Why We Only Act When Everything Falls Apart
The forces within and surrounding us that keep us waiting until crisis
I knew for years that something was deeply wrong. The anxiety, the exhaustion, the sense of living someone else’s life. As a management consultant, I could see patterns in the external world—market trends, organisational dynamics, how past decisions shaped present outcomes. But I wasn’t seeing the patterns running inside me, the slow accumulation of unprocessed baggage, suppressed anger and misalignment that was building towards collapse.
Like so many others, I didn’t act until everything fell apart—a key relationship broke down, I was made redundant, and I then came a complete breakdown. Force-12 tears. Unable to move forwards. Only then, when I had no choice, did I finally address what I’d been avoiding for decades.
Why did I wait so long? Why do any of us?
Despite knowing deep down that this is all occurring, we often delay addressing deeper core patterns until things are at breaking point. We wait until our lives, businesses, or relationships are in total crisis, or past the point of disintegration, before taking real action and responsibility.
However, this isn’t because we’re lazy, incapable, or unwilling to grow. It’s because the forces keeping us stuck are invisible to us until they’re too overwhelming to ignore. Here’s why this happens:
1. We’ve Lost Our Capacity to Sense What’s Forming
We’re meant to feel the shifts before they fully arrive. To notice the subtle changes in energy, the quiet warnings, the early signals that something needs attention. But we’ve been severed from this natural capacity.
When we’re operating on anxiety—in constant override mode—we push past signals, ignore warnings, and stay productive at all costs. Our bodies send messages: quiet exhaustion, nagging frustration, deep dissatisfaction, growing resentment, the internal feeling of being lost. But we’ve been trained to dismiss them.
That quiet exhaustion? Just work harder.
That nagging frustration? Don’t make a big deal out of it.
That deep dissatisfaction? Other people have it worse—be grateful.
That growing resentment? Bury it, keep the peace.
That internal feeling of being lost? You’re fine—just stay busy.
Ignoring these signals doesn’t make them disappear. They don’t go anywhere, they just accumulate beneath the surface, setting us up for breaking point later. By the time we notice something’s wrong, we’re already breaking down.
We can’t act proactively because we literally can’t see what’s building. Pattern recognition requires spaciousness, stillness, the ability to sense subtle shifts. But when we’re perpetually fragmented—reacting moment to moment, drowning in noise and distraction—we lose the very conditions necessary for seeing what’s forming.
Crisis becomes the only signal loud enough to penetrate our disconnection.
2. The Terror of Facing What Lies Beneath
On a deeper level, we know that once we begin addressing core patterns, there’s no turning back. Real change isn’t about tweaking habits or adopting new strategies. It’s about confronting fundamental truths we’ve been avoiding—sometimes for our entire lives.
This is terrifying because it means:
Acknowledging where we’ve betrayed our own needs. The times we said yes when we meant no. The dreams we abandoned. The truth we suppressed to keep the peace or maintain an image.
Letting go of narratives that justify staying stuck. “I’m fine.” “It’s not that bad.” “Other people have it worse.” “I just need to try harder.” These stories protect us from seeing reality, but they also imprison us.
Feeling the grief of wasted time and suppressed truth. The years lived in someone else’s pattern. The relationships that suffered because we weren’t present. The version of ourselves we abandoned to become acceptable.
Facing the reality that no one is coming to save us. That we must do the work ourselves. That rescue isn’t arriving. That the only way out is through.
But there’s something even more difficult beneath all of this: admitting we don’t really know who we are or how we work.
In a world that prizes competence, certainty, and having it all figured out, who wants to say, “I don’t actually know myself”? It’s dark and murky in there. We’ve suppressed things, pushed things down, avoided looking at uncomfortable truths. Going back in feels overwhelming, especially when most of us have had no guidance or framework for doing this work.
Real change requires us to recognise that we’ve been living within an identity—a set of beliefs and patterns that are really just temporary structures we adopted to help us navigate the world. The anxious overachiever, the people-pleaser, the one who sacrifices themselves for others—these aren’t our true nature. They’re survival strategies, coping mechanisms, trauma responses.
But beneath that constructed identity is something deeper: our core nature, the living organism that exists below all the learned patterns and protective mechanisms. Most of us don’t know this deeper self. We’ve been operating from identity for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s something underneath.
And facing that—admitting we need to go down there, into the murky unknown, to find out who we actually are beneath the performance—is terrifying. So we avoid it. We stay busy. We tell ourselves we’re fine.
I certainly did. Looking back, I can see now that I wasn’t actually avoiding the work of change—I was avoiding the confrontation with the fact that I didn’t really know who I was beneath the anxiety, beneath the achievement, beneath the identity I’d constructed. That person had to be recognised for what it was—a temporary structure, not my actual nature—before I could discover what lay underneath.
3. Resentment, Suppressed Anger, and Guilt Create Emotional Paralysis
As we avoid facing what’s beneath, we internalise a toxic cocktail of emotions that keeps us locked in place on a one-way journey to fragmentation and inevitable disintegration.
