Why do systems of harm seem to persist no matter how much we protest, heal, or “raise awareness”?
Dear Ruby,
Why do systems of harm like kyriarchy, Wetiko, and sexual abuse energy seem to persist no matter how much we protest, heal, or “raise awareness”? Is this just human nature, or is there something deeper, maybe even designed, keeping all this in place?
Systems Skeptic, Still Hopeful
Dear Still Hopeful,
I hear you. Some mornings, I wake up with the taste of metal in my mouth like the world is burning wires behind my teeth. That’s kyriarchy for you: invisible rules, written in smoke, teaching you to bow before you ever learn to run.
We’ve been told this is just “the way things are.” Human nature. Eve’s original sin of being “too much” or “not enough.” But that’s only half the spell.
The persistence of these tangled harms is not a cosmic accident or a flaw in the human spirit. The system is a masterpiece of self-preservation. It is a feature that is crafted, iterated, and reinforced by design, not a bug that made it in by accident.
The kyriarchy, Wetiko, SAE don’t just happen. They replicate themselves, cell by cell, meeting after meeting, family after family, boardroom after boardroom.
This isn’t men over women. It’s race, class, age, ability, sexuality, all stacked like a Jenga tower built to topple on the most vulnerable, softest heart in the room.
Kyriarchy: The VIP Lounge of Power-Over (And Guess Who’s NOT on the List)
Kyriarchy is patriarchy’s overachieving crazy Uncle Ivan. It’s not just gender holding you back.
It’s race.
Class.
Who you love.
How able your body is.
How old you are.
Your accent.
Your zip code.
Your hair texture.
And on. And on. And on.
It’s the “rule of the lords”… a tangled hierarchy where a select few keep the velvet ropes up, and the rest of us are left circling the block, wondering why the bouncer (who looks suspiciously like every system you’ve ever tried to change and crazy Uncle Ivan) keeps saying, “Not tonight, honey.”
Velvet Ropes, Disappearing Ink, and the Real Guest List: A Forensic Look at How Power Really Plays
Let’s get forensic and break it down, design-thinking style. You deserve to know exactly how the velvet ropes get strung, and who’s holding the clipboard. It is time to stop accepting that this is “the way things are.”
We can look at the whole choreography of invisible defaults, feedback loops, and unspoken rules written in disappearing ink and enforced by bouncers who look suspiciously familiar.
Ready? Pull back the curtain with me:
Invisible Defaults & Feedback Loops: The rules are written in disappearing ink. Certain bodies, voices, and stories get the megaphone. Everyone else learns to mime. The more power you have, the less you get checked. The less you get checked, the more you believe your own press releases. You go a little mad. Nobody tells you.
Absence of Corrective Mechanisms: Okay so now you’re at the top of the heap. No one to check you? That’s not a bug. That’s a feature. The system is designed to keep power insulated, critique out of earshot. No “user testing” from the marginalized only propo from the winners.
Normalization of Harm: Wetiko (spirit of predatory hunger) and SAE (sexual abuse energy) persist because harm is normalized, rationalized, invisibilized. We teach ourselves to look away, minimize, make nice. Violation becomes the ugly stained wallpaper in every room.
But it doesn’t stop there. When someone finally stands up and names the harm, she’s not met with gratitude or repair. She’s met with suspicion, scrutiny, and blame. The system turns on the whistleblower, crucifies her in public and private, calls her “too sensitive,” “attention-seeking,” “overreacting.” Victim-blaming isn’t a glitch; it’s the glue that keeps the whole rotten structure upright. It’s easier to crucify the canary than to face the poison in the mine.
This is how harm becomes invisible, how the cycle spins on, how the bravest among us are punished for daring to break the spell. And still, every time a woman refuses to collude, every time she names what’s been made unspeakable, she cracks the wallpaper. She lets the light in. That’s where change begins.
And every time a woman cracks the wallpaper, something holy happens: repair. Not perfect or polished, but real. The nervous system remembers there are still good hands in the world. Hands that plant, touch, soothe, build. Healing isn’t the opposite of harm; it’s the body remembering it was never meant to hold so much pain alone. Each tremor, each tear, each truth spoken out loud rewires what’s possible for the rest of us.
Design for Extraction, Not Connection:
Institutions are built to extract time, energy, bodies and not to nourish or give back. Those at the top get more. Those below learn to fawn, fight, flee freeze, comply. Performance as survival. Exhaustion as currency.
And yet… beneath all that extraction, there is a pulse the system can’t touch. Life keeps breaking through the cracks: friendships that become sanctuaries, laughter that arrives uninvited, breath that softens a hard day. Every small act of care is important. Every nervous system that learns safety again becomes a lighthouse. The feminine body, in all genders, knows how to regenerate. Give it honesty, warmth, and time, and it will alchemize even centuries of silencing into song.
When the System Pretends to Heal, But You’re Learning to Truly Mend
(The Body Keeps the Score—and the Seeds of Renewal)
Systems protect themselves by spinning stories, muting dissent, and rewarding those who keep the illusion intact (no shame in that game. I did it for 25 years in corporate America). If you’ve ever doubted your sanity in a world that gaslights truth-tellers and canonizes delusion… congratulations (and condolences), you’re awake.
