Yesterday’s article made one move; from asking what is wrong with this person? to asking what is this distress responding to? Today is about what the ecosystem is actually made of, and why distress so rarely shows up where it started. If you want the whole model in one sitting before reading on, this is the fullest version I have recorded:
More Than A Room
When people hear “environment”, they usually picture a room; the lights, the noise, the chairs, but an ecosystem is the total network of conditions that shape a life, including parts of it that a person never sees and has no say in.
There is a useful precedent for thinking this way. In 1998 the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued that cognition does not stop at the skull. A notebook, a tool, a habit or another person can be part of how a mind does its work. The ecosystemic model applies the same logic to distress; if thinking can extend into the world, so can the conditions that make thinking unbearable. To make that manageable, the model names three levels. They are a way of organising, not a claim that life arrives in three tidy layers. In practice they leak into each other constantly, and that leakage is the point.
Level 1: The Inner Ecosystem
The first environment is the bodymind. We exist in it at all times, there is no stepping outside it, no neutral position and no pause button, which is why distress is always embodied.
The inner ecosystem includes:
Interoceptive signals: pain, hunger, thirst, nausea, breath, temperature.
How those signals are read and given meaning.
Chronic illness, injury and disability.
Fatigue, sleep and energy regulation.
Trauma and stress physiology.
Nervous system activation and shutdown.
Interoception is not only sensation, it is communication; a bodymind reports its state continuously. When those reports are ignored, overridden, pathologised or disbelieved, distress intensifies.
This is why distress so often appears here first, as anxiety, pain, exhaustion, dissociation or shutdown. But appearing here does not mean originating here. The bodymind is simply the place where mismatch becomes impossible to avoid.
Level 2: The Immediate Ecosystem
The second level is the set of environments a person is placed inside day to day. This is where distress becomes visible, and where it is most often misread as “behaviour”.
Sensory: sound, light, smell, touch, movement, visual load, unpredictability. What overwhelms one nervous system may barely register in another.
Physical: access, layout, crowding, seating, toilets, exits, temperature. An inaccessible environment is not neutral; it produces distress.
Predictability and cognitive load: routines, transitions, clarity of expectations, pacing, task switching. Visual supports, previewing, choice and pacing are not extras. They are load-bearing.
Relational: attunement or misattunement; co-regulation or control; dignity or shame; being believed or being dismissed; rupture repaired or left to fester.
There is one part of Level 2 that almost every other model misses. Relational harm does not only come from conflicts you are in, people around you being in conflict affects you too. So do decisions made between professionals in a meeting you were not invited to, and disagreements between two services about whose budget you fall under. These relationships are part of your ecosystem even though you are not a participant in them, and traditional assessment almost never asks about them.
Level 3: The Systems Ecosystem
Level 3 is where power lives. It includes schools, workplaces and healthcare systems; policies, rules and eligibility criteria; economic conditions and cultural norms; ableism, racism, sexism and classism; diagnostic gatekeeping; and the long histories of exclusion that sit behind all of them.
These systems decide how Level 2 environments are built and how people are treated inside them. They determine whose distress is taken seriously, whose pain is minimised, whose needs are framed as unreasonable and whose survival is made conditional. Level 3 does not stay abstract, it flows downward.
Distress Accumulates
Distress is rarely caused by one thing, it builds. A mismatch at Level 3 increases pressure at Level 2, and sustained pressure at Level 2 eventually overwhelms the bodymind at Level 1.
It accumulates through small mismatches that stack:
Sensory overload without recovery.
Masking without relief.
Misunderstanding without repair.
Effort without accommodation.
Responsibility without power.
This is the most common reason interventions fail. People try to fix distress at Level 1 or Level 2 without touching the upstream conditions that keep recreating it, when the distress returns, the person is blamed for not improving.
Two Examples
Pain and healthcare. At Level 1, a person is in pain, in a bodymind already shaped by previous experiences and stress physiology. At Level 2, they attend hospital; it is bright, loud and unpredictable; waiting times are unclear; control is taken away. At Level 3, ableist assumptions shape their care, their pain is minimised, their communication misread, their previous trauma with healthcare reactivated.
The result is not only untreated pain but also reinforced trauma. The bodymind learns to expect harm, anticipatory stress raises future pain, and a loop is created. Not because the person is “anxious”, but because the ecosystem keeps proving them right.
School anxiety. At Level 1, a child’s anxiety shows up as disrupted sleep, stomach aches and shutdown. At Level 2, the school is sensory-heavy, unpredictable, socially unsafe and cognitively overwhelming. At Level 3, power structures create and enforce that environment. The child has no meaningful control, attendance is prioritised over wellbeing, and distress is reframed as refusal or defiance. The anxiety is treated as the child’s problem, the ecosystem that produces it is left intact.
Systemic Backflow
Even when distress seems to start at Level 1 or Level 2, Level 3 shapes how it is experienced, responded to and remembered. Past harm alters future physiology, dismissal today raises vulnerability tomorrow, systems teach bodyminds what to expect.
I call this systemic backflow; harm flows down through the ecosystem, then cycles back up as crisis, burnout, withdrawal or collapse. What looks like personal failure is very often ecosystemic exhaustion.
Canaries In The Coal Mine
Autistic and other neurodivergent people tend to feel ecosystemic imbalance first and hardest. Partly this is because our bodyminds are often more sensitive to sensory and social disruption. Partly it is because a minoritised position offers less protection when systems fail.
That makes us canaries in the coal mine and means that fixing the ecosystem is not special treatment for a few. A school that is calmer, more predictable and less coercive is a better school for everyone in it.
Breakdown Shows The Design
There is a way of reading all this that turns it from a list of grievances into a method. Legacy Russell, writing from Black feminist and queer traditions of refusal in Glitch Feminism (2020), describes the glitch as the moment a system stops running smoothly and, in failing, reveals how it was built.
Applied here; a school run is fine until a child cannot do it, and then the design of the school run becomes visible. Distress is not a message the person is sending, it is the system becoming briefly readable at the exact point where it fails. A service that only suppresses breakdown is destroying its own evidence.
What an ecosystemic response asks for
An ecosystemic model demands ecosystemic responses:
Supporting the bodymind rather than overriding it.
Reshaping immediate environments rather than demanding endurance.
Challenging systems that concentrate power while denying access.
Addressing backflow, not only surface symptoms.
Accommodation is not indulgence, access is not special treatment, safety is not optional. When environments change, people change, because the pressure finally eased.
How Sure Are We?
If the nested shape feels familiar, it should. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (1979) placed a child’s development inside a similar set of layers, and that work is long established. The extended mind is a serious, much-debated position in philosophy of mind. The ecosystemic model borrows the nesting and adds two things that are ours; power flowing downward, and harm flowing back up. Those additions are proposed rather than tested, and the best evidence for them at the moment is how often they describe what people already live.
