A Guidebook: How to Live Beyond Survival in Oppressive Systems
This series is a psychological survival guide for how to hold on to yourself, the truth and each other when people in power positions try to resolve their wounding by controlling and dominating us.
Know Yourself
Know Yourself, Graphite and Pastel on Strathmore Paper, 18 x 24 in.
This piece represents the embodiment of self-awareness and self-love, and our connection to our natural world - within and without. When we know ourselves, we become harder to manipulate. We aren't easily triggered by our fears, shame, or grief because we understand where these feelings come from. We know how to regulate our nervous systems through difficult moments and don’t need to escape.
Get Centered
We can learn to take a comfortable seat inside our own minds and bodies. Find a practice that helps you tune in - meditation, yoga, art, books, exercise, music, crafts. This practice isn't about fixing or managing. It's about observing, listening, and connecting - even when you want to escape discomfort.
This doesn't mean being happy about everything we experience inside. Quite the opposite. It's about becoming comfortable relating to the feelings of shame, grief, uncertainty, and fear, for example, from a seat of self-compassion and acceptance. It’s about practicing regulating our nervous systems, over and over again, through compassion and openness.
We Do It Together
Connect with others who are doing the same wake up call from within. Support each other and encourage each other. This work is hard, we don’t have to do it alone.
As a culture, we have largely been taught to ignore our internal world. We reinforce this norm with each other daily. Our minds have had to figure out complex ways to cope with the internal suffering - minimize, dissociate, blame, people-please, push through, and intellectualize.
Together, we can practice sharing, witnessing and relating to each other’s wounding in small ways and validate each others’ experiences of pain and the ways we protect ourselves. It takes patience. It takes persistence. It takes connection.
And when we understand ourselves more fully, we know others more fully.
From Inner to Outer
We can learn to practice relating to our internal dialogue from a loving, compassionate center. This leads to a more fearless and honest life, connected to who we naturally are.
When we stop avoiding our own pain and grief, we can stop avoiding the pain and grief in our world. The manufactured, bite-sized stories on Tik Tok or
Instagram reels start to taste too sweet. We begin to crave something more nuanced, more real. Something closer to the truth.
This deeper knowing extends outward. We learn to tune in to ourselves as we simultaneously take in the world around us. We pay attention to our body signals and behavioral patterns while we look around - these are clues to knowing ourselves more deeply. The devices we use every day and their algorithms know these things about us…so we should too.
What helps you return to yourself when you want to escape?
Which coping strategies (minimizing, blaming, people-pleasing, pushing through, intellectualizing) do you recognize in yourself?
Who in your life is also doing this inner work? How might you support each other?
Open Heart,
Open Eyes
Open Heart, Open Eyes, Graphite and Pastel on Strathmore Paper, 18x24
This piece illustrates the feeling of joy and relaxation that comes from being open and connecting to others while taking care to protect our space, energy and time. We can love people more fully when we see them fully, and set our boundaries accordingly. Compassion-led boundaries over fear-based boundaries break the cycle of harm.
Open-Hearted Connection
How can we love ourselves and others while acknowledging harmful behavior? When we deceive ourselves in order to love, we are communicating to ourselves and others that love and compassion are conditional. We can acknowledge the harm we or others cause when we see people in the context of their history and environment. This approach both avoids demonizing others and stops people from manipulating us by demonizing them.
We can set limits and boundaries, call out harmful behavior and allow for and enforce natural consequences, as an act of love for others and ourselves. Open-hearted doesn’t mean open to harm.
The Water We Swim In
Harmful behaviors can be best understood when we examine the stories people carry. Humans connect through the stories we share - stories passed down through generations without question.
Stories like: productivity equals worth, money makes you important, men shouldn’t cry, children should obey, women should be accommodating and pleasant. These stories can manifest in thoughts like: I’m failing if I am not the best, I look like a nobody in this car, this house, these clothes, I’m weak when I am sad, I look bad if my kids don’t listen, if I don’t say yes they will hate me.
These aren't truths. They're ideas the generations before used to make sense of the world and survive.
