Letter 21: The Fractal Self - How Personal Patterns Shape Our World
“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.”
— Hermes Trismegistus
In my last letter, I wrote that we live inside of patterns. I meant that literally. The patterns aren’t just inside of us, in our familiar thoughts and automatic behaviors. We live within them.
Nature shows us how this works. Patterns repeat across scales, not fractals in the strict mathematical sense, but similar organizational principles that show up at different levels of complexity. A tree branch looks like a miniature version of the whole tree. Flower petals spiral the same way whether you’re looking at the whole bloom or a single petal. Rivers, blood vessels, and lightning all branch in similar ways, even though they follow completely different physical rules.1
Nature reuses patterns because they work. Trees branch to catch light and move water efficiently. The same branching pattern appears in your lungs, in river deltas, in neural networks. Nature finds a good solution and uses it everywhere, including in how humans organize ourselves.
But what about our inner patterns? The adaptive habits of perception, thought, and reactivity we’ve been exploring? The distortions that keep Will and Anna, fighting about the dishwasher, from actually hearing each other? The numbness that leaves so many of us sleepwalking through our day to day routines?
And what do these patterns cost—not just to the individual, but to us collectively?
Is it possible that those, too, follow the same natural laws of repetition, and that the distortions we observe in the individual—the inability to accurately perceive, and thus respond to, the present moment—spiral out into parallel costs to our family systems, communities, and even global society?
Looking at our current moment with clear eyes, the answer becomes hard to deny.
From Personal to Collective Patterns
These individual patterns don’t simply remain contained in us. When Anna brings her sensitivity for criticism into her workplace, her colleagues begin to walk on eggshells, afraid to trigger her. When Will’s children observe their father avoiding conflict, they learn that difficult conversations are dangerous territory. Those patterns will unconsciously be passed into their own future relationships.2
When a parent demands imperfection, the whole family learns to live in fear of making mistakes. If a manager grows up believing that being emotional equals weakness, that will affect his team’s ability to communicate authentically. These individual patterns ripple outward, shaping the emotional climate of entire systems.3
This is what systems theorist Peter Senge points to when he talks about personal mastery and organizational learning.4 Individual unconscious patterns don’t just affect systems, they get built into them, influencing how whole organizations perceive reality and respond to change.
As I’ve discussed previously, drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s work, the way we pay attention to the world shapes what we are actually able to perceive—and therefore how we design the systems we live inside.5
When we build institutions in this fragmenting mode, we create systems that treat humans as resources to manage rather than beings in relationship. Education becomes test scores. Medicine becomes metrics. Work becomes optimization.
In this mode of attention, analysis and control dominate, while the living, interconnected reality of human experience becomes invisible.
Individual patterns of wounding scale into this cultural context. Anna’s defensiveness, Will’s avoidance, your own reactions—these don’t just repeat, they operate within systems already organized around fragmentation and control. Personal and cultural patterns reinforce each other.
This is why transformation requires both inner work and systems change. We can’t heal individual patterns while leaving intact the cultural structures that fragment, isolate, and mechanize human experience.
We can see the cost of this clearly in the world right now. We are experiencing historic wildfires and extreme heat waves around the globe, driving increased migration. These conditions call for thoughtful, coordinated responses, yet we often fail to address them in a meaningful way, caught in polarization or paralysis. We tend to focus on economic and political forces, while overlooking the psychological layer we can’t afford to ignore.
We see this same avoidance in individuals. Just as Anna automatically perceives criticism to protect herself from threat, we collectively avoid acknowledging realities that would demand uncomfortable changes from us. Psychologist Robert Kegan calls this “immunity to change.” We collectively avoid acknowledging realities that would demand uncomfortable changes, even when we consciously want to change.
And we see the same dynamic happening in our relationship to social media. It is now widely recognized how harmful it can be, particularly on developing brains.6 There is no controversy—the evidence shows skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and attentional collapse among young people. And still, we continue to build entire economies around it.
It is therefore encouraging to see that some U.S. States have recently begun passing laws to permanently ban students from having phones in the classroom. And according to the early studies, to great effect.7 To me, this shows what’s possible when we begin to let go of some of the noise we have taken on just to fit in, whether that is fitting into a culture, a social class, or a certain identity, and instead focus on what truly matters for our children’s well-being.8
I’ve written before about the deepest childhood wound: I am all alone. You can see it everywhere, like a fractal thread, weaving through our need to belong to clearly defined groups—religious, cultural or national. These identities help us feel less alone. They give us a place to belong. But they often do so by shutting others out.
We cling to our identities—our religion, our country, our culture, our political tribe—because they soothe that old fear. They tell us who we are and where we fit. But there is a cost. The same lines that create belonging also create outsiders, enemies, and threat.
