The Power Structures That Live in the Nervous System I
How the power structures we move through come to live inside us — fiction and essay, Part I.
I hate myself — she heard the mutter at the top of her mind. Where did it come from? Every once in a while she had these intrusive thoughts, nowhere close to what she consciously felt or thought.
What was it?
She wondered if she was picking up the thoughts of others, if it was some form of self-hate deep in her psyche, or something else — something far darker than she wanted to imagine.
She pressed pause and set her phone aside and jumped back into the brief she was writing.
Life had been weird lately, serendipitous in a lot of ways — she was learning to see the good in it, and to let it in.
Then there were these dark moments that made her question it all.
The phone rang. “Taryn,” a familiar voice said as she answered.
“Taryn,” the voice repeated.
“Yes,” she answered, with curiosity and play. It was her baby brother. He was always rushing, never giving people time to respond.
“I thought you’d be here by now. I told you, Mommy needed us.”
He was well into his thirties and still called their mother Mommy. Taryn rarely called her at all.
“I’m not coming,” she said.
“You’re not coming? But Mommy said she wanted us all here.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? So you’re not— she’s going to be pissed.”
Taryn lowered the phone to her chest and took a deep breath.
I hate myself became I hate you became I hate her — an old loop she no longer wanted to play.
She still wasn’t sure of the source, but she knew it hadn’t begun with her. Yet she was convicted it would end here.
She thought of the podcast she recently pressed play on — it was about the ivory-tower-to-corporate-America pipeline and how it trained a lineage of women to give away their power in exchange for reward.
What that reward was, exactly, the piece never quite settled — the money, the perceived status, the sense of belonging that came with being in? Or maybe of being different, somehow: one of the ones who made it.
It drew on interviews with countless women from all over the country — ages twenty-five to sixty-five, every kind of socioeconomic background — all of them, however, college-educated, each from what would be deemed a top-ten school in her field.
One would assume the education thread meant similar circumstances. It didn’t. They all carried the same pipeline somewhere in their story, but their paths through it were wide and varied.
One woman — a corporate consultant, a top-three degree in her field — had been asked to think about the institutions: the big firm, the Ivy League, the consulting rooms, the boardrooms.
What had those power structures trained her to do with her intelligence, her ambition, her creative instincts?
Her words rang in Taryn’s head:
“They trained me to give away my intelligence and ambition for a relatively low price, and to use my creative instincts to hold them up and feed them. They rewarded me for overriding my own desires. They rewarded my rushing, my overgiving. They punished me for taking my time, for breathing, for enjoying myself — for letting things emerge on their own, for speaking my truth, for using my creativity and energy and focus on me.”
“It was never outright, she continued. “It was covert, subtle — in the small daily actions, the conversations, the energetic impulses. I learned to hide what I wanted — my deepest desires — even from myself.”
Even from myself. The words reverberated in Taryn’s mind.
What was she hiding?
She lifted the phone back to her ear and sent her love instead of folding.
“Alright,” said her brother, and they hung up.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that the power structures had been internalized — built into nervous systems, into culture, into the conditioning handed to little girls (and maybe boys too), from a very young age.
When I consider the power structures we move through and carry, I am reminded of cauliflower and its fractal nature.
There’s a zoom in, zoom out pattern where similar family dynamics are experienced on a macro scale as one navigates corporate America.
Oddly enough, similar to cauliflower and broccoli, this dynamic is also man-made.
The more I think about the names we know this pervasive dynamic as — social class, gatekeeping, respectability politics, the mother wound, the father wound, the medical system, the alphabet agencies — the less they sound like separate things, and the more they sound like one thing wearing different clothes.
A thing designed to manage people out of their own free will, manipulate dynamics, and have them hand their power over complicitly.
I’ll call them chess pieces. Some were placed deliberately — tools of management, an opening move. Some the intentional byproducts of the position itself, the cruel and brilliant strategy of the game spawning compounding advantage.
And one — arguably the most powerful — is the brilliant bonus child of the rest: internalization.
The piece that has learned its own moves so completely it no longer needs a hand on it.
It plants itself in the nervous system, takes the shape of the board, and turns on its self.
The player can lift their hand from the table. The game keeps playing itself.
It lives in family structures normalized as ‘culture’, in institutions and systems normalized as ‘policy’ or ‘law’, and in the very fabric of society normalized as ‘acceptable behavior’.
It becomes hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. Or, more precisely, where it ends and you begin.
As one cuts a head of cauliflower, the pattern seems inescapable – with each chop, a smaller, complete whole expression of the original persists.
The macro and the micro repeat each other, fractally, in a society plagued by trauma.
A nation built on trauma, no matter how far back you trace it — the psyche of exiled sons, the tactics of psychological warfare, the inability to shoot a man in the face without splattering his blood onto your own.
More fractals.
It is an incestuous, enmeshed cycle: the harmed, doing the harming, becoming the harmers.
And where does it end?
How does it end, when it lives so deep in the fabric of a society — in the nervous systems of its people, the lines of its constitution, the energy that built the walls?
It can seem inescapable.
Yet – it isn’t.
The very idea of its inescapability is precisely where its power lies.