These stories BOTH hurt us and connect us to our people. When we can see them clearly - the water we swim in - we realize how we are all trapped in them. Even those who seem to benefit from these beliefs are cut off from their authentic selves.
To move beyond these stories, we first have to see how they show up in
our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments every single day.
But with seeing comes…grief. Letting go of what we think connects us to our people, to the earth, to life can be the hardest part. When we can begin to see our past and the people we love through the lens of these inherited stories, we can then tend to the suffering and damage they've caused.
Connection Through Boundaries
To create open-hearted connections with others, we need appropriate boundaries that correspond to and fit each situation. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we cut people off. We can think of boundaries on a spectrum, depending on our needs or the others’ behaviors.
Boundaries can be explicitly stated out loud or private decisions we make about moving forward with someone. We can have gentle boundaries of taking time and space, limiting topics of discussion, politely walking away, saying no to requests, and taking time to think to yourself before responding.
Or, we can have firm and confrontational boundaries of calling out dishonesty, requesting accountability, stating expectations for engaging, and asserting natural consequences for harmful behaviors.
When we engage with oppressive systems - we can see the systems clearly, refuse to participate in the damage, and work for change.
When we set boundaries from regulation rather than fear, we create space for creativity and connection rather than perpetuating harm.
What inherited stories do you catch yourself believing without question?
Who do you love that you've had to partially unsee in order to keep loving?
What would it mean to hold someone accountable as an act of love?
Discern and Protect
Discern & Protect, Graphite and Pastel on Strathmore Paper, 18x24
This piece is in response to the biggest abuses of power in our current world - the digital landscape. It is drawn to contrast the digital world trying to consume us and the most vulnerable by hacking our nervous systems. It targets and exploits our psychological wounds created by the cultural stories we inherited. Our power rests in the ability to know the stories while staying connected to our natural world around us and within us
The Digital Landscape
We live in a world of algorithms designed to capture our attention and shape our thoughts. Algorithms don't create vulnerabilities from scratch. They exploit the inherited stories we already carry. They hack the water we're already swimming in.
Learning to discern truth from manipulation has become essential in navigating this landscape. The people in control of these systems are currently using these capabilities to gain more power, but it only works if we forget our alive minds and bodies for the numbing thumb scroll.
The truth is usually complex, nuanced, multi-faceted and difficult to understand, which makes it impossible to articulate in a meme or 30 second reel. Algorithms feed on quickly absorbed, polarizing, and provocative information, so the truth gets drowned out by excitement and drama.
People who use control and power over others, thrive on simplistic narratives and rigid absolutes to box in our minds in big and small systems.
Not only do we have to discern for ourselves, but children are especially vulnerable. They are growing up in digital spaces that we barely understand ourselves. Their developing minds are targets for systems designed to create dependency and division.
The younger generation has no power over the world that we are creating, and generational protection is part of this resistance.
Protection Through Connection
Protection means more than monitoring screen time for ourselves or for children. It means connecting to community, to the earth, to our own inner knowing. When we are rooted in relationships and natural rhythms, we are less vulnerable to manipulation.
Spending time talking to friends, engaging with the plants in the garden, getting quiet and allowing ourselves to experience boredom or anxiety, or cuddling with our pets are all ways to reconnect to the natural world.
If we are doing this for ourselves, we can model and prioritize it for the children in our lives. Making time for walking and talking, drawing together, inviting friends to play, talking to them about their friendships are all ways to connect our kids to reality on a daily basis.
Teaching Discernment
We can teach discernment by modeling it. Learn how to pause, how to question, how to check in with our bodies when consuming information. Remind ourselves that algorithms are designed to trigger strong emotions - and strong emotions make us less able to think clearly. Take time to research sources and examine a story before sharing.
Then we can explicitly teach the children in our lives to do the same. This is how we protect what matters most: capacity for authentic connection, critical thinking, and trust in our own inner wisdom.
Which of your inherited stories does the algorithm know how to trigger?
What does your body feel like after thirty minutes of scrolling? What about after thirty minutes in nature or with a friend?