In the last Field Note, I wrote about the moment when the room goes still.

The subtle shift in atmosphere that often arrives before anyone has named what is happening. A shortening of breath. A tightening of posture. A growing sense that curiosity has quietly left the room.

I suggest that these moments tell us something important about power.

Not power as an abstract concept, but power as a lived experience in the relational field.

Power as something that changes what can be said, who can speak, and whether relationship remains possible.

Since writing that piece, I have found myself returning to a different question.

Where do these patterns come from?

Not simply in one organisation.

Not in one boardroom. Not in one planning department.

But across institutions, communities and cultures.

Why do organisations devoted to care so often reproduce the very dynamics they claim to challenge?

Why do people who value relationship repeatedly find themselves inside structures that make relationship difficult?

The answer, I suspect, lies deeper than governance.

Deeper than policy. Deeper even than organisational culture.

It may have something to do with memory.

Not individual memory. Collective memory.

The kind that survives long after the original events have been forgotten.

In psychotherapy, we understand that experiences which cannot be fully processed do not simply disappear. They continue to shape perception, expectation and behaviour, often outside conscious awareness. Families carry these inheritances across generations.

A fear that is never spoken.

A grief that is never acknowledged.

A silence that gradually becomes normal.

The next generation may know nothing of the original wound and yet still organise itself around it.

Increasingly, I wonder whether organisations do something similar.

What if institutions carry inherited patterns in the same way families do?

What if some of the dynamics we encounter in contemporary organisations are not merely procedural habits, but expressions of collective history that have never been fully metabolised?

What if the room is carrying more than the people inside it?

Thomas Hübl’s work on collective trauma offers one way of understanding this possibility. He suggests that unintegrated historical experience does not disappear when the generation that lived through it dies. Rather, it continues to organise relationship, perception and behaviour, often invisibly.

Trauma becomes embedded not only in individual nervous systems, but in families, cultures and institutions, shaping what can be spoken, what must remain hidden, and what forms of authority come to feel natural.

Seen through this lens, many organisational patterns begin to look different.

The impulse to centralise power.

The fear of dissent.

The tendency to prioritise stability over truth.

The habit of converting people into categories.

The subtle movement from relationship into procedure.

These may not simply be governance choices.

They may be inherited adaptations.

Ways of organising collective life that once served survival but now continue long after their original purpose has been forgotten.

Many of the structures we have inherited were shaped in contexts very different from care.

Military systems learned how to coordinate bodies under threat.

Empires learned how to govern people at distance.

Industrial systems learned how to maximise efficiency through standardisation, hierarchy and control.

These developments solved particular historical problems. They helped large populations organise themselves. They allowed institutions to scale.

But they also normalised forms of distance.

Distance between decision and consequence. Distance between authority and accountability. Distance between those who make decisions and those who live with them.

Over time, these forms became so familiar that they began to appear natural.

Yet what appears natural is often historical.

And what is historical can be questioned.

This is where my ecological work and my therapeutic work begin to meet.

In planning disputes I have often witnessed decisions being made about places by people who have never walked the land. A woodland becomes a site allocation. A tree becomes a constraint. A living ecosystem becomes a series of categories on a map.

The language remains professional. The process appears rational. Yet something important disappears.

The same dynamic can emerge inside organisations devoted to care.

A member becomes a governance issue. A concern becomes a procedural problem.

A person becomes a case. The language changes.

The pattern remains.

Something living is converted into something manageable.

Not necessarily through malice.

Through distance, fragmentation, and inherited ways of organising reality.

What interests me is that these patterns resemble the dynamics we often see in trauma.

When a person is overwhelmed, perception narrows. Complexity becomes difficult to hold. Feeling is split off. Relationship gives way to protection.

Traumatised systems can behave similarly.

They become preoccupied with self-preservation.

Dissent begins to feel threatening. Questions become destabilising. Difference becomes difficult to tolerate.

The system starts protecting itself from the very information it most needs to hear.

Not because the people inside it are bad.

Because survival has become more important than contact.

This raises a difficult possibility.

Perhaps some of our institutions are carrying collective trauma patterns that have never been fully recognised.

