Inheritance
James was born in a two up two down on a sprawling council estate. His mother was a nurse and his father a labourer for the council. Poverty brings its own residue and James was born with a series of health issues. There was some ambiguous love present at home but it was also a place of structural chaos.
James was at a distinct disadvantage. He was routinely ridiculed and shamed at school. His prospects looked bleak. But he developed an anger inside. A mentality that said, “...I’ll prove you wrong.”. He fought his way up, realised his talents and became an incredible commercial success and leader. That is until one day when the entire structure of his manufactured life collapsed, leaving him in the rubble.
Marcus was born on the outside of a traditional village, on the fringe of a members-only golf club in quintessential England. His mother was a full-time mother when he wasn’t in boarding school and his father worked in private equity. His life was comfortable but there was an immense expectation conferred upon him. His mother and father never really showed any sustained affection towards him.
Marcus received a first class education and upon graduation went into finance like his father before him. He married accordingly and maintained composure throughout his life. Even through the collapse of the firm he helped to build and the castrating divorce. That is, right up until he found himself in a golf buggy listening once more to the same old platitudes of the men around him. Having ‘straightened himself up’ for the third time, with ever more expensive retreats and coaches, he realised that the same knot in his stomach never really went away in the first place. The whiskey and the water were fading off.
The invisible architecture we adopt
The boy who grows up in difficulty might expect to say that the privileged boy had it better. And the boy who grows up in privilege may carry a private guilt about that along with the weight of conferred expectations. But each paradigm installed its own invisible architecture.
The circumstances of these two men, contributed to by the paradigms they inherited and that they adopted, both resulted in either a breakdown or a slow, invisible breakdown. The point is what they share: neither boy chose what he was handed. Neither proactively designed nor actively consented to the system that ran his life.
What is missing in all of this is that the architecture, whatever it is, was never inspected for whether it actually belongs to the boy who becomes the man running it.
So what makes you think you chose yours?
And how exactly can you answer this question if it has never been asked in the right kind of space? All of our life we have sought stability and surety but this, right here, is your point of destabilisation.
What are you carrying?
We need to take a look at what you’re carrying and where it came from. It isn’t a memory that you can locate and then file away conveniently. It is the live operating mechanism that you are living right this second. It is the reason you are quietly certain about some things and uncertain about others, why you are drawn to some risks and cautious elsewhere. And it is the reason why stopping feels dangerous. This is not memory, not explanations, it is simply operating logic.
Taking back ownership
The job of introspective analysis is for a therapist and not for me. The work I do is to examine what the inheritance installed, whether it was actually chosen or not and to take back ownership.
You have already built real sovereignty over your professional domain with all of your decisions, your authority and direction. But in the domain of your own identity you are probably running on an inherited authority. Someone else's sovereignty, never examined, mistaken for your own.
The ultimate question
Have you ever actually decided who you are? Or have you been running a version of you assembled before you were old enough to have a view?
When you can see where your system came from, you can only then really decide what you want to keep, what you want to revise, and what’s no longer serving you. That is true sovereignty. And it becomes available the moment you are willing to look at it without judgement but with honesty and the acceptance to rebuild.
I inherited a life I didn’t design and then redesigned it.
