What are we talking about when we talk about systems? (A primer on systems theory) I Heather Plett

Recently, I created a short video about worthiness and posted it on social media. It was about how it’s hard to develop a sense of self-worth, no matter how many self-help books we read or therapy sessions we attend, if we don’t understand that we are all embedded in systems of worthiness and have been taught, since infancy, how to measure our worth in those systems. I was talking about systems like patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonization. I created that video partly because I was trying to increase the reach for the Centre’s work on social media. We’re starting a new course soon, which means that I have do some marketing, and since my strengths do not lie in the kind of content-creation that gets attention these days, I was trying to stretch myself into a new way of communicating. Ironically, when I tried to boost the post on Facebook so that more people would see it (that’s the way Facebook makes money off of small businesses like ours – it only puts our stuff in front of very limited audiences unless we pay for the post), it got rejected. Apparently, it didn’t comply with their policy about “social issues, elections or politics” (probably because I used the words “white supremacy” in the video). The whole thing really makes me laugh, partly because it feels like a message from the universe saying I should stick with what I do well, and partly because I got rejected by a representative of one of the systems I was naming in the video – namely, capitalism (in the form of social media). Luckily, I know better than to measure my worthiness by their measurement! Read more...