The Harms Are Cumulative. Your Overwhelm Is the Goal. Let’s Get Unstuck

Trump and Musk weaponize chaos to exhaust our capacity for resistance. Recognizing the patterns of harm gives us the framework to protect our humanity and reclaim our strategic power.

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The last post, Life Inside the Authoritarian Harm Complex: Understand It to Stay Human, went viral. Thousands of people read it, and hundreds reached out to say it gave them words for what they’ve been carrying. Posts like this take time, thought, and labor to create. If this work matters to you, please consider supporting it. You can upgrade to a paid subscription or send a one-time donation via Ko-fi. Your support helps me keep doing this work and sharing it widely. Thank you.

Another headline. Another pillar of democracy bulldozed. More executive orders, mass layoffs, and economy-crashing tariffs. The authoritarian blitz keeps accelerating. It’s getting harder to keep track and even care the way we used to.

We feel overwhelmed, uncertain, disconnected from our work, people close to us, and our own sense of what matters. We are carrying more than we can name.

Of course, this is their objective.

“Name it to tame it” is a motto from social movement consciousness-raising. This post continues the naming work begun in Life Inside the Authoritarian Harm Complex: Understand It to Stay Human.

We are living through a multi-front assault on democracy, conscience, public systems, and human dignity. It’s a Category 5 hurricane of authoritarian actions that push people and institutions toward retreat, silence, and collapse.

The Authoritarian Harm Complex is my emergent framework for understanding how that storm hits in our bodies, workplaces, communities, and sense of self. It helps us recognize the pattern beneath the disorientation, grief, fear, and moral injury so many are experiencing. Naming the structure of these personal consequences of authoritarian actions gives us more to work with. It builds our strategic versatility and agility. And it creates shared language we can use to organize and protect what matters.

This naming work is emergent, built in real time as the authoritarian blitz escalates. I am refining it through reflection, expert input, and stories from people like you.

“This is the first time I’ve had words for what I’ve been feeling.”

That’s one of the most common responses I received. The last post resonated far beyond what I expected: thousands of reads, hundreds of comments and shares, and private messages from people who felt seen and equipped with concepts to make sense of their pain.

But the response also revealed something else: we’d only just begun to chart the territory.

Readers pointed to experiences that weren’t on the list but should have been. They surfaced new layers, made new connections, and asked, “Is this part of the Harm Complex too?” Through those conversations and continued reflection I’ve been able to refine and expand the framework. This isn’t a finished product. It’s a field tool, still in development, shaped by what we’re seeing and feeling together in real time.

What follows is a newly updated version of the Harm Complex: a map of how authoritarian pressure is landing in our lives, our relationships, our bodies, and our institutions. Some of the domains will feel familiar. Others may offer words for what you haven’t yet known how to describe. Either way, the goal is the same: to give you more clarity, more shared language, and more strategic grounding for what comes next.

Expanding Our Vocabulary of Harm Increases Our Strategic Agility

Authoritarianism doesn’t just change laws or break systems. It reaches into daily life and rewires how we function — emotionally, socially, professionally, and physically. The harms are cumulative, interconnected, and often hard to name in the moment. The Authoritarian Harm Complex is built around three zones of impact: personal and internal, relational and community-based, and institutional and structural. Our individual experiences often fall into more than one category at once. The goal isn’t to perfectly categorize every experience, it’s to offer a working map that helps us recognize patterns, locate ourselves in the terrain, and begin to move more strategically.

1. Personal and Internal Harms

This is where the harm lands first: your nervous system, your sense of meaning, your ability to act. These impacts often go unnoticed until they accumulate and harden into despair, paralysis, or illness.

1a. Vigilance Fatigue and Bandwidth Tax

You’re mentally overloaded but afraid to drop your guard. Your attention is fractured. You second-guess your words, monitor your tone, rehearse your safety. The cognitive strain wears you down. Even small tasks feel huge.

1b. Existential and Purpose-Oriented Harm

You’ve lost your storyline. What once felt purposeful now feels fragile or disconnected. Long-term goals seem unreachable or irrelevant. You’re no longer sure what you’re building toward or whether it still matters.

1c. Moral Harm

You’re forced into silence. You feel pressure to compromise your values to keep your job, your license, your relationships. You carry shame or guilt for things you didn’t do, but also for what you didn’t stop. There’s no safe place to speak the truth.

1d. Internalized Authoritarianism

You catch yourself craving control. Fantasizing about retribution. Wanting to force compliance. A daily mental narrative full of bad othering and Us vs. Them thinking. This is not failure. It is the psychic impact of authoritarianism.

