How Systems of Oppression Are Actually Dismantled

Every time a system of power is exposed, my social feed is full of shock.

How could this happen?
How was this allowed?
How did so many people look the other way?

We tend to search for answers at the top—individual villains, corrupt institutions, broken laws. And while accountability matters, it rarely explains why harm was tolerated for so long.

Oppressive systems don’t survive because people don’t know. They survive because people are trained (often from the minute they come out of the womb) to doubt what they feel.

And if I’ve learned anything over the last five years of writing and teaching on the subject of early life care, it’s that for some reason absolutely no one wants to have this conversation.

Apparently I can’t help myself from standing on the street corner attempting to wave the neon flag in attempt to get someone — anyone! — to dare to dig deeper into the dire and devastation correlation between the West’s treatment of babies and our crumbling culture.

So here I go again.

Let’s start with a little retrospective as a reminder: across disciplines—critical pedagogy, feminist theory, trauma psychology, sociology—there is unanimous agreement on one point:

Oppressive systems are not upheld primarily through violence. They are upheld through internalized compliance.

People learn, over time, to distrust their own perception of harm, defer to authority over their lived experience, misconstrue discomfort as “weakness”, equate obedience with maturity, and confuse endurance with virtue.

When this happens at scale, power no longer needs to hide. It becomes normal.

So although the prevailing question beneath the shock coloring our social feeds seems to be “why do people protect power even when it’s abused?” perhaps the question ought to be, “how people were taught to stop trusting themselves in the first place?” or “Why are so many sociopaths walking the planet right now?” or “What happened to the empathy circuitry of so many white men?’ (maybe that’s another post for another time).

Human beings are not born confused about distress.

Infants are exquisitely sensitive to discomfort, rupture, and separation. Their nervous systems are designed to protest loudly when something is wrong. Crying is not manipulation. It is communication. It is an alarm signal meant to elicit care. Connection. Coregulation.

But in most modern, western cultures, caregivers (especially mothers) are explicitly taught to override their response to that signal. To ignore their intuitive drive to care for and connect with their babies.

“Don’t pick them up too much.”

“They need to learn to self-soothe.”

“You’re projecting your anxiety.”

“This is healthy for your baby, even if it feels wrong for you.”

In case it wasn’t abundantly clear already, we’re not actually training babies when we leave them alone to cry, ignore their attempts at communication, or force early independence.

We’re training parents. We’re training the adult’s capacity to distrust their intuition in the presence of distress, especially when an authority figure assures them it’s “normal,” “necessary,” or “for the greater good.”

This is not a moral failure. It’s cultural conditioning.

And it matters far beyond infancy.

When babies are trained early to override their alarm signals — when they’re conditioned for obedience, for collapse, for shutdown, for disassociation — they are also more likely to grow into adults who defer to institutions instead of their own inner-knowing. Who continue legacies of disembodiment until they have the spaciousness, resources, or privilege to break the cycle.

This is how harm, how obedience, how systems of domination, oppression, extraction, and violence become normalized.

Not because people are stupid, dense, or complicit, but because they have learned — somatically, below conscious thought — that trusting their perception is dangerous, disruptive, or immature.

In other words, a culture that protects powerful men at all costs depends on enough people having learned not to trust what they feel when something is wrong.

That learning does not start in courtrooms or boardrooms.

It starts in relationship.

Women’s intuition—especially maternal intuition—has always been a threat to systems of dominance.

I am almost tempted not to enumerated the reasons why after moving my fingers across the keyboard and feeling the ancient rage of women across time and space flowing through me.

BUT SINCE I MUST, let me lay it out for you like this:

Intuition is relational, not hierarchical. Intuition responds to LIVED REALITY, not ideology.

And as social mammals (unless we are literally psychopathic) our intuition prioritizes connection and care over coercion and control.

Patriarchal systems have never merely dismissed intuition. They have worked actively to discredit it, specifically seeing feminine power and maternal intuition as a direct threat to their “conquest”.

Since the rise of colonization, intuition has been deliberately rebranded as emotional, irrational, hysterical, indulgent, “unscientific” all in an attempt to uphold external authorities.

So when mothers are taught to ignore their own knowing in moments of vulnerability, that disconnection doesn’t stay contained to caregiving.

It becomes cultural conditioning. Muscle memory.

Systems of oppression are not dismantled by exposure alone. They are dismantled when the conditions that allow harm to be tolerated are removed.

Across liberation movements and trauma research alike, the same mechanisms appear again and again.

Liberation begins when people are supported to trust their perception of harm without needing validation from authority.

Oppression reproduces itself when we continue to silence our intuition and continue along the treadmill of the status quo. Dismantling power requires changing how we respond to vulnerability, dependency, and need — especially in early life.

Systems built on extraction and dominance rely on the devaluation of care. On the devaluation of connection.

The norms we establish around infancy (specifically around responsiveness, closeness, dependence, and intuition) shape the adults we become and the systems we tolerate.

When adults are supported to respond to distress rather than override it, something radical happens: harm is harder to ignore.

This is not about perfect parenting. It is about interrupting the perpetuation of dominance.

So daring to do things differently — to choose connection, closeness, responsiveness — isn’t empty work or a strange signpost of your “weakness”.

It’s literally the foundation of the resistance. It’s rebellion.

The status quo is either reinforced or undone at the level of relationship, and I don’t know a more formative, influential relationship than the mother-baby dyad.

Do you?

This is how systems of oppression are actually dismantled.

Not just named, not just exposed, but deprived of the conditions they need to survive.

And it begins earlier than we’ve been taught to look.

It begins in infancy. It begins with you. With me. With all the mothers who mother from their hearts.

The mothers against the machine.