Patterns of domination, compliance, exclusion and silence.

Patterns that were once woven into larger histories of empire, class, patriarchy and social control, and which continue to shape organisational life long after the original conditions have disappeared.

If this is true, then changing policy alone will never be enough.

We will also need to change our relationship to history.

To power. To memory. To the inherited structures that continue to organise how we meet one another.

The question, then, is not simply whether an organisation is caring.

The deeper question is whether the structures through which care is expressed support relationship or undermine it.

Do they bring people closer to the consequences of their decisions, or further away?

Do they encourage encounter, or categorisation?

Do they increase accountability, or distribute it so widely that nobody feels responsible?

Do they help people remain in relationship with complexity, or do they reward simplification?

These are not only organisational questions. They are relational questions.

And perhaps, ultimately, trauma questions.

I began this series trying to understand why the room goes still.

Why organisations devoted to care so often struggle to remain relational when pressure arrives.

The enquiry has gradually led backwards.

From behaviour to structure.

From structure to history. From history to collective memory.

And from collective memory to a question that feels increasingly important:

What is the system remembering?

And what might become possible if we learned how to remember differently?

The meeting has ended.

The minutes will record decisions.

The policy will describe process.

The structure will say it has done what it was designed to do.

But somewhere beneath the formal record, another story remains.

A story carried in bodies.

In relationships.

In what was spoken.

In what could not be spoken.

In who felt heard.

In who disappeared.

The field remembers.

And perhaps relational activism begins when we become willing to listen…

If you are a psychotherapist, counsellor, or facilitator trying to stay human in rooms like these, I am holding a CPD Workshop called Staying Human in Complex Times.

We will work with exactly this territory, reading power in real time, tending to the nervous system, and practising relational activism in our everyday work.

If you would like to know more, you can find details here

This is a composite reflection drawn from different spaces over time, asking, can we remain human when the structures around us forget how?

Next in the series: Field Notes #4 — How People Disappear Inside Systems of Care

How categories, procedures and fragmented responsibility can slowly convert people into problems to be managed rather than persons to be met.

Relational Activism Field Notes explore how to stay human in systems built for something else — from planning battles to boardrooms, from ecological grief to organisational power.

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This is for anyone who has felt a room go still the moment something living entered

How do we stay relational when the systems we inhabit, whether planning departments or organisations that claim care, are built for something else?

In the first Field Note, Relational Activism, I wrote about what happens when living places become easier to redraw than to relate to.

I wrote about trees. Planning applications. Quiet wealth extractions and conversion of habitats into commodities. The way a system can fragment “care” by distributing it across so many parts that no single person has to feel the whole loss.

I did not expect to find the same pattern inside organisations that claim care.

But I have.

The same dissociation. The same procedural fragmentation. The same quiet disappearance of something living

Not land this time, but the Relationships themselves.

I have discussed what happens when decisions about land are made at a distance, by people who have never walked the paths, never felt the weather, never stayed long enough to notice what lives there.

I have learned that organisations can do something similar to people.
When decisions are made about people who are not in the room.
When offerings are read by people who have never met the person bringing them.
When governance happens at such distance from lived experience that the relational field disappears.

This is where my ecological grief and my therapeutic work have begun to meet.

Because I recognise the mechanism.

What happens when an organisation devoted to care becomes unable to digest disturbance without turning the disturbance into a person?

The same fragmentation that converts forests into planning sites can convert people into procedural problems.

Often, this is also the moment when shadow begins to move.

Not in a dramatic or fully conscious way, but through projection, suspicion, defensive certainty, and the quiet recasting of people into problems.

In that state, people can do real harm while remaining convinced they are only ‘following process’.

The same dissociation that allows one person to process, another to sign off, another to explain, each part appearing reasonable while something living disappears between them.

If relationships grow in conditions, then organisations are fields too.
Fields that can nourish or starve. Fields that can hold complexity or collapse under it.

What happens inside organisations devoted to care when the conditions for relationship begin to disappear?

There is a moment I have learned to recognise in rooms where people gather to talk about care.

