the distinctions Virginia and I explore is middle management - stuck in the middle with you - and executive leadership which seems to sail blithely above the fray, even though their decision-making authority is far more impactful than that of middle managers.

I also talk about how we can create a sense of personal integrity and safety that will serve us in even the most toxic environments because sometimes leaving is just not available to us.

I know I have had that experience of feeling empty. Today I talk about how I remember my value is not determined by someone else, but by my actions.

Let us know below: what experiences of safe leadership or safe work colleagues made a difference in your workplaces. Or what you think needs to change

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Detachment and the Hero’s Journey end with triumph, but what happens after the hero has arrived home? or the detached enlightened being comes down from the mountain?

Today Virginia and I are breaking down common assumptions. We consider the role detachment plays in healing and personal growth

Is the Hero’s Journey better than staying? And the people who stay behind to keep the bills paid and the lawn mowed while the hero is out journeying - why aren’t we talking about them?

We’re a bit more philosophical today, and a bit more personal asking ourselves who we are becoming and how these ideas got us to where we are, and what they mean for where we want to go in our lives and our work.

I know, after doing this podcast with Virginia, that life isn’t something we can control, the best we can do is navigate what gets thrown at us.

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood: https://www.audreys.ca/item/5Z0NmApghbwPm8K9H3ybSQ

(this is my favourite bookstore in the world right now, not an affiliate link. I just think more people should know about Audrey’s Books)

Link to the astrologer mentioned in the episode: Rob Brezsny https://freewillastrology.com/

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Today Virginia and I talk about creating healthy tools to maintain a sense of safety in turbulent times when we feel overwhelmed but still have to get up and go to work.

We talk about control - often thought of as how do we manipulate or arrange external events to turn out the way we want. In this episode, we flip that question to how do we create internal safety so we are in control of our decisions regardless of how external events unfold.

When we are confronted with the unknown, what guides our decision making and how do we ensure we are choosing character over comfort? What check-ins do we have in place to ensure we make decisions that align with who we aspire to be, not what others want us to be for their convenience?

And then we have to heal both from the hurts we have experienced and the hurts we have caused (sidenote: in recovery this is often referred to as making amends), it can feel really overwhelming, particularly in a culture that prizes isolation as the path to self-knowing.

We end this episode talking about what we can do as we navigate this unfolding and uncertain future, while also taking care of ourselves.

I know that as we talk about what it means to be building a business and the questions we face, I am learning to discern needs and wants which is giving me a lot more control.

I’d love to know how you create a sense of personal control in these times. Who is your support system and what might be missing?

(image courtesy of iStockphoto.com)

Life is like that. Sometimes we are so busy chasing dreams, we forget that we grow and change in the process

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Being ok with who we were is how we become who we want to be, it is how we trust ourselves enough to take risks. Otherwise we are too busy trying to pretend that everything is just fine. We are fitting in.

Art can be a gateway to the next step on our journey - which was never meant to be linear, but a meandering investigation of what catches our interest in the moment.

Art can’t be rushed, just like a cake, it takes the time it takes. There is a lot of things about that fact that are hard for me cause sometimes I do not have the patience for the oven to preheat, let alone bake the cake.

The big lessons for me:

• Success does not look the way we think it looks - the responsible platform may be the launching pad for your dreams

• Art shows up in many different ways, and it can be a part of our lives whenever we are ready to welcome it

• Transforming systems requires vulnerability and safety. If safety cannot be found in our culture we need to learn to create it within ourselves.

What dreams do you harbour that are waiting for you to breathe life into them again?

Who do you want to be in this next moment? Let me know below

Bad workplaces can linger long after we've left.

Today Virginia and Trisha talk about toxic behaviours they carried with them after they had left unhealthy workplaces.

From people pleasing and performativity, to how needing external validation enforces the status quo, there are all sorts of cultural norms that do not serve us well regardless of whether we are entrepreneurs or employees.

Knowing what you can control helps you create good boundaries - if the job you have is the only option and it is unhealthy, then the goal is to set focus on maintaining your boundaries and creating an exit strategy. Sometimes a job is just a job.

Three takeaways from our combined ten years experience helping others navigate changes in their lives:

1. Focus on your strengths and what you are doing well, rather than worrying about your weaknesses. Knowing what you have done well creates a sense of internal safety rather than relying on external validation.

2. Non-negotiable No’s and Enthusiastic Yeses. By knowing what is off-limits, what we will not do, decisions can make themselves. We will not question our integrity because we know where our no-go zones are.

   This also creates more time to embrace enthusiastic yeses for the relationships and projects that make excited you.

