We Need New Systems
And I don't mean D.I.D. systems.
When I say “systems,” most people think rules, regulations, bureaucracy, or if you’re me, D.I.D. But I’m not talking about multiples’ systems. I’m talking about the invisible frameworks that shape our lives: mental health care, social support, and community safety. The ones that are supposed to help — but more often hurt.
Survivors of trauma, complex mental health challenges, and dissociative experiences face systems that fail them. Care is often rigid, dehumanizing, or retraumatizing. Even when people use these systems heavily, improvement is minimal — and the human cost is immense.
This same thing could be said for so many of the old systems in America, including (but not limited to!) food production and distribution, healthcare, child-raising and education, spirituality, economic systems that prey upon everyone who isn’t wealthy…etc.
Here’s the thing: we don’t have to wait for the broken systems to change. And we don’t need to keep trying to force them to be different (because it’s a waste of time, IMO). —We can build new ones. Systems grounded in peer experience, community strengths, and human needs. Systems that are flexible, trauma-informed, and rooted in compassion.
This is exactly why I’m building Safe Harbor Peer Respite Center. It’s a small, rural space where people with dissociative experiences can find real, practical support — a system that actually works for them. It will not be perfect, and it will not be a solution for every need, but it’s going to be tangible proof that alternatives are possible.
Also—this post isn’t about Safe Harbor. I’m extremely excited and passionate about Safe Harbor Peer Respite Center, but one center alone can’t address the systemic polycrisis in America. We need more — not instead of it, but in addition to it.
We need all of us on board. And we need everyone to engage in this process of starting to think outside the boxes we’ve become accustomed to. The government and even powers that currently be would have us think we’re powerless, that we need them, that there are no alternatives besides the decaying institutions they’ve left us with and refused to fix or change for decades.
None of that is true.
We are powerful, we don’t need them (to the contrary actually!), and there are alternatives. We just have to find, and in some cases create, them. Safe Harbor will hopefully stand as a beacon for what’s possible, but it’s just one effort. We will need more.
Consider your own context. What could a better system look like in your neighborhood, workplace, or circle of friends? —For health, for food, for non-exploitative labor, for resource-gathering and resource-sharing? You don’t have to dismantle the old structures yourself — you just need to create options that give people better choices. Small, intentional systems ripple out. Together, they show a different way.
We can’t fix everything at once, but we can start showing what works, one community, one idea, one alternative system at a time. The systems that serve humanity best don’t have to exist somewhere else — we can build them ourselves. In fact, from my vantage point…we have to.
No one is coming to save us.
I concur