The breath changes first.
Not dramatically.
Not in a way that would register on a transcript.
But if you have spent enough time in these rooms, therapy rooms, supervision groups, board meetings, professional gatherings, you learn to feel it.

The shoulders rise slightly.

Eyes that were searching stop searching and begin bracing.
Someone shifts in their chair, a small movement that creates just enough distance.
The air itself seems to thicken. The room goes still. I am describing a moment that happens before words. Before anyone names what is happening.
Sometimes, before anyone consciously knows what is happening.

But the body knows.

The body knows when the relational field, the living, breathing, sensing space between people, begins to collapse under the weight of something else.

I have watched this happen in rooms where an offering is being discussed.
In rooms where someone has raised a concern.
In rooms where a decision is about to be made about a person who is not present.

I have felt it in my own body before I could name what I was feeling.

A tightness in my throat.
A subtle forward lean that becomes a pulling back.
My own breath, shorter than it was a moment before.

This is not anxiety.
Or rather, it is not only my anxiety.

It is the field responding to something the room has not yet said out loud.

Long before I understood the theory, I knew the feeling.
The shortening breath. The tightening jaw. The urge to disappear.
The body withdrawing from a room before the mind has caught up.

Later, I would come to understand this through the language of the nervous system.
Safety and connection. Mobilisation. Shutdown.

How the Body Knows Before We Do

But the body knew first. The body knew when safety had left.
Not danger in the obvious sense. Relational safety.

The feeling that you can be present, be seen, speak truth, and still belong.

When that feeling leaves, the body responds.
Shoulders rise. Breath shortens. Eyes begin to fix.

The room may continue speaking politely.
The minutes may record calm discussion.
The procedure may appear intact.

But something else has already happened.
The field has shifted from connection into protection.

Often, this is also the moment when shadow begins to move.
Not in a dramatic or fully conscious way, but through projection, suspicion, defensive certainty, and the quiet recasting of people into problems.

What has not been faced in the system does not disappear.
It enters the room indirectly.
It appears in the tightening of language, the loss of curiosity, the sudden need to control what can be said, by whom, and in what tone.
What cannot yet be owned is often managed instead.

This is one of the first things relational activism asks us to notice.
Not only what is being said.
What is happening in bodies. What is the room doing to your nervous system? Where has breath shortened? Where has curiosity disappeared?
Who has become very still? Who has stopped speaking? Who is being spoken about, but not spoken with?

These are not small questions.

They are often where power first becomes visible.
Not as domination.Not as open aggression. But as a change in the conditions of relationship.

After years of sitting in rooms where people claim to practise care, compassionate care, relational care, person‑centred care, I have learned to read something else.

I have learned to read what power does to relationship.

Not power as an abstract concept.
Power as a live dynamic in the room. Power as the thing that makes breath shorten, eyes harden, and the space between people collapse into procedure.

This is what I mean when I extend relational activism from land to organisational life:
the practice of reading what power does to the relational field in real time, in your own body, before it gets translated into policy.
Not after the decision.
Not in the debrief. Now.

When Thou Becomes It

Martin Buber wrote about two ways of being in the world.
I–Thou.

And I–It.

In I–Thou, I meet you as a whole, unrepeatable subject.
Not as a role. Not as a category.
Not as a problem to be solved.
Your presence matters.
Your reality alters the room.
Something living passes between us.

In I–It, I relate to you as object.
Function. Position. Case. Concern.
Risk.

This is not always wrong. We need forms, systems, roles and procedures. No organisation can survive in pure encounter. But something happens when I–It becomes the dominant mode. The person disappears behind the category.
The living encounter becomes a management task.
The relational field collapses into process.

And often this happens most quickly in spaces that speak most fluently about care.

Let me give an example.
Not from one organisation, but from a pattern watched across many.

Someone brings a new offering.
It is substantive.
Values‑aligned.
Formally placed through proper channels.

The content does not matter for this example.
What matters is what happens next.

The room goes still.
Not necessarily because the offering is flawed.
But because the organisation cannot tolerate what the offering reveals.

Perhaps it reveals a gap between stated values and actual practice.
Perhaps it reveals that decisions are being made informally that should be made formally.
Perhaps it simply reveals that someone outside the usual circle of power is speaking.