3. Know your zone of control and focus your efforts there. By focusing your efforts on what you can control, your energy is directed at what needs to be done. This zone of control can and will expand as you develop a sense of safety and empowerment.

   If you spend your energy focusing on what you cannot control but want to - your zone of interest - you will burnout and get nothing done.

There are a lot of things that I have had to confront as an entrepreneur that have been uncomfortable

• Resistance to doing admin

• Realising being an entrepreneur is more work, not less, than being an employee

• Fear of looking stupid

• Anxiety that I made a mistake in a training

• Not knowing how to do things

• Doing a lot of this work alone.

All of these I expected. Some of them might be chalked up to fear of success, or fear of failure depending on perspective. There is one however, that has lurked like a hidden abscess behind all the others, poisoning my will to do hard things.

I tried to identify what this feeling, or barrier, is.

The easiest would have been to chalk it up to having Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This reason was like a midnight swim on a hot summer night. Seductive. “It’s not my fault I can’t …, I have complex trauma.”

I am not going to deny that for some, maybe even most, CPTSD might be debilitating to their ability to work but this is not my experience.

Work is medicine for me. I might be working slower, and it might take me nine tries instead of two, and it is different work now, but work fills me up. I have a sense of safety and empowerment that my previous role in government had not, and a disability check could not.

Tired of the frustration at a lack of momentum in my goals, I decided to take a deep dive into figuring out what needed to be addressed.

Diagnosing the Root Cause

After too many sessions with my therapist, multiple coffees with friends, and infinite journal entries I collected a list of potential candidates, most of which I put into 4 broad categories:

1. Imposter Syndrome is the one that most people knowingly say, as they nod along with my words when I try to describe it. It’s the one I assumed would explain my issues since as a woman, I am told I have imposter syndrome regularly.

   But it didn’t feel right. I know I am intelligent and understand how apply what that knowledge, I know that I have some solid skills and get along well with people, I speak up freely in classes and conferences and workshops. Imposter syndrome just didn’t feel like it fit.

   To be fair, this showed up sometimes as “No one likes me anyway.” Like somehow that absolved me of accountability. But it wasn’t the poison I was avoiding.

2. Fear of being seen/Hiding is the one I even have a story for. My grandma was an Irish immigrant who worked as a housekeeper. When she was teaching me to clean, she would always remind me: “keep yer arse to the wall so nae can blame yer wiggle.”

   She would also remind me to keep my eyes down. “No one needs to know what you see.” Fear of being seen fit just fine in this story.

   But! As anyone who knows me will attest, this is not a concern for me. Nor my gran.

   What she had was street smarts about how to keep cleaning houses without ending up with more than you bargained for. Literally and metaphorically.

   I also found that I say things like “I’m a better Chief of Staff than I am a Chief Executive.” A sentence that sounds absolutely reasonable and like I’ve done some deep reflection.

3. Lazy! I am entitled and think someone else should take care of me.

   This made me uncomfortable. Do I not want to do this work because I somehow think I am worth someone else taking care of me? Paying my bills?

   There are days I think, “Wow, I would love to be independently wealthy” but usually because it is -30C, the snow is a foot deep, and I can’t afford a winter beach vacation.

   Or maybe I was avoiding/learning how to do what needed to be done: make the cold calls, send the messages, reach out to others for support.

4. The system is rigged

   I’m a single mum. I have CPTSD. I’m Indigiqueer. I have all the Adverse Childhood Experiences. Things are unfair is absolutely true. It totally sucks.

   Naming the truth: that the system is not designed to assist me, or really anyone although it looks like it does from the outside, and talking about it is work. It is work that some people spend their entire lives being paid to do.

   Could it be that the poison was external, not internal? Perhaps it wasn’t my abscess I needed to excise to be able to succeed, but rather expose the one at the heart of my problem.

   Because of course, I am the one who can solve it. No one else has ever said “The system is rigged, let me tell you how to fix it.”

All of these fit to some extent. Common interpretations of what we may face as humans building careers, companies, families in a culture inclined to quick fixes so these are relatively generalizable across most people.

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What’s a girl to do?

I realised that naming what it was, creating a category, didn’t get me to what lies underneath. Sure, it helped me rationalize my struggles and gave me some comfort that I would eventually why myself into success.

I kept looking, taking courses. I’ve hired a wide variety of coaches. Everything from organizing my house, to creating a personal image.

Each of these made a difference. Some taught me what I don’t want, others helped me learn why buying should not be the goal of shopping (totally blew my mind, actually, learning this.)

I loved these things. And also power poses and filing systems were not getting me to the place where the pain, or at least the belief in the pain, lived.