But instead of awakening being the end of the story, let’s view it as the beginning of repair. The moment you start to see through the performance of “healing,” your body begins its own release. Muscles unclench. Breath deepens. Truth, long buried under fluorescent lights, starts to hum in your bones again.
The machine may still promote the enabler and silence the seer, but you are steady, breathing, sovereign and learn to source your sanity from within. This is what real healing feels like, a nervous system slowly remembering safety.
So let’s reframe the question. Not “Why does this keep happening?” but “What becomes possible when we design for feedback, repair, and collective sanity?”
That’s the blueprint we’re building together… body by body, breath by breath.
How does all this show up in women’s bodies, day after day, decade after decade?
But let’s drop the theory and get intimate. Here’s what your nervous system knows… long before your mind can make sense of it…
It shows up as the knot in your stomach before you speak your truth because you learned young that your voice was dangerous.
It’s the tension in your jaw from years of smiling when you wanted to scream.
The ache in your back from carrying too much, too long, for too many.
The shallow breath, the numbness, the fatigue that no amount of green juice or yoga can touch.
It’s the way you freeze at boundaries, fawn to keep the peace, or leave your body entirely when praise or threat enters the room.
It’s the insomnia, the migraine, the skin that breaks out before every big moment (even in your 40s).
The collapse after being “on” all day, holding it together, performing beauty, managing power, never letting the mask slip.
This is your nervous system in a centuries-old survival loop, running code that was never meant for your dignity, power, voice or radiance.
You Are The Miracle The System Never Planned For
Your body is the greatest the architect of repair. Every knot can unwind. Every tremor is an exhale trying to find its way home. Every tear you once swallowed becomes sacred water, softening what was once stone.
The same jaw that clenched to survive can open to speak prophecy.
The same back that bent under generations of “be good” can rise like cathedral arches.
The same breath that went shallow to stay safe can deepen into song.
Your body remembers wholeness. It knows how to rewire toward safety, toward sensation, toward self-belonging.
This is what we mean when we say Reclaim Your Beauty: a physiological returning to yourself.
A return to the pulse beneath the programming where power hums, truth lands, and the body becomes a place of worship again.
Ready to Rewrite the Code? Here’s How You Disrupt the Old Story (Cell by Cell)
Until we build systems that prize accountability and feedback over insulation and extraction, the old patterns will keep pirouetting in the shadows.
The amazing news? You don’t have to play by their rules. You can choose to be the pattern breaker, the one who designs new feedback loops, builds new thresholds of care, refuses to be insulation for someone else’s delusion.
Change doesn’t happen because we hope. It happens because we design for it… cell by cell, conversation by conversation, refusal by refusal.
So stay awake. Stay human. Stay willing to ask the questions that make the system stutter.
With you at the edge of the old world and midwifing the next,
Ruby
P.S. The revolution isn’t out there. It’s in the questions you dare to ask and the systems you’re bold enough to reimagine. That’s where the real beauty lives.
P.P.S- You might be wondering how can Reclaim Your Beauty™ helps? Wholeness doesn’t come from thinking your way out of these loops. It comes from feeling your way home. Reclaim Your Beauty 1:1 Mentorship is a deep, bespoke, somatic transformation. It’s where you learn to:
Listen to your body’s signals, not override them.
Track sensation instead of judging it.
Metabolize emotion instead of managing it.
Rest without guilt, because rest is your birthright, not a luxury.
Speak your truth with a steady voice and a calm heart even when the room gets tense.
Build boundaries as sacred architecture, not barbed wire.
Reclaim beauty as a frequency you inhabit, not a performance you maintain.
Stop outsourcing your worth to a world built on your disconnection.
This is about unwinding the old code cell by cell, breath by breath, so you can return to your original knowing that our body is the oracle, the altar, the revolution in motion.
If you’re tired of living in someone else’s story, if you’re ready to feel at home in your own skin, if you want beauty that hums from the marrow out Reclaim Your Beauty 1:1 Mentorship is your invitation.
Let’s make liberation your new baseline. This is the homecoming your body has been waiting for. Let’s walk it together.
Ask Ruby Your Question
If there’s a question alive in your body.. about beauty, power, rest, pleasure, or reclamation, write to me below. Examples of questions that Ruby answers:
“Ruby, I don’t feel beautiful anymore. What can I do?”
“Why do I still collapse around men?”
“How do I rest when my body feels unsafe?”
Your story may become the next Letter to Ruby, offered anonymously, with reverence. We move from performance to resonance. First with ourselves and then radiating out to others. Here, women remember that their bodies hold the blueprint for liberation.
You’ll also receive the first five letters in the Reclaim Your Beauty series, written for the woman awakening from overwork, overgiving, and over-polishing, and a 19-minute walking meditation called She Walks In Beauty.
We will only use your first name and last initial. If you would like to remain completely anonymous, please let us know in the question.