We feel guilty for wanting change. For being unhappy when we “should” be grateful. For having needs that feel selfish or demanding. So we tell ourselves we should just accept things as they are.
We feel resentment—toward ourselves for not fixing things sooner, toward others for not seeing our struggle, toward the situation we’re trapped in. But we can’t express it directly, so it festers beneath the surface, poisoning our relationships and self-perception.
We feel suppressed anger at how stuck we are, at the years we’ve lost, at the choices we didn’t make. But there’s nowhere safe to put it, so we turn it inward or pretend things aren’t that bad—until they are.
These emotions don’t exist in isolation—they feed each other in a vicious cycle. Guilt fuels resentment (Why can’t I just be happy?). Resentment generates more anger (Why is this so hard?). Suppressed anger creates more guilt (I shouldn’t feel this way). Round and round, creating an emotional paralysis that prevents real action.
And here’s the insidious part: whilst we’re caught in this cycle, we abdicate responsibility. We can’t take responsibility because we’re too busy cycling through these emotions. It becomes a coping mechanism—if we’re lost in guilt, resentment, and anger, we don’t have to face what’s actually wrong. We don’t have to make hard choices. We don’t have to act.
But there’s another layer to this abdication: we turn our suffering into virtue. We create a badge of honour from our capacity to endure, to bear the unbearable, to keep going no matter the cost. Productivity becomes a virtue. Working through exhaustion becomes strength. Sacrificing ourselves becomes noble. Look how much I can carry. Look how much I can handle. Look how I soldier on.
This martyrdom serves a function—it makes our stuck-ness feel meaningful. If we’re suffering for something, if our endurance proves our worth, then we don’t have to face the fact that we’re simply stuck in patterns that don’t serve us. We’ve reframed our paralysis as dedication.
And here’s where it gets particularly toxic: when others choose differently—when they act proactively, listen to their bodies, leave before the bridge is on fire—we judge them for it. “Back in my day, we just got on with it.” “I don’t know what they’re complaining about.” “They just need to toughen up.” Their choice to act before crisis challenges our entire framework. If they can leave without everything falling apart, what does that say about our years of endurance? So we police them. We reinforce the pattern. We demand they earn their crisis before they’re allowed to change.
This isn’t weakness. It’s a protective mechanism, a survival pattern often set early. These emotions serve a function: they keep us from facing something that feels too threatening to acknowledge. But they also keep us from taking responsibility for our own lives. And what they protect us from ultimately becomes more dangerous than what we’re avoiding.
We convince ourselves that “now isn’t the right time.” That change would be too disruptive, too selfish, too risky. We stay in jobs that drain us, relationships that suffocate us, patterns that diminish us—not because we lack courage, but because we’re trapped in an emotional web we can’t see clearly enough to escape.
4. Crisis Becomes the Only Acceptable Permission
We don’t allow ourselves to change just because we feel called to. We wait until there’s a justifiable crisis—a business collapse, a health scare, a marriage breakdown—to finally do what we always knew we needed to do.
More specifically, we wait for external voices to tell us that crisis has arrived. We wait for the doctor to diagnose our burnout or exhaustion before we admit we’re not fine. We wait for the boss to tell us to take leave before we allow ourselves rest. We wait for the accountant to say the business is failing before we acknowledge the model isn’t working. We wait for the therapist to confirm we need help before we seek it. We wait for friends to stage an intervention before we admit the relationship is destroying us.
We don’t trust our own knowing. We need external validation that things are bad enough to warrant action.
There’s also a cultural laziness to this—a “she’ll be right, mate” attitude where we put up with things far longer than we should. We convince ourselves it’s fine, it’s not that bad, we can handle it. Until we can’t.
This happens because:
Society validates crisis responses but not quiet transformation. If you leave a job because you’re burned out and hospitalised, people understand. If you leave because you sense misalignment before it destroys you, people question your judgement. Crisis provides social permission that proactive choice doesn’t.
We fear judgement for making bold changes without an “acceptable” reason. Walking away from success, leaving a relationship that looks fine from outside, restructuring a life that others envy—these require us to trust our internal knowing over external validation. And we’ve been trained to distrust that knowing.
We believe suffering must be extreme before we deserve to choose something different. There’s a stupid sense of duty here—duty to external expectations at the expense of ourselves. That we must earn the right to prioritise ourselves. That pain is the price of admission to real change.
When everything is on fire, change is no longer a choice—it becomes necessity. Only then do we feel “allowed” to prioritise our core needs. Only then does the terror of staying outweigh the terror of facing what lies beneath. Only then do we have the external permission we’ve been waiting for.
The irony is that by waiting for crisis, we make the work infinitely harder. When we’re in complete breakdown, we have to simultaneously stabilise ourselves AND address the root patterns. We’re doing emergency triage whilst trying to rebuild the foundations. It’s possible—I did it, many people do—but it’s the hardest possible path.
