Origin and Rationale
My first experience of systemic harm was in high school. After moving schools in my first year, I became isolated in a small environment where I did not fit in. I was already highly self-aware due to early, pre-verbal trauma, and this made me unusually sensitive to contradiction and irony within the education system itself. I quickly became apathetic, not because I could not learn, but because learning was framed through pressure and threat. Forced compliance, rather than safety and understanding, was the organising principle. Given that threat-based control was also at the root of my earlier trauma, this was not just ineffective—it was actively destabilising.
At the time, I held grievances toward individual teachers, but even then my deeper frustration was directed at the system itself: a model of learning that relied on coercion rather than conditions, and on performance rather than capacity. Over the years, I encountered the same structural pattern repeatedly across other systems: those organised around money and targets, within justice services through court, community supervision, and prison, within addiction services, and more recently within children and family services. In the latter, I am still dealing with the consequences of poor information transfer and mis-sequenced decision-making across these systems.
For a long time, my anger remained focused on structures rather than individuals. More recently, however, the experience of being met without respect or understanding during a parenting capacity assessment pushed me back into anger toward specific people. It was only through reflective journaling and slowing myself down that I was able to recognise a familiar pattern: individuals were again operating inside harmful structures, and my own responses were being shaped by the same pressure and mis-sequencing I was trying to name.
As I began to apply the very principles I am arguing for—starting with respect, reducing threat, building regulation, and restoring honesty—I started to see measurable changes in my own life. Stability increased. Communication improved. Capacity grew. Responsibility became easier to carry. The sequence I am proposing is not theoretical to me; it is the same sequence I am now living.
Because of these experiences, I no longer see systemic harm primarily as a product of individual malice. I see it as the predictable result of systems that are built around the wrong order: demanding outcomes before building conditions, and enforcing responsibility before supporting capacity. This error compounds as people move between systems and as information is transferred without context, increasing stress and distortion at each boundary.
The purpose of proposing a different sequence is not to attack institutions or the people working within them. It is to offer an observational correction: a logically grounded adjustment that aligns system design with how human beings actually stabilise, learn, and change. The aim is not to excuse harm, but to reduce it—by creating conditions in which better outcomes become possible for everyone involved, from service users to practitioners to organisations themselves.