The content becomes secondary.
What becomes primary is the threat to organisational equilibrium.

How Organisations Turn People into Problems

This is often what happens when real change touches an organisation.
An offering, a question, a challenge, or a new piece of work begins to bring something hidden to the surface.
Perhaps it reveals a discomfort with genuine accountability, it exposes informal hierarchies that have never been named, it stirs old anxieties about relevance, authority, or loss of control.

What is being defended in that moment is not only process.
Often, it is the organisation’s shadow the disowned material it cannot yet bear to meet directly.

Watch what happens. The offering is no longer read as an offering.
It becomes a problem. The person who brought it is no longer met as a person. They become a category. Too ambitious. Too intense. Difficult. Divisive.

Sometimes the double bind is subtle. If the person continues to offer the work, they are framed as pushing. If they withdraw it, they are framed as hiding. Either way, the system preserves its suspicion and avoids meeting what has actually been brought.

Not understanding the process.

Procedural language appears.
Governance concern. Boundary issue.

Difference of Planning Judgment.
Constitutional difficulty.
Need for neutrality.

These phrases may sound reasonable.
Sometimes they may even be partly true.

But language can do more than describe.
It can manage discomfort.

It can distance the decision‑maker from the human being affected by the decision.
It can convert a relational encounter into an object that can be handled.

This is Buber’s I–It at work.
Not because anyone is necessarily cruel.
Because this is what structures often do when they are under pressure.

They convert complexity into manageability.
They convert Thou into It.

This is one way institutions protect themselves from transformation: by relocating the disturbance into the person who has noticed, named, or introduced something living.
The shadow is not recognised as belonging to the whole field.
It is assigned to an individual and then handled there.

The shadow is not recognised as belonging to the whole field.

It is assigned to an individual and then handled there, which means those with the most power can remain blind to their own part in what has happened.

And this is the tragedy for organisations that claim care.

Organisations devoted to care are not harmless by default.

They can injure people precisely because they believe too strongly in their own goodness.

The very moment they most need to remain relational when something difficult, vulnerable or structurally important is being brought into the room, is often the moment the structure pulls them toward management.

The person disappears behind the process.
The concern disappears behind the procedure.
The field disappears behind the minutes.

And everyone in the room, if they are paying attention, feels it before the words arrive.

It is possible to see this on a wider scale too.
There are times when old structures begin to lose their authority but cannot yet imagine renewal.

Faced with what they can no longer contain, they often cling more tightly to the forms that are failing: hierarchy, distance, control, the familiar grammar of authority.
Old structures can feel safer than living change, even when they no longer serve the life they were meant to protect.
And so the new is not met as possibility, but as threat.
The room goes still.
The field contracts.
Relationship gives way to procedure.
The old order, unable to transform itself, tries to preserve itself by narrowing what can be felt, said and known.

I will sometimes ask, in a supervision group or workshop:
What is your body telling you right now?

The room goes quiet in a different way.
Someone notices their jaw is clenched.
Someone else realises they have been holding their breath.
Another person feels the urge to leave, to check their phone, to do anything except stay present.

These are not random sensations.
They are information.
Not always complete information.
Not always simple information.
But information nonetheless.

The body is reading the relational field.
It is noticing whether there is enough safety for contact.
Enough space for truth.
Enough trust for disagreement.
Enough humility for repair.

Here is the practice.

Before reaching for procedural language.
Before saying, let’s stay professional.
Before reassuring the room that everyone means well.
Before moving too quickly into what should happen next.

Pause and Notice.

What has happened to the breath in the room?
Who has become silent? Who is being protected? Who is being managed?

Who is absent, but being discussed?
Where has relationship become procedure?

Then, if possible, name something simple.
Not as accusation.
As witness.

I notice the room has gone still. I notice I have stopped breathing. I notice we are talking about someone who is not here. I notice we have moved very quickly into process.

Simple, Embodied, True.

The field does not need to be attacked.
It needs to be witnessed.

This is delicate work.

Because naming the field can itself be treated as disruption.
The person who notices the collapse may become the problem.
The one who says the room has gone still may be accused of making the room uncomfortable.
The one who asks where the absent person is may be told they do not understand the process.

