When the System Gaslights the Soil: Practising Relational Courage in Rigid Environments

At times, entering a meeting feels like stepping into the past; a place where lived experience is dismissed and reciprocal care has no home. It becomes an echo chamber, where unspoken grief wears the mask of ‘best practice.’ Someone inevitably says, “Let’s return to the standard procedure,” and others chimes in, “That’s just how we do things here.”

And with those words, something subtle but vital withers. Innovation. Care. Integrity.

This isn't merely about toxic behaviours. It’s about a deeper, institutionalised reflex towards ego; a compulsive return to control and familiarity disguised as competence. It’s about systems that gaslight relational awareness, suppress nuance, and exhaust anyone brave enough to bring genuine curiosity, care, or complexity into the space.

The Compost Heap: Ego, Unprocessed Grief, and Stagnation

The phrase "Let’s not reinvent the wheel" might sound sensible, until you notice the wheel is square and everyone is pretending it rolls perfectly. When people cling to "we've always done it this way," they’re not upholding wisdom; they're clinging to the illusion of certainty.

Mel Robbins’ wisdom, ‘let them’ (Robbins, 2024), offers spaciousness here. Let them hold fast to control. Let them perform predictability. Let them resist change. You are not required to follow. Instead, direct your energy to what is relational, alive, and emergent.

Often, beneath the rigidity is grief: grief for lost relevance, grief for dissolving status, grief for the unbearable truth that systems we once believed in no longer hold. Nora Bateson’s Warm Data (Bateson, 2017) reminds us that complexity can’t be reduced without distorting its essence. Yet our dominant culture teaches us to bypass grief with process, mask fear with expertise, and call it leadership.

Embracing Relational Practices in Toxic Environments

In spaces addicted to predictability, showing up relationally is like introducing fluidity into concrete. You may be labelled too emotional, too unpredictable; too much. The cracks you cause might be mistaken for weakness, but they are also where new life begins to grow.

From a meta-relational perspective, what matters most is not the performance, but the field; the space between us, shaped by intention, memory, silence, and presence.

When someone rewrites your words to soften their impact, or deflects a necessary tension with a joke, you're not simply facing personality quirks. You’re confronting a system allergic to ambiguity.

And yet, ambiguity is where life happens.

That dissonance is wisdom. It’s the sound of something more human, more spacious, more truthful trying to break through. Like the hum of mycelium beneath the surface, it whispers life doesn’t follow standard operating procedures.

"We've Always Done It This Way" as a Cultural Lament

This phrase isn’t neutral. It’s not nostalgic. It’s a shield against vulnerability.

Don’t ask me to adapt. Don’t ask me to feel. Don’t ask me to share power.

I’d rather keep my role in a dying system than risk becoming part of something living.

But what if we could hear the grief beneath it? What if instead of recoiling from that fear, we honoured it?

Vanessa Andreotti’s work on hospicing modernity teaches us how to stay with the dying systems, not to fix them, but to witness them, compost them, and make space for the not-yet-known.

True change doesn’t come from tactics. It comes from tenderness. From metabolising what’s been denied. From making peace with not knowing.

Practical Steps for Navigating Relationally

Here are daily ways to stay grounded in relational integrity:

• Pause before reacting to urgency or demand.

• Speak relational truths, even if inconvenient.

• Acknowledge emotion, yours and others, without needing to fix it.

• Set micro-intentions that reflect your values, not just your goals.

• Use the "let them" practice to let go of what’s not yours to carry.

• Create space for reflection through journaling, art, breath, or time outside.

Finding Your Relational Community

Relational work is not meant to be done alone. To support your nervous system and sense of purpose:

• Seek resonance, not just agreement.

• Form small constellations of relational practice where you are.

• Join wider communities, online or offline, committed to systemic change, complexity, and care.

• Attend learning spaces hosted by relational thinkers like Nora Bateson, Ken Silvestri, and Vanessa Andreotti.

Reflective Questions for Practice

• What relational dynamics am I being asked to hold, rather than solve?

• Where might control be masking grief?

• What forms of care are being suppressed by culture or policy?

• How would this situation feel if it were a compost heap, not a performance?

An Invitation

This is not a grand strategy. It’s a murmur. A reorientation. A rebellion rooted in remembering.

If your intuition says something is off, If your care has been framed as inefficiency, If your grief or tenderness has been made invisible. You are not broken. You are metabolically alive.

The invitation isn’t to fix the system. It’s to tend the soil beneath it.

"We’ve always done it like this?" Perhaps. But not anymore.

References

Robbins, M. (2024) The let them theory: A life-changing tool that millions of people can’t stop talking about. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House LLC.

Bateson, N. (2017) ‘Warm Data’, Nora Bateson (blog), 28 May. Available at: https://norabateson.wordpress.com/2017/05/28/warm-data/ (Accessed: 26 May 2025).

Silvestri, K. (2020) How to see the world through a wider lens: A way to expand and enhance our understanding of mutual learning and complexity in an age of needed transformation. Available at: https://drkennethsilvestri.medium.com/how-to-see-the-world-through-a-wider-lens-a-way-to-expand-and-enhance-our-understanding-of-mutual-162b095d0788 (Accessed: 21 June 2025).

Andreotti, V. (2021) Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and implications for social activism. Vancouver: UBC Press.