The Empire of Lived Experience:

Reflections on Power and Wounding

When I first stepped into the lived experience workforce, I remember hearing a saying whispered with a half-smile: “Beware......we eat our own.” I remembered laughing nervously as I brushed it off then, and chalked it up to cynicism, even bitterness. The phrase felt to bleak and I was full of energy, conviction, and a kind of soft idealism (even naivety) that comes from finally feeling seen and purposeful. But not long into the journey, I found myself on the receiving end of that phrase. The experience left me deeply bruised and quite bewildered by how people who had known pain so intimately could inflict it upon each other. I learnt something then about the edges we develop when survival shapes us, and how those edges (when left unguarded) can hurt others. It was a painful lesson.

Over the years, I’ve met people who restored my hope - colleagues who held power gently, who stayed in relationship through disagreement, who understood that authenticity mattered more than control. But I’ve also witnessed the other side: the ways we (me included) can replicate the very dynamics we set out to dismantle. I reflect often on how these two truths can coexist within the same movement.

The beauty and wholesomeness of lived experience.

It has changed systems, language, and lives. But perhaps what I see now is that its wholesomeness doesn’t make us immune to the human pull toward power and also fear. I used to think that the table we fought to sit at was the goal. These days, I wonder whether the table itself, its shape, its rules, its unspoken hierarchies, was always part of the problem? And, what that means for when any one of us join that table?

I don’t want to speak in absolutes. I’ve just seen how easy it is, in the name of reform, to slip into the habits of empire-building. The grant applications, consultancy roles, the curated personal brands. And, that it is all too easy to start measuring one’s worth by recognition or reach. I’ve caught myself wondering: when does advocacy become performance? When does survival turn into competition cloaked as leadership? When does self-interest get dressed up as sector expertise?

Scarcity

Sometimes I think it comes from scarcity. When you’ve previously been positioned as an afterthought or the token voice, there’s an almost primal fear of losing your seat and therefore your voice. And maybe that fear makes it harder to share, to mentor, to lift others. I know that feeling in my own chest - the quiet panic that there might not be enough roles, enough funding, enough space for everyone’s truth, enough space for me to remain relevant and part of this space that has become my career and therefore my livelihood.

Trauma

And then there’s trauma, the invisible shadow that trails so many of us. So much of lived experience work is grounded in pain, in survival stories – some that have not yet found full healing. I’ve come to see how unhealed pain can sometimes masquerade as authority, or how control can feel like safety. I recognise pieces of myself in that. When I’ve felt unsteady, I’ve been tempted to hold tighter, speak louder, lead harder. It’s confronting to admit how close the line can be between empowerment and re-enactment.

Maybe that’s why Audre Lorde’s famous warning about “the master’s tools” still echoes so strongly. We’ve learned the language of systems, adopted their frameworks, joined their panels and steering committees. But I’m not sure we’ve always escaped their gravitational pull. I sometimes wonder: can we use the tools of hierarchy and competition and still believe in liberation? Or what else? Something built from deliberation, collaboration, belonging and shared vulnerability?

The role of social prescribing in supporting whole-of-person wellbeing For me, that might mean asking harder questions of myself:

How am I using whatever power I have?
Whose voices do I bring in, and whose do I quietly sideline?
When I speak as “we,” who is missing from that “we”?

It might also mean nurturing abundance where scarcity once lived while celebrating another’s rise without feeling diminished. I’ve experienced deep healing in spaces where mentorship wasn’t about gatekeeping but about giving, about being part of a longer story rather than guarding one’s own chapter.

I think real accountability lies somewhere in that shared practice, neither punitive nor permissive, but deeply relational. It asks for courage, and tenderness, and the belief that we can still change how we meet each other.

Build an Empire?

When I look back on that early warning - “we eat our own” - I don’t necessarily hear it as condemnation anymore. I hear it as a plea: to notice when hunger turns us on each other instead of toward each other, and to find another way. Because whatever empire we build, whether of systems or self, will only ever be as free as the relationships that sustain it. And maybe liberation, in the end, isn’t a destination, but the daily practice of refusing to build a throne where a table of kinship was meant to be.

It is no small thing to stand in the tensions of this work. To love a movement and still name its harm. To believe in liberation while sensing how close it lies to control. There have been days that I wanted to walk away from it all.... go sell T-shirts on the beach. And then there are days when I witness something so tender, someone holding space with truth and humility, and I believe again in what we began – a path forward where leadership is less about ascent and more about reciprocity, less empire and more ecosystem. Not a hierarchy but a gathering.

And I no longer fully believe that we should fully own the table.

I don’t even think I want to

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