This is why relational activism requires more than sensitivity.
It requires courage.

Not the heroic courage of certainty.
A quieter courage.

The courage to remain in contact with what the body knows before the system has decided what may be said.

The courage to stay when you would once have left.
Not because staying is always right.
But because leaving too quickly can mean the field never gets witnessed.

This is not only about organisations.

Couples know this moment.
Families know it.
Communities know it.

The moment when something living tries to enter the room, the system moves to contain it.

A hurt becomes an overreaction. A question becomes a threat. A need becomes too much. A boundary becomes hostility. A difference becomes disloyalty.
A person becomes a problem.

Relational activism begins when we learn to recognise that conversion.
The moment Thou becomes It.
The moment the living field collapses into management.
The moment relationship becomes easier to control than to encounter.

So here is the question that opens this thread of Field Notes:

If organisations that claim care exist to preserve relationship, presence and mutuality, why do they so often produce I–It dynamics?

The answer is not only about individual failure.
It is about structure.

About the histories our organisations inherit.
About the habits of administration, hierarchy and control that live inside systems even when the language has changed.
About what happens when institutions built to manage people try to speak the language of care.

The next Field Note will explore that inheritance.
Not to blame. Not to accuse.
But to understand what enters the room with us before anyone speaks.

The meeting has ended.
One person puts their coat on slowly.
Another waits by the door, keys already in hand.

Outside, the light is dim.
The street is mundane.
The buildings, locked behind them.

They walk into the evening carrying what the room could not hold.

But the field is still teaching.
Still showing them where Thou became It.
Still offering them the choice:
to read what happened,
or to let it pass unnamed.

Relational activism begins in that choice.

If you are a psychotherapist, counsellor, or facilitator trying to stay human in rooms like these, I am holding a small CPD Workshop called ; Staying Human in Complex Times.
We will work with exactly this territory, reading power in real time, tending to the nervous system, and practising relational activism in our everyday work.
If you would like to know more, you can find details here

This is a composite reflection drawn from different spaces over time

Next in the series: Field Notes #3: Built for Something Else

Relational Activism Field Notes explore how to stay human in systems built for something else — from planning battles to boardrooms, from ecological grief to organisational power.

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For most of my adult life, I have worked with forms of distress that do not respond well to urgency, trauma, relationship pain, grief and loss.

For over twenty-five years, I have sat with individuals, couples and groups trying to understand what happens when care becomes defence, when closeness hardens, and when people begin protecting the very patterns that keep them apart.

Again and again, I have returned to the same understanding; relationships grow in conditions. Trust grows in conditions. Repair grows in conditions.

For a long time, I thought this belonged mostly inside therapy rooms.

Now I am less sure.

I did not set out to become involved in planning. I did not imagine public life would become part of my work. I certainly did not imagine spending evenings reading planning reports, committee minutes, ecological assessments and legal correspondence.

But something crossed a threshold.

A series of planning applications. A green space. A place with a long history of repeated refusals and dismissed appeals. A place known by those around it not as a site, but as openness, habitat, relief.

And then eventually permission.

Quietly. Administratively. Through process.

I sometimes think the campaign did not begin where I thought it did. Not with legal letters, planning policy, or even the recent approval. Perhaps it began earlier, with the trees. Nineteen of them disappearing from a place in Highgate that had, for decades, offered openness, habitat and relief. I remember witnessing that loss and feeling something shift inside me. Disbelief first. Then grief. Then a deeper kind of rupture: the recognition that a living place could be altered so completely, and still be spoken about as if only paperwork had changed.

As a student, I remember making my first documentary around the battles at Twyford Down.

At the time, I didn’t have language like ecocide. I did not have theories about relational fields or eco-grief or the langauge I have now. I knew that people were living in trees, refusing to leave, trying to protect a landscape from becoming a torn and extracted landscape.

I remember being struck by the seriousness of it. The way people spoke about land as if it mattered. The strange mix of grief, idealism and disbelief.

I thought I had left that part of myself behind.

Maybe I hadn’t.

