A frequent question on my mind, especially when working inside organizations, is:

Where is the energy trapped?

In the language of complexity theory, what I’m often thinking about as “trapped energy” is a system that has collapsed into a narrow attractor state. Human organizations are complex adaptive systems: they don’t change because someone decides they should, and they don’t respond linearly to effort or pressure. They change when existing patterns lose their grip and new ones become possible.

Energy, in this sense, isn’t enthusiasm or morale. It’s degrees of freedom within the system. It’s whether attention, authority, emotion, and imagination can recombine in new ways, or whether they’re locked into enduring structures that feel stable locally but are stagnant over time.

Anyone even mildly empathetic can feel when something wants to move and can’t. Work gets repetitive. Conversations loop. People feel restless, defensive, exhausted, or oddly inert.

Sometimes what helps is not insight, boldness, or emotional processing, but a tool. And tools don’t have to be perfect to be useful. But in the right moment, a tool can function as a focusing device—giving shape to intuition and offering a way to sense what the right next step might be.

The figure eight

There’s one tool I learned about more than ten years ago that still comes to my mind in very specific situations. It comes from Gareth S. Hill’s book Masculine and Feminine: The Natural Flow of Opposites in the Psyche. Hill’s central metaphor is a figure eight—an endless cycle that describes the movement between recurring states of being.

• At the lower left of the figure eight is a holding environment: a nest, a home, a state of attunement and belonging. It’s static, connective, safe.
• Over time, restlessness emerges. The person ascends the loop, crossing into a phase of initiative and individuation—leaving the tribe, asserting ego, seeking fortune, testing capacity.
• That dynamism is intoxicating—but unsustainable and, over time, unfulfilling. At that point, Hill describes a fiery initiation: a confrontation, a trial, a submission to something larger than personal will. The individual takes a defined place in a social order, with roles, expectations, and constraints. This becomes a new kind of static home—structured and externally validated.
• And then, inevitably, that rigidity cracks. Descending the other side of the figure eight, the system destabilizes again. Creativity returns, but this time it’s less heroic and more unruly. Old forms loosen. Identity becomes porous.
• Eventually, the journey culminates in what Hill calls a watery initiation: dissolution, disorientation, a dark night of the soul. The ego melts, allowing in material that could not previously be held. Afterwards, one seeks and finds containment, and the loop begins again.

The model works at the level of a lifetime, a single professional chapter, and—as Hill notes—the micro-moments of lived experience: in the mind, calm gives way to initiative; initiative hardens into form; form becomes stifling; dissolution clears space for something new.

Where people get stuck

One thing that makes this framework leap to mind for me is that it foregrounds resistance.

People don’t want to leave the nest. They don’t want to submit to collective constraint. They don’t want to surrender the ego structures that once kept them safe.

And yet, at each point of refusal, trapped energy accumulates, seeking an outlet. 

When I’m working one-on-one with someone and I sense that resistance—not as pathology, but as friction—I can use Hill’s model to clarify what transformative step is being avoided. From there, I get an intuitive sense of what kind of movement would unlock things: more structure, not less; more humility, not more assertion; more experimentation, not more discipline; more containment, not more freedom.

I also notice when certain leaders and managers get stuck in one mode or another: always rallying the troops, always offering nurturance, always playing devil’s advocate. When this happens, I can suggest other ways of showing up that might work better in that particular moment.

I also especially appreciate that the model treats initiation as active and costly. Fire and water are not metaphors for insight; they’re metaphors for a kind of transformation that hurts. In our culture, we tend to over-value willpower and under-teach surrender. We celebrate “growth” without acknowledging the painful ego deaths it actually requires.

The problem with language

A power and a problem of this model is how it’s labeled.

Hill names the four stages in the flow as static feminine, dynamic masculine, static masculine, and dynamic feminine. He is careful to say that he is not describing gendered people, but archetypal images inherited from mythic traditions.

Those Jungian labels give the model its force. They echo familiar cultural patterns: women as nurturers or agents of transformation; men asserting ego, ascending hierarchies, claiming social rank. The prevalence of these images makes the framework vivid and memorable, and that memorability is part of what makes it effective as a tool.

But the metaphors are not neutral. They come from patriarchal cultures that encoded power, agency, receptivity, and submission along gendered lines that have caused real individual and collective harm. That history doesn’t disappear just because the model is being used abstractly or with care. This is the main reason I rarely mention the framework directly, even when it’s clarifying my own perception.

The obvious fix would be to replace “masculine” and “feminine” with less charged language. But when you do that, something else disappears too. The model loses its mythic resonance. It stops hooking into the symbolic material that gives it traction in the first place.

I can see what’s wrong with the model while also acknowledging that I’m not the right person to repair or replace it. Two deep premises of my thinking are that those most marginalized within a system often understand it best, and that marginalized people, in collectives, are best positioned to ethically articulate those insights. Perhaps there is a less-sexist version of this model that works without becoming inert. Perhaps there is a different, feminist framework that captures the same dynamics more cleanly or more brilliantly. (Julia Kristeva’s work remains on my reading list.)

And one honest posture is this: to hold appreciation for what the model can do, alongside grief and humility for what it cannot.

For me, the value of Hill’s tool—or any tool, symbol, or word—is not its truth, but its contextual usefulness. The figure eight model, with its current labels or any others, helps diagnose where movement is being resisted and what kind of change might actually restore flow. It offers a way to work with trapped energy without pretending that the tool itself is innocent, complete, or final.

That stance—using imperfect frameworks with awareness, care, and a loose grip—is a core professional skill. And it’s one that’s increasingly rare in environments that conflate symbols with reality, maps with terrain, and conceptual clarity with moral cleanliness.

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. – Gustave Flaubert