1e. Physical and Somatic Harm

Your body is breaking down. You’re exhausted in ways rest doesn’t fix. You carry pain, illness, tension, or numbness without clear cause. The stress has settled into your physiology.

2. Relational and Community Harms

This is how the harm shows up between people. It frays trust, fragments networks, and isolates those who would otherwise hold each other up.

2a. Relational and Social Harm

You’ve pulled away from people you care about. Speaking feels risky. Conversations are laced with suspicion or self-censorship. Friendships fade. Mutual aid weakens. Even close relationships grow brittle or conditional.

2b. Narrative and Epistemic Harm

You don’t know what to say or what’s true. The language you used to trust has been politicized or turned against you. You spend energy adapting your words just to be understood, or to avoid being targeted. Reality feels slippery.

2c. Cultural and Symbolic Harm

The stories and symbols that once gave you belonging have been distorted or erased. Your history, rituals, language, or identity markers are co-opted or condemned. What once affirmed your place in the world now feels like a liability.

3. Institutional and Structural Harms

Harm also shows up in how we perceive and engage with the institutions and systems that shape everyday experiences.

3a. Civic and Political Harm

You’ve stopped participating. Voting feels pointless. Speaking out feels dangerous. The public square feels like a trap. This erosion of agency is the effect of policy rollbacks, targeted punishments, and shifting rules that make engagement feel futile or dangerous.

3b. Legal and Procedural Harm

You’re blocked, delayed, or punished by processes that claim to be neutral. You follow the rules and still lose ground. The system speaks in “due process,” but wields that process against you. Even trying to push back can be used against you.

3c. Material and Economic Harm

Your livelihood feels unstable. You’ve lost income, housing, insurance, or access to the basics. Economic pressure is constant and constraining. You’re making survival-based decisions that shrink your options and isolate you from others.

3d. Vocational and Institutional Harm

You’ve been purged or laid off. Your workplace or profession no longer aligns with its stated mission. You’re asked to stay silent, look away, or carry out decisions that contradict your values. You watch good people leave, bad actors rise, and the work you care about get hollowed out.

From Recognition to Strategy

Some of what you just read may feel familiar. Some may feel newly named. You may see yourself in more than one place on the map, or all of them. That’s the nature of cumulative harm: it spreads, compounds, and confuses. But once you start to see the pattern, you can begin to respond on purpose.

Naming harm boosts our strategic agility. It helps us stop spinning and start discerning. It gives us language to use in board rooms, break rooms, team meetings, and family conversations. This language helps clarify what’s happening and how we might move through it.

Strategy isn’t about having a master plan. It’s about seeing clearly enough to make your next move with insight, agility, and an expanded set of options. That is what this framework offers. And it’s what the resource list below is meant to support.

If you have approaches that are helping you or your organization navigate these harms, share them in the comments. Your insight helps strengthen the collective toolkit we’re building together.

Where This Work Leads

This blog is part of a larger project called Progressive Strategy Now which is more than just my blog’s title. It is my attempt to meet the moment, a growing collection of resources and consultation to help mission-driven people and organizations stay human and stay strategic while navigating moral injury, institutional destruction, and the lived realities of authoritarian harm. If this post gave you words for something you’ve been carrying, you’re in the right place. This is one dispatch in an ongoing series.

Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.

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Strategies for Staying Human in the Face of Authoritarianism

If you’re looking for practices, tools, and deeper reading to help you stay grounded under pressure, this growing list is for you. It includes some of my previous posts and a section for other resources. These are starting points for staying human in hard times.

My Posts

• Befriend Yourself: A Strategy for Staying Whole While They Dismantle Everything That Matters. Trump and Musk want to disappear you into a cell of despair. Kindness to yourself is how you stay human—and begin your escape.

• When They Gut Your Mission: Start Here…. You’re still standing. That means you get to choose where to go next.

Other Resources

• ACT for Moral Distress, online course by Dr. Jaimie Lusk. “Navigate moral distress with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a powerful evidence-based treatment that allows us to hold our pain while taking valued actions.”

• Please drop additional suggestions in Comments

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My Consulting Services

📞 Need a strategic plan that protects your mission and your funding? I partner with progressive leaders to navigate threats and build stronger, resilient organizations. Let’s talk.

📩 Message me to start the conversation.

***From Progressive Strategy Now, a publication of Paul T Shattuck LLC. The views expressed here reflect my personal analysis as a researcher and consultant, and do not represent the positions of any employer, clients, or affiliated organizations.