Then later, standing before the loss of a mature tree removed in broad daylight, couched as a favor, I felt something difficult to explain. The tree was not the whole story. It sat inside something larger and more tangled; water, ownership, planning language, commercial pressure, and the slow conversion of living land into commodity. But the loss was not abstract either. I had known that tree long before I had language for ecology or planning. The willow tree was the visible wound, but the injury was wider.

Not only grief.

Recognition.

Different landscapes. Different authorities. Different language. And yet underneath them I kept meeting the same question: what happens when living places become easier to redraw than to relate to?

What unsettled me was not only the loss. It was the atmosphere afterwards. No one saying; stop. Nothing explicit. Something quieter. The subtle feeling that once something has happened, the reasonable response is acceptance. That concern should become private. That grief should not interrupt procedure. That asking questions for too long becomes its own kind of problem.

I realised that part of what I was resisting was not only ecological loss. It was the expectation that care should remain emotional and never become structural; that love of place should stay personal and not become public.

I don’t think I understood eco-grief until it had an address. Until it was not “the environment” in the abstract, but a tree, a path, a boundary, a place I knew.

From Highgate to the Fens, my understanding began changing. I had spent years helping people understand that relationships deteriorate when reciprocity disappears. I had not realised landscapes could reveal the same lesson.

Somewhere along the way, places I knew became shapes on drawings. And once that happened, it seemed easier for people to stop feeling them.

People do not exist in isolation. Places do not either. Communities do not either. All living systems depend on conditions. And when those conditions become too thin, too procedural, too fragmented, too defended, something begins to disappear.

Not dramatically.

Quietly.

People stop believing participation matters. They stop expecting to be heard. They stop showing up. And those who remain are left carrying not only the campaign, but the grief of the field around it.

At the beginning there were more of us; conversations, objections, shared outrage, people opening homes, people believing things could still be influenced. Then time passed. People returned to work. Health intervened. Life called them back.

Of course it did.

This is what life does.

The campaigns continue in different forms. And much of the work now happens quietly; reading, writing, learning, following one thread after another, trying to understand how decisions are made and where relationship disappears inside process.

Sometimes I feel clear. Sometimes exhausted. Sometimes I wonder whether I am defending particular places, or something older, a deeper understanding that land is not simply material.

It is relationship.

There is a kind of law older than policy. Not legal law. Not something enforceable. Something more ecological; reciprocity, limits, stewardship, continuity, care.

When those conditions break, something in the body knows.

This is where my therapeutic work and public life have begun to meet. Because I know something about dissociation. I know what happens when experience becomes separated from language. I know how systems protect themselves.

Families do this. Organisations do this. Cultures do this. Institutions do this too.

One person processes. Another signs off. Another explains. Each part can appear reasonable. And yet somewhere between the parts, something living disappears.

I am not sure I chose activism. I think I followed care past the point where it was socially convenient.

Perhaps that is where this new thread begins. Not in certainty. Not in strategy. But in the uncomfortable place where love of place becomes public, and grief refuses to stay private.

I do not know how this story ends. The questions remain. The work continues.

But something has changed.

My practice. My writing. My understanding of relationships. All of it feels less abstract now, less contained, more exposed to weather.

I used to think relational work was mostly about helping people find their way back to one another. Now I wonder whether it is also about helping us find our way back into relationship with places, systems, grief, limits, and what is alive.

Perhaps this is where I begin again. Although perhaps that isn’t entirely true.

Not a campaign update. Not a legal argument. A field note.

From the place where care meets systems.

From the place where grief becomes knowledge.

From the place where the question is no longer simply whether one development should or should not go ahead, but whether we can remember how to relate to what sustains us.

And whether, from Highgate to the Fens, we can begin to create conditions in which care survives.

Aisha Ali is a UKAHPP, UKCP-registered integrative humanistic consultant psychotherapist, couples therapist and clinical supervisor with over 25 years’ experience. She is writing a book exploring how relationships grow in conditions, not isolation, and how our relational climate shapes everything from intimate partnerships to our capacity to care for the living world. Her current writing follows the meeting point between therapy, ecology, public life and the difficult work of staying in relationship with what is being lost.

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