Even last night as I lay in bed I was wondering why I had chosen to be Systemic Trauma Specialist, rather than a Systemic Change Specialist or indeed a Systemic Healing Specialist?
It’s a very long story that I will do my very best to summarise here. You see the systemic has only just teetered into my consciousness as something that fully exists much less that it can be effectively tackled. As if tackling is going to work. I can’t catch it wrestle it to the ground and make it submit. In fact, as my last post suggests that approach is probably quite counter-intuitive, no matter how powerful it might make me feel. You see I can imagine that there are a lot of beautiful corporate face out there in their mass-produced Chinese shirts grinning from ear to ear, with the prospect of selling us a brighter future, with clean energy and human-centred design. Problem is at what point did these Systemic Change Specialists learn to be human? Have they even had time in their life to deepen the context of their understanding of change.
You see for me change is a trauma response, maybe very specifically for me, yet it is. I grew up in a home where nothing ever changes, the toxic space tolerance was emotionally corrosive and then explosive as we all trauma bonded together under the coercive control of inherited unresolved abuse and war trauma. It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? For many of us, this is true and as we were bounced into adulthood with nothing more than the life jacket of freedom we felt forcibly propelled into survival mode. Few of us have sat down to reflect since unless of course you got your burn out badge. It’s been a very firmly held belief for a very long time; if I just was able to change things then everything will be ok. Change jobs, move house, move country, get a new car and I’ll feel better. Of course this approach became both consumptive and addictive one more pair of shoes to stem off your dissatisfaction with life. Then of course it turned to people what if I just help people realise their full potential and see the ways in which they might be able to contribute to society. Which at best was presumptive of me and at worst was mildly fascist. Why can’t we all just change the world and get along while screaming at one another? (Yes I was militant and quite scary with it too) You see the real breakthrough didn’t really come until I figured out that I needed to change myself. In fact, I needed to break to change as I had been so deeply coded with the unchecked toxicity of unconditional love that my own worthiness lurked like a fat island in an underground sewer. The truth is I still haven’t mastered radical self-care or even navigated it with the nuance of radical self-reliance (another trauma response). So you see if someone is running around telling you all the things that you need to change, thinking that there is a singular cure-all approach they probably haven’t talked to that many people, nor have the recognised that Systemic Change results from being entirely human. The bigger question here for me though, within that I’m not sure where shirts fit into that or why indeed they might be appropriate to the evolution of human society? Aesthetics communicate a number of things if you get good at reading the signs. Systemic Change has to emerge from disrupting the system that has been inherited.
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