Fractals of Change

Recursion

• Mary Schaub • Season 2 • Episode 27

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Recursion is a foundational pattern: systems feeding outputs back into themselves, shaping continuity and change.

This episode explores recursion across mind, relationships, organizations, and society—from identity and trauma to culture and systems. We don’t escape the loops we’re in. We change them—iteration by iteration.

💡Key Takeaways

  •  Recursion drives both stability and change 
  •  The present is built from repeated patterns of the past 
  •  Identity is recursively constructed through narrative and behavior 
  •  Relationships reflect repeated interaction patterns 
  •  Culture and organizations emerge from repeated behaviors 
  •  Social systems are sustained by reinforcing feedback loops 
  •  Awareness enables intervention 
  •  Small changes, repeated, reshape systems 

🎤Memorable Quotes

  •  “The system becomes the input to its own future.” 
  •  “Over time, biography becomes strategy.” 
  •  “We live inside the stories we repeat.” 
  •  “Trust is built through repeated experience.” 
  •  “Culture is recursion made social.” 
  •  “Institutions become what they repeatedly rehearse.” 

🔗Resources

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Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

SPEAKER_00

Recursion is one of those quiet structural patterns of reality that shows up almost everywhere. It's not a line, it's more like a spiral. In mathematics, recursion means a process that refers back to itself. A recursive system generates new states by feeding its previous outputs back into the system as inputs. Recursion even shows up in language. Imagine opening a dictionary and finding the definition recursion, a process defined in terms of recursion. You can't understand the definition without referring back to the same word again. The explanation loops back on itself. But this isn't just a technical pattern, it's an ontological one. Recursion and feedback are central to how ecosystems evolve, how economies grow or collapse, and how cultures transmit their values across generations. Life doesn't unfold in a straight line. We're living inside webs of circular causality. Across science, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, we see the same dynamic again and again. Systems produce the raw material for the next iteration of themselves. The present isn't separate from the past. It's built from it. And once you start seeing recursion, you see it everywhere. Not as a line, but as a spiral, a pattern of learning, adaptation, and transformation through time. Fractals, evolutionary adaptation, neural learning, cultural narratives, and institutional dynamics all operate this way. Recursion reminds us that the world we inhabit today is partly constructed from the accumulated outputs of yesterday. Iteration is the universal pattern shaping everything we know about ourselves and the systems we live in. This season we've been exploring recurring patterns that shape change. Emergence showed us how complexity arises from interaction. Polarity showed us how opposites regulate one another. Disruption showed us how systems renew themselves when patterns break. Recursion explains how patterns persist and evolve across time. And by the way, these patterns interact with one another too. Recursive interactions generate emergence. Opposites recursively regulate each other, and disruption breaks recursive loops that have become rigid. Recursion is the engine of continuity and transformation. Recursion begins with a simple idea, self-reference. A system refers back to itself. But recursion isn't simple repetition. Each iteration can introduce variation, growth, adaptation. You see it in spirals, in developmental stages, in evolutionary processes, and my favorite, fractals. Healthy recursion has boundaries and grounding conditions. Without those constraints, recursion can spiral into runaway processes, what mathematicians call infinite regress, or what we experience in human life as feedback loops that spin out of control. Recursion is everywhere in nature. Fractal patterns show up in coastlines, snowflakes, branching trees, river systems, blood vessels, and lungs. The same branching rule repeats across scales. In physics, gravitational clustering works recursively. Tiny fluctuations in matter density amplify through feedback loops, eventually forming galaxies and cosmic structures. Climate systems also behave this way. Feedback loops between temperature, ice, oceans, and atmosphere shape how the planet evolves over time. Recursion isn't just an abstraction. It's embedded in the architecture of nature, and life itself is recursive. DNA contains instructions to produce the proteins required for DNA replication. Evolution works through recursive selection. Each generation inherits patterns from the previous one, introduces variation, and feeds the results forward. Even the immune system works this way. Exposure to pathogens creates memory in immune cells, shaping future responses. Our bodies literally carry recursive histories of their past encounters with the world. The mind is recursive too. The brain isn't a feed-forward machine. It constantly predicts sensory input, compares those predictions to reality, and updates itself through feedback loops. Learning happens through reinforcement cycles. Behavior produces outcomes. Outcomes reshape future behavior. Cognitive scientist Douglas Hostatler proposed that self-awareness itself may arise from recursive self-representation. His idea of strange loops describes systems that contain models of themselves. Consciousness may be one of those loops. Many spiritual traditions recognized recursive patterns long before mathematics formalized them. In Hindu philosophy, the metaphor of Indra's net describes a universe where each jewel reflects all others infinitely. In Buddhism, dependent origination describes how consciousness and experience recursively condition one another. Taoism describes reality unfolding through the interplay of yin