Doubling down on the ‘expert’ suggestions to address “analysis paralysis” or Imposter Syndrome rarely resulted in long term sustained change, although it did move me forward a bit each time.

“Houston, We Have a Problem!”

In recovery the first step is to acknowledge we have a problem. The same logic applies all over life and I defined my business problem two ways, depending on the day:

a. I struggled to advocate for myself

b. I didn’t know how to package my offer.

I went around and around in circles with these specific pain points for three years. They had different names each time, like “I think the market might have shifted” or “Really, I don’t want to be a CEO, but a 2iC.” (second in command)

“Is selling to people really what I want to do? Or do I want to sell to companies?”

“Maybe I should actually focus on mushroom farming, not butterfly collecting.” (How many people get stuck on the niche question?)

Each iteration resulted in more pain, more frustration, more self-doubt. Even though it also could be mistaken for work.

• Getting clear on my market share

• Identifying my ideal client

• Creating policies for on-boarding when I signed a client

• Regular coursework and seminars to keep me up to date

As a quick recap, I figured the root cause of this problem was one of the following:

1. Pretending

2. Hiding

3. Lazy

4. When I felt particularly ignored, “The system is stacked against me.”

I believed that once I figured out how to address the root cause, the problem would be solved, and suddenly:

I would be able to advocate for why I could solve the problem confidently. This would result in offers flooding my email from people begging me to help them, and

Sudden clarity would result in the cleanest, most articulate offer. Also resulting in a flood of emails. Miracle! I have a regular flow of money.

I was looking for an answer that would finally get me to the done state. There would be no more barriers or obstacles. Find the groove and then it’s like brushing my teeth: a no-brainer.

Except I forgot I still need a reminder to floss everyday.

The Uncomfortable Reality I was Avoiding

It doesn’t matter if it’s because I am lazy, am spending too much time on defining my market share, or the system is stacked against me, the outcome is the same.

I could spend the next five years trying to solve imposter syndrome. Or unpack why I am hiding, what it is that makes me lazy.

And yes, the system is stacked against me. But not just me. So while I face more barriers than some people, I face less than others.

And also …

None of these do anything to get me closer to building the business and life I want to build or achieve the goal I set for myself back in university: making work better for everyone.

Maybe having an explanation will make failure more comfortable. Comfortable failure seems like pretty sore consolation when I am living out of a box and cooking on my coleman stove.

I needed to accept that maybe sometimes I don’t believe in myself, or I am lazy. Also maybe I do like to hide and would rather have someone else be the spokesperson. Acknowledging these does not

• Gift me a full-time audience

• Sell my product.

Also, absolutely, life is unfair, and the system is rigged.

That sucks.

And? So what?

We all know the system is rigged. We still pay rent and buy food and a night out occasionally. Since the system is rigged, that falls into “I don’t know how to package my offer” (to sell in this market).

Naming the system is rigged can inform how I run my business, or where I shop with the money I make, and that’s awesome. But it’s not a revolutionary thought

I did not want to hear it, but the truth is if I want to make money, I must sell in the market that exists, not the one I wish existed.

That requires me to do things I don’t want to do.

(Also, no one is going to seek me out in my corner bedroom office and ask if they do my marketing. For free. The work falls on me.)

Ghosts of Workplaces Past

It was a chance passing in the airport that pointed me in the right direction. I was speaking at a conference, one of my hero’s was a keynote speaker and this was a dream come true.

My kids were travelling with me. We were passed a former government colleague who had recently been promoted to a position that I aspired to when I joined the civil service. I was really bitter. My kids could tell when I mentioned the person’s job.

Suddenly on repeat in my head:

“Why them, and not me?”

“What did they have that I didn’t?”

“I should have stayed.”

Until my kids interrupted with this delightful quip “Why do you care? You hated working for government at the end.”

I was shocked. I was busy creating an imaginary easier future because I knew I could navigate the ecosystem. Not because it addressed any of the questions I was wrestling with.

I’d left that ecosystem because navigating it was making me miserable. My kids were right. The appeal was in the perceived safety from the pain I was experiencing now.

The roadblocks I faced in my business are ones also regularly presented as the reason people struggle to be recognized at work, or fail to get a promotion, or maybe are passed over for assignments. These weren’t going anywhere.

Back in government I would still need to advocate for myself, and I would still need to ‘package my offer.’ We just called them one-on-ones and briefing notes. The system would also still be rigged against me because governments prefer people who have no opinions.

This moment made me realize that the problems I thought existed in my business, the roadblocks I thought I needed to remove to make progress, were the same as the ones I had overcome to leave government.

