Listen when you hear the sound of soul sucking
Almost everyone has experienced being in a dysfunctional environment at some point or another. After all, messy humans, in all of our glory, often create messy complexity at home and work. We create or inherit certain ways of operating, certain systems. We all know what a dysfunctional environment or system feels like - disregulating at best, often fear-inducing, trauma-filled at worst. Many of us can return our bodies, hearts, and souls to that wobbly place and time and feel how hard it is to be there, often operating in a fully reactive fight-or-flight state.
If we are fortunate to be among the people who drop in and out of dysfunctional systems, rather than staying there all the time, we know the contrast between breathing inside a system and suffocating. Our conscience tells us, sometimes ever so quietly, that something isn’t the way it needs to be, that we are suffering along with the people, beings, and places around us. Those with a grasp of the contrast want to hurl themselves out of the toxic system and often feel trapped.
With the world's increasing complexity, the dysfunctional system is on overdrive, desperately trying to survive and wreaking even more havoc on all living beings trapped within it. The most toxic of places might be the so-called “corporate” system. Not only an actual corporation, which in its most corrupt form might be a publicly traded company myopically focused on accumulating more money each quarter, but all the organizations that emulate “corporate” values, focusing on quantity over quality, outcomes over relationships, scarcity, so-called “professionalism”, and managing through fear. These systems were created at their very core with a Power Over, hierarchical structure that rewards the opposite of humanity. Although the epidemic of suffocating workplaces has reached just about every industry, those of you working in government, professional services, higher ed, and some big non-profits, almost certainly recognize these places.
Inside these toxic, corrupt, dying systems, one gasps for air and may not even realize it. I experienced this for 20+ years while working in all sorts of “institutions” and keep hearing it from so many others. The brainwashing and gaslighting assaults you with such regularity that you can no longer tell which end is up. You are made to believe that you can’t find a better job, a better life. That this is it. This is the best of what you deserve. You are told to be wary of the “grass being greener”. You work so hard to survive inside the system that you are too exhausted to figure out an alternative. The onslaught of people doing bad things to one another makes you believe that this is how it is everywhere, that this is “normal”. You often have to leave your conscience behind and eventually create a split personality, where one side, the robot, consumes the other. Once the robot has taken over, you forget how to feel. You are a machine executing things, seeking satisfaction from meaningless outcomes. You have become a pawn in the machine. The machine is designed to take all it can from you, all that anyone lets it take. It keeps taking and taking and you believe you must keep giving to survive. You might get to the point where you realize that they can’t pay you enough for any of this because you are so miserable.
If this sounds all too familiar and you are in the machine now, you already know this is no way to spend one’s precious life’s time. There’s hope! You can escape. Start making a plan, one move at a time, to extricate yourself. Find inspiration everywhere you go; in nature, in friends who are building a life they love, in music, in your children, in your pets. Rejuvenate yourself and nurture your courage. Check in with your values. Remember who you are as a human and resource yourself. No one is able to do this for you, and at the same time, there’s lots of support ready to help you.
We are sending our deepest compassion to those who are stuck, trapped, and frozen in our dying systems. We are here holding space for you, ready to breathe with you. Reach out, and we’ll support you, or we’ll get you connected with someone who can.