and yang. Alan Watts described the universe as the self playing with itself, a cosmic game of hide and seek where reality forgets and rediscovers itself through countless forms. Even storytelling itself is recursive. Every generation inherits narratives, retells them, and modifies them slightly, carrying forward cultural memory. Carl Jung saw similar patterns in the psyche. He believed archetypal structures repeat across myths, dreams, and individual lives. Human development, which he called individuation, unfolds through repeated encounters with unconscious material at deeper levels. Growth happens through recursive confrontation with the self. Recursion is perhaps most visible in our inner worlds. Human beings are self-reflective systems. We think about our thinking. We narrate our own narratives. We revise stories, we tell about who we are, and then live inside those stories long enough for them to begin shaping what feels possible. These recursive identity loops matter because they aren't just abstract, they become embodied. Thoughts influence emotions. Emotions influence actions. Actions confirm beliefs. Beliefs narrow perception, and the cycle continues. This is how habits form, how self-concepts stabilize, and sometimes how suffering perpetuates itself. We experience emotional recursion when we feel anxiety about anxiety, shame about shame, resentment about resentment, or even gratitude about gratitude. The mind doesn't simply react, it reacts to its own reactions. It folds back on itself. This can be destructive, but it can also be the basis of growth. Recursive loops shape identity. The story I tell about my past shapes the choices I make in the present. Those choices then become evidence for the story I tell next. Over time, biography becomes strategy. Narrative becomes structure. This is why change can be so difficult. People often think they're trapped by circumstances when they're also, at least in part, being held in place by recursive self-interpretation. I failed before, therefore I'll fail again. I was betrayed, therefore, intimacy is dangerous. I succeeded by overfunctioning. Therefore, rest feels unsafe. The loop becomes a home, even when it's an unhappy one. Trauma intensifies this pattern. Trauma isn't simply a bad event in the past. It's often a recursive process in the present. A triggering situation activates an old emotional reality. The body responds as if the past is happening now. The person reacts, withdraws, dissociates, attacks, appeases, or shuts down. Then the aftermath of that reaction becomes new evidence that the world is unsafe, that the self is broken, or that intimacy is dangerous. Round and round we go. This is why trauma theorists such as Drs. Philip Bromberg, Peter Levine, and Bessel Vanderkalk have all in different ways pointed to repetition, fragmentation, and reenactment as central to psychic suffering. The unresolved doesn't disappear, it recurs. But recursion isn't just about suffering. It can also be the mechanism of healing. Healing rarely arrives as one dramatic revelation. More often, it comes through repeated returns. Returning to the body, to the breath, to reality, to a more accurate interpretation. Returning to the present when the mind has wandered back into an inherited script. Ram Das framed spiritual practice this way. Be here now. Not once, repeatedly. Each return is small, but over time, those small returns form a new pattern. Attention is retrained. The nervous system is softened. The self becomes less fused with its own mental loops. Meditation, reflection, therapy, journaling, contemplative practice, honest feedback, these are all recursive interventions. They're ways of introducing new information into an old loop. And that may be one of the deepest truths about change. We don't heal by escaping recursion. We heal by changing what gets repeated. I was a very curious and thoughtful kid. I can remember being four or five and asking profound questions, not too dissimilar from what I do here on the show. I was seen as precocious, highly sensitive, and deep. I taught myself to read with the help of Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, and was even put into school a year early. But something shifted around the time I was seven or eight. There were challenges at home, which had a big impact on me and my performance at school. By the time I was in third grade, I was being slotted into slower classes. I remember in my elementary school, they had something called GT, gifted and talented. Some of my friends were in GT. They went on special trips to museums and presented to the rest of the school at GT assemblies. I remember wondering, how were they selected? And why wasn't I? That reflection highlighted my awareness that I wasn't being seen as who I knew myself to be. Now, I'll be honest, I was struggling as a kid, and it was reflected in my grades. But it wasn't who I was. I was going through something that made me look like I wasn't a good student. But without intervention from myself or others, I began to believe that it was me. And from third grade until freshman year of high school, I was a mediocre student. I naturally took to reading literature and writing, but math and science were hard. And I saw myself as bad in those subjects. I began having an aversion to them. That resulted in me doing poorly in those classes, and I was put into lower classes the next year. The cycle repeated. I became the story. In my freshman year of high school, I was exposed to some wonderful teachers. If you've watched me long enough, you'll hear me talk a lot about my high school teachers, especially my English teachers. But freshman year, my world was turned around by a math teacher named Mr. Philhauer. He was an unassuming man who seemed to fly under the radar, which made sense for someone who teaches high school freshman math. Unlike teachers I'd had that took their frustration about my performance out on me, he was different. He was kind and patient. Maybe he saw through all my teenager walls and defiance and worked with me. With me, the human, not the