The ones I had overcome to move to England and publish an article and advocate for my kids. The skills were transferrable because I had misdiagnosed the problem.

What I Had Missed All Along

It wasn’t missed actually, more misunderstood. And I suspect it’s not just a me thing, either, but a cultural expectation:

I thought I was special.

And sure, we are all unique individuals experiencing the world for the first time. We have gifts and passions; and -ish that needs to get sorted.

There are deep thoughts and secret dreams flitting across everyone’s mind. Or the anxiety of getting caught. For what? We don’t know, just a gnawing in the pit of our stomachs that we’ll get found out, be discovered. We’ll be naked on stage.

And because I thought I was special, I thought it meant I deserved what I dreamed of. Especially because it’s such a good dream, one of prosperity in a sustainable healthy future.

Truth? From my favourite spiritual leader, Mother Meera

Everyone here thinks he or she is special—but to be truly special you have to know you are nothing.

Not very poetic. It’s kind of lumpy actually. And what exactly is inspiring about knowing you are nothing? How is this the truth that got me going and actually did result in a change in my inbox and bank account situation?

I spent a lot of time wishing life were more fair, wondering how come things are so hard. If I have a great dream and it would benefit other people, I thought it should somehow be easier.

Isn’t this just dressed-up Negative Self-Talk?

The first time I read the “know you are nothing” phrase I had a strong emotional reaction. What sort of spiritual leader tells us that we are nothing? I immediately started listing all the people who have benefitted from my presence.

The list got longer, and at first the sense of “See, I do matter” felt comforting. Did she think I was a worm? I did important things and people relied on me. The more accomplishments I listed and people I named, the more I felt stuck. The weight of history and obligation made real.

Accepting that I am nothing gave me some clarity.

Road blocks

1. Imposter syndrome? Lots of people have it and it didn’t stop them, they don’t have a superpower, they just kept going.

2. Fear of being seen/hiding? Speaking in public is considered an almost universal fear, other people have found a way to be seen.

3. Lazy? Have you seen a sloth? They still manage to feed themselves.

4. The system is rigged against me? Yep, for most people.

It doesn’t matter what the roadblock is, when I understand I am not special the answer becomes clear:

• Take action

• If you don’t know what action to take, ask for help

• If the first round of help doesn’t work, find different help

• Keep going

This is how problems are solved. It’s not sexy, no fanfare. Just hard work, followed by more hard work. Dressed up with a side of chill, it’s not that serious.

Accepting I am not special, embracing that the game is rigged and I am probably closer to being benched than being in the starting line-up, started to loosen up the constriction I experienced every time I had to

make a hard phone call.

It also encouraged me to recruit a friend to go to networking functions with me where I can practice talking to people in a low-stakes professional environment. Not special doesn’t mean we can’t have fun.

So many of us grow up being told we are special, but that can be a heavy weight. Things matter more, the consequences are bigger and more impactful – in our own heads at least – and that’s where it matters when we have to make decisions.

Final Thoughts

I have no guarantee that the frustration is gone, in fact I suspect it will be back in some other form. I’m a bit more prepared now. I no longer expect smooth sailing and I know the easy path is deceptive.

But reminding me that I am not special also reminds me that no one else is either, and if someone else has done what I want to do, then I can too.

As long as I start, get help, keep going.

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This week, with all that is going on in the world, we talked about what are some boundaries that need to go. Things like “I was just doing my job.”

We’ve all heard these platitudes used to dismiss accountability or excuse doing harm and, I don’t know about you? but they don’t sit right with me.

And the big question is “What even is the point?” if our work is not making things better, why are we doing it? This week we talked about what needs to change so work can be regenerative and sustainable: something that builds community rather than destroys it.

What boundaries do you think need to change at work? let us know below

As someone with complex trauma and really big fears of rejection and exclusion, boundaries were always hard for me because I was afraid no one would like me. It has taken me a long time to realise that not having boundaries meant I didn’t like me. That is worse

So in this episode, how do we start setting boundaries, why are they important, how do we navigate something new that takes a lot of energy to put into practice.

Thanks for joining us. Let us know below where have you struggled to put boundaries in place? What helped you?

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I know a lot of families are great, and some are not. Workplaces are similar, so how does the family metaphor create expectations and establish cultural norms.

We talk about clean up crews and roles and what it feels like to be in a family that believes in the ‘behind closed doors’ kind of loyalty.

At the end, Virginia and I give a couple of tips (about minute 20) on what you can do to manage the “we’re like family” dynamic in ways that are healthy and empowering for yourself.