As Bessel van der Kolk reminds us, trauma doesn’t live only inside individuals. It lives in communities and entire cultures.9 When groups don’t process their fear, it shapes how they see danger, who they blame, and who they let in. Childhood terror becomes cultural paranoia. Loneliness turns into tribalism.
When this childhood terror operates at a collective level, entire societies begin to function like Anna and Will at the dishwasher, each group hearing threat and criticism where none may exist, each responding from old wounds rather than present reality. When people cling to their well-defined groups, they see people on the other side as enemies, extremists, or fools. We forget how interdependent we are. We are often blind to how much of our comfort and safety depend on people we will never meet—the strangers who grow our food, deliver packages, maintain roads, write code, or keep hospitals running. We may never know their names, but our lives rely on their work every single day.
The Cost of Unconscious Culture
When people live unconsciously, families slowly turn into groups of people tiptoeing around one another. Everyone learns what not to say, which topics to avoid, and how to manage each other’s reactions. It may keep the peace on the surface, but they don’t get to experience real connection and care. Instead of being honest, curious, or vulnerable, family members become careful.
When families operate this way, communities do the same. Instead of neighborhoods, workplaces, and institutions operating as places where people can actually grow and connect, they avoid conflict by accommodating to each other’s issues.
We’re not actually relating to each other, we’re relating to each other’s defenses. And we all think that’s normal.
When communities are driven by these dynamics, entire societies can get stuck in collective reactivity. A perfect example is the response to COVID-19. During this pandemic, many schools worldwide were forced to close and shift to remote learning. For many children, this meant losing more than a year of education. They were also deprived of daily structure, social connection, emotional regulation support, and, for some, their primary safety net.
Instead of slowing down to really understand what children needed in this crisis moment, many institutions reacted from fear and a need for control.10 They reached for what felt familiar. Organizational psychologist Otto Scharmer calls this downloading—repeating old patterns—rather than presencing, which means sensing what’s actually emerging and responding creatively.11
Our institutions are acting a lot like families, reacting from fear and not pausing long enough to listen to what was in the best interest of the children. The result is a missed opportunity to respond thoughtfully, and in ways that truly serve our children.
We design institutions that, often unintentionally, drain people more than they nourish them. Our economic systems reward short-term comfort and speed, at the cost of long-term health and wellbeing. We have built cultures where people can be constantly surrounded—at work, online, in public—yet still feel deeply alone.
The Possibility
Once we see how these patterns repeat across every scale of human experience, new possibilities arise. The same awareness that can free Anna from automatically perceiving criticism, or help Will recognize his conflict-avoidance, can operate at larger scales too.
When individuals begin to recognize their unconscious patterns, families can start communicating more honestly. When families become more honest, they contribute to communities that can engage with reality more clearly. When enough communities operate this way, societies can begin responding to challenges with wisdom rather than reaction.
Robert Kegan describes this as an evolutionary demand—a movement from the socialized mind, shaped by external expectations, to the self-authoring mind, and ultimately to the self-transforming mind, capable of holding multiple perspectives and learning from complexity.12 This is not self-help. It is adaptive necessity.
This isn’t just about individual growth anymore. It’s a species-level necessity. We can’t solve collective problems—climate, polarization, the metacrisis—from the socialized mind. We need enough people operating from genuine self-authorship to shift the whole system.
Yes, the patterns that bind us run deep. But so too does the impulse toward awakening.
As we each learn to pause, to notice, to feel—not just for ourselves, but for one another—we create the conditions for something new to emerge. A fractal of consciousness echoing through families, systems, and societies.
This is not naïve hope. It is an evolutionary necessity.
The future human is not someone else.
It is you. It is us. Becoming.
Love, love, love…
Ronit
Randi Gunther, “How Triggered Immaturity Destroys Intimacy,” Psychology Today, December 2024.
The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, “Multigenerational Transmission Process,” The Bowen Center, 2025.
Gail Hochachka, “Overcoming the Climate Awareness-Action Gap,” Ambio: Journal of Environment and Society, May 2024.
Peter Senge, “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,” Doubleday, 1990.
Iain McGilchrist, “The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World,” Perspectiva Press, 2021.
Jared Marsh, “More Social Media, More Depression: Study Links Cause and Effect,” BBC Ideas, May 2025.
Charlotte V. Campenhout, “Study finds smartphone bans in Dutch schools improved focus,” Reuters, July 2025.
L.P. Beland & Richard Murphy, “Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance,” Labour Economics, April 2016.
Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” Viking, 2014.
Taïeb Hafsi & Sofiane Baba, “Exploring the Process of Policy Overreaction: The COVID-19 Lockdown Decisions,” Sage Journals, March 2022.
Otto Scharmer, “Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges,” Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009.
Robert Kegan, “In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life,” Harvard University Press, 1994.