5. What We’re Organised Around Keeps Us Disconnected and Productive
These internal forces—the lost capacity to sense, the terror of facing ourselves, the emotional paralysis, the need for external permission—don’t exist in isolation. They’re reinforced by what we’ve organised our lives around.
Our disconnection isn’t just personal—it’s structurally maintained. But it’s not just “the system” as some external force. It’s the organising principles we’ve built our lives around—the frameworks, the assumptions, the values, the stories that shape how we exist. Systems are both a product of these principles and a perpetuator of them.
And what goes on around us replicates within us. The fragmentation, the constant reactivity, the disconnection from sensing—these aren’t just external conditions. They become our internal operating system. The noise outside becomes noise inside. The performance demanded externally becomes the performance we demand of ourselves.
We exist within structures organised around extraction and productivity rather than human thriving. And these structures need us to stay compliant, disconnected, and performing until we break.
If we all became aware—if we all started listening to our bodies, trusting our sensing, acting on early signals—we’d stop participating in patterns that exploit us. We’d reorganise our lives around what actually sustains us rather than what produces economic value. The structures can’t afford that.
So we’re conditioned to value external success over internal balance. To measure worth by output rather than wellbeing. To treat rest as something we must earn rather than a biological necessity. To override limits in the name of productivity.
Living organisms have feedback mechanisms—pain, exhaustion, emotional discomfort—designed to signal when something needs attention. But we’ve been trained to override these as weakness rather than recognising them as intelligence. We’ve learned to distrust our own sensing and look outward for validation, permission, and proof.
The economic logic we’ve organised around doesn’t reward proactive self-care or early intervention. It rewards perpetual striving:
More achievement (instead of deeper connection).
More control (instead of surrender to truth).
More external wins (instead of inner peace).
When we’re disconnected from our internal world, we look outward for solutions. A new strategy will fix the business. A new relationship will fix the loneliness. A new habit will fix the exhaustion. But these are surface-level solutions that delay addressing the real issue: our fundamental misalignment.
And here’s the thing: all systems maintain their homeostasis. They resist change until forced. Anxious individuals don’t move until they have to. Families don’t shift patterns until crisis arrives. Organisations cling to what they know. Cultures resist transformation. The structures around us don’t change until continuation becomes impossible. The pressure to maintain the status quo is enormous—even after individual crisis, there’s constant pull to snap back to “normal” because systems want to restore their equilibrium.
It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
Here’s what I’ve learned: crisis was my path, but it doesn’t have to be everyone’s.
Some people do change proactively. What’s different for them? They’ve maintained—or reclaimed—their capacity to sense what’s forming. They trust their internal knowing enough to act on it before external validation arrives. They have processes, practices and frameworks that help them see patterns beneath the surface.
For me, that framework has been Realm Theory—a way of understanding the universal principles life operates by. It helped me see that I wasn’t just having a personal crisis, I was caught in destructive patterns of isolating, fragmenting, and disintegrating. And it showed me the generative alternative: connecting, integrating, expanding. Understanding myself not as a fixed anxious identity, but as a living organism with the capacity to heal, realign, grow and evolve.
The work of reconnecting with our sensing capacity—of learning to trust the quiet signals before they become screaming crises—is some of the most important work we can do. Not just for ourselves, but because our collective patterns mirror our individual ones. Systems don’t change until forced. Neither do we. But the cost of waiting is enormous.
We don’t need to hit rock bottom to reclaim our lives. Taking responsibility, being proactive, recognising there are patterns and getting in amongst them—the moment we start doing this work, listening to ourselves, facing what’s real, and choosing alignment before crisis forces us to—is the moment we step into real power.
Looking Back and Looking Forward
If you’re reading this post-crisis, you’ll recognise the pattern. The years of ignoring signals. The accumulation beneath the surface. The moment when everything converged and you had no choice. And perhaps, like me, you’ll see that the crisis wasn’t the problem—it was the wake-up call you weren’t allowing yourself to hear any other way.
If you’re reading this currently ignoring signals—feeling the exhaustion, the resentment, the quiet desperation beneath the functioning exterior—you don’t have to wait. You don’t need permission. You don’t need everything to fall apart before you’re allowed to choose something different.
But here’s what makes this so difficult: when we’re this disconnected, we literally don’t know what’s possible. We accept a life defined by external focus, by constant override, by performing and producing and proving our worth through endurance. We’ve lost touch with what else might exist. A life beyond these patterns. Beyond the acquiescence. Beyond waiting for permission. Beyond the martyrdom we’ve made of our suffering.
We can’t imagine it because we’ve never experienced it. Or if we have—in fleeting moments, in childhood perhaps, before we learned to suppress and perform—we’ve forgotten what it felt like. So we stay in what we know, even when what we know is slowly destroying us.
The signals are there. The pattern is forming. The question is: will you act whilst there’s still space to move with some grace, or will you wait until the only option is emergency response?
Real change doesn’t happen when everything collapses. It CAN happen then—that was my path. But real change happens when we finally decide to stop waiting for permission to live as we were always meant to.
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