frustrating teen who hated math, but me, the young person who was trying my best. And he helped me learn. I received a B in math that year, which was pretty incredible for me. But something much more profound happened with Mr. Philhauer. He held on to the different version of me that wasn't public, that was hidden far below algebra and geometry. He saw the real me and held on to it long enough for me to remember it too. He gave me the gift of reconnecting with myself at 14, which started me on a multi-year transformation from a struggling student to an exceptional one. This helped me to understand that we aren't the stories we and others tell about ourselves. And with kindness and compassion from others, we can muster the strength to chart a better path and rewrite our story entirely. By the way, last season I interviewed Penelope Cottrell and Rhea DeMay, who founded the Rewrite Workshops. They have writing classes for exactly this kind of self-discovery. I'll put a link to that interview and their website in the show notes. Recursion doesn't stop at the level of the individual. Relationships are recursive systems. Every interaction becomes part of the conditions for the next one. Defensiveness evokes defensiveness. Curiosity invites openness. Withdrawal provokes pursuit, and pursuit provokes more withdrawal. One moment doesn't stay in one moment, it enters the stream. Trust is built recursively, not through declarations, but through repeated experiences of reliability, honesty, responsiveness, and repair. We learn whether another person is safe, not from a single statement, but from the pattern that forms across time. The same is true in reverse. Mistrust is also recursive. Broken promises, emotional inconsistency, contempt, evasion, or chronic misattunment create loops that become harder and harder to interrupt. This is why rupture and repair matters so much. Healthy relationships aren't those without rupture. They're those in which rupture is followed by recognition, accountability, and repair, often enough that the relationship becomes more resilient. Each successful repair becomes evidence that conflicts are survivable. Each failed repair becomes evidence that vulnerability is dangerous. You can see this very clearly in family systems. Communication styles, emotional roles, conflict patterns, and attachment strategies often recur across generations. The overfunctioner, the peacemaker, the scapegoat, the unavailable parent, the child who learns to become hyper-competent. All of these are not just personal traits. They're often recursive adaptations inside a larger emotional system. And unless someone becomes aware of the pattern, the system tends to keep reproducing itself. This is where dialogue and co-regulation become more than nice ideas. They become pattern disruptors. Practices like deep listening, nonviolent communication, reflective dialogue, and emotionally honest presence change the feedback conditions of a relationship. Instead of trigger, defend, counterattack, a different loop becomes possible. Notice, pause, reflect, respond. Instead of escalation, regulation. Instead of projection, connection. Instead of reenactment, choice. Co-regulation is especially important here. Human nervous systems don't operate in isolation. We shape one another continuously through tone, pacing, facial expression, attention, and emotional steadiness. One regulated presence can help interrupt a recursive spiral in another person. And one dysregulated person can destabilize an entire room. This is true in couples, families, teams, classrooms, and nations. This is one reason relational skill is not secondary to systemic change. It's foundational to it. Check out my interview with Dr. Thomas Gartenman. He's a business consultant and somatic executive coach and advises senior executives on helping them understand this precise dynamic. Because when leaders understand this, they have the opportunity to build high-performing and resilient cultures. I'll put a link to that interview in the show notes. I'd like to share a story about an up-and-coming middle manager I'll call Donna, who had a reputation for being edgy and confrontational. Colleagues assigned to work on her projects performed unusually low and often had high absentee rates. Some colleagues even requested to be reassigned to different managers. Then the formal HR complaint started to pop up. And finally, a client complained about her interpersonal style. Donna was moved to a new operational role where she wouldn't have client contact. Unfortunately, she wasn't coached on how her behavior was being experienced by others. She missed an opportunity to reflect on what was happening inside of her that resulted in her being short-tempered, critical, and condescending to others. As a result, these behaviors continued in her new role. She acted out, often publicly humiliating her employees, micromanaging, and giving last minute assignments with unreasonable deadlines to establish dominance. As with her first team, employees started to look for new roles. They complained to HR that they They were experiencing anxiety, depression, and even sleep issues because of Donna's behavior. Finally, enough complaints came in that she was again removed from her role. Donna was stuck in a recursive pattern. Something unresolved in her kept getting replayed over and over again. These behaviors directly affected the people around her, undermining both performance and relational health. Donna's story is an example of where relationship dynamics can become normalized and turn into cultural norms. Her coworkers broke the cycle by raising concerns. When interventions don't happen, they perpetuate bad behaviors, often relocating them somewhere else in the organization and establishing negative examples that risk settling into cultural norms. Organizations are deeply recursive systems. Donna's story highlights that corporate culture isn't written in policy manuals. It emerges from repeated patterns of behavior. What leaders reward, ignore, punish, tolerate, and repeat becomes the emotional and operