Healing at a Systemic Level

A chair created by the owner of our new apartment in CDMX.

Like many people from the US who move to Mexico City, we were drawn by a mix of financial relief, curiosity, and the promise of something slower, warmer, and more human-scaled. But for us, the move was not just about affordability or adventure. It was about healing from the invisible forces that had been shaping our lives for too long. What propelled us was something older than ambition and deeper than wanderlust, a bone-deep need to realign, to recompose, to recover parts of ourselves we hadn’t realized had gone missing. 

What began as a conversation about financial sustainability, cultural resonance for Virginia and André, and the natural progression of a season in our lives, evolved into something far more profound: an intentional act of healing from systems that had long since outlived their usefulness in our lives.

These are not systems in the abstract, but in the embodied, lived sense: the economic systems that reward relentless output while punishing rest; the social systems that assign value based on proximity to whiteness, maleness, Americanness; the business systems that elevate compliance and profitability above soul. These are not simply policies or structures; they are relational fields that penetrate calendars, conversations, bank accounts, and even breathing patterns. They become the unspoken grammar of everyday life, and to remain within them without question felt like participating in my own erosion.

To heal at a systemic level, then, is not merely to relocate physically, but to reorient spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally. It is to acknowledge that the systems I seek to disentangle from are not just around us; they are within us. They shape how we relate to other people, how we respond to uncertainty, how we interpret success, and how we speak to ourselves when no one else is listening.

As a straight, white American man, this healing carries an additional layer of complexity. The systems in question were built, in part, for me and by people who look like me. They have historically extended to me the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of competence, the illusion of safety. And yet, within that very privilege lies a paradox: that which advantages you externally can distort you internally. You begin to conflate easiness with ease, approval with alignment, and access with insight.. Over time, these distortions accumulate not as dramatic fractures but as subtle dislocations of the soul. And eventually, something has to give.

In my case, it was a gradual unraveling rather than a singular event. A series of internal epiphanies that began in 2014;  each one peeling back a layer of illusion until I could no longer deny the dissonance. The hunger for meaning had not disappeared, but it had become entangled with the pressure to monetize it. The desire to serve had not dimmed, but it had grown distorted under the literal cost of living as well as the spiritual costs of expectation and performance. The outward success concealed a quiet, persistent grief, born not of failure, but of misalignment.

To further explain this feeling, this process, I want to introduce the term Self-Justice. This concept came out of a session with a client/friend. She is not ready for it to be publicly attached to her, but I have her permission to explain it here. Self-Justice is the disciplined practice of restoring internal alignment between one’s declared values and embodied behavior. It is not an act of self-care or moral posturing, but a rigorous, often uncomfortable reckoning with the unresolved emotional, psychological, and relational contradictions that shape leadership, identity, and impact.

Self-justice involves confronting the survival-based strategies—such as control, performance, and compartmentalization—that once secured safety or success, but now perpetuate distortion in relationships, organizations, and systems. It requires metabolizing unprocessed emotional material (grief, anger, fear) and converting it into usable intelligence, thereby transforming power from a compensatory mechanism into a relational force.

The elegance of the term lies in its refusal to pathologize or moralize. Self-justice is not therapeutic catharsis dressed up as virtue. It is an ongoing discipline; a form of spiritual jurisprudence that holds us accountable not to external metrics but to the quiet covenant between our integrity and our actions. It asks not how effective we are, but how congruent. It insists that performance divorced from wholeness is not leadership; it is theater.

This practice touches every domain of my life.

In the physical realm, it has meant confronting the cost of chronic vigilance. My body had become a battleground for unresolved expectations: tightness in the chest, restlessness in the jaw, exhaustion that sleep could not mend. The physical consequences of systemic dissonance often masquerade as aging or stress, but they are better understood as the body’s final, faithful protest. Healing at a systemic level requires that I honor my body not as a machine to be optimized, but as a living archive of what I have tolerated, ignored, and internalized. It demands that I learn to regulate not through discipline alone, but through compassion, rhythm, and relational safety.

Mentally, self-justice has invited me into a new relationship with thought itself. Much of what I once celebrated as insight was, in truth, reactivity refined by language. I had mastered the art of analysis, critique, and strategic abstraction, yet struggled to rest in the unknown without reaching for resolution. The systems that shaped me rewarded speed, certainty, and articulation. But true healing resides in slower, stranger terrain. It emerges from silence, ambiguity, and the capacity to sit inside a question without insisting on an answer.

"If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive."- Audre Lorde

Spiritually, this work has involved relinquishing the compulsion to earn grace. My early encounters with faith were transactional; holiness was something to be achieved through effort, obedience, or performance. That mindset followed me into adulthood, where even the most sincere spiritual seeking was often laced with a subtle urgency: to get it right, to prove sincerity, to transcend the mess. Mexico City has softened that edge. It has reminded me that the sacred is not awarded but remembered. That the Divine meets us not at the end of our striving, but in the stillness that follows surrender.

And financially, which is perhaps the most culturally charged of all. This healing has required a recalibration of value. For my entire 54 years, I lived in a country that equated wealth with wisdom, solvency with virtue. I bought into the myth of scalability, where every offering had to become a product, every insight a funnel, every quiet conviction a platform. But underneath that hustle was a deep-seated fear: that if I did not stay visible, I would become irrelevant; if I did not stay productive, I would become dispensable. Healing at a systemic level means decoupling value from velocity. It means believing that my worth is not determined by how much I produce, but by how honestly I live. It means organizing my financial life not around accumulation, but around sufficiency, stewardship, and flow.

To be clear, I did not need to leave the United States in order to begin this process. But I did need space to breathe, to see. I needed a different cultural cadence. I needed to see my own conditioning in contrast to another rhythm of life. Mexico City has not offered me answers, but it has offered perspective. And from that perspective, I have been able to see that healing is not simply an act of self-preservation, but a form of resistance. It is a refusal to perpetuate what has harmed us. It is a commitment to live in a way that re-humanizes the spaces we touch.

Healing at a systemic level, then, is not an individual endeavor, but a relational one. It is how we begin to interrupt the transmission of unresolved pain. It is how we prepare our children for a world that may still be fractured, but no longer demands their fragmentation. It is how we remember that true justice begins in the body, extends through relationships, and ultimately reconfigures the systems we choose to build and sustain.

Before this kind of clarity can emerge, we must make a crucial distinction between coping and healing. Coping mechanisms, while often necessary and adaptive in the short term, are strategies designed to manage symptoms. They are strategies that allow us to remain functional within the very systems that caused the pain. They are forms of endurance, not transformation. Systemic healing, by contrast, requires us to engage the root conditions. It calls for us to dismantle inherited assumptions, metabolize unresolved experience, and reconstitute our relationship with power, safety, and belonging. Coping allows us to survive inside the frame; healing invites us to question the frame entirely and reimagine our place within or beyond it.

This work is not glamorous. Moving here has been wildly disruptive to all of my systems. But I’m already witnessing that it is offering something more enduring: the quiet, steady return to a life aligned. Further I offer this perspective not as an indictment of the United States or its institutions, but as a personal testament to what I am learning to release. My aim is not critique for its own sake, nor an escape into moral superiority, but rather a vulnerable accounting of what I am healing from: the beliefs, pressures, and postures I once carried as necessary, and which now ask to be laid down. This is not a prescription I’m sharing, merely a reflection. A way of saying: this is where I am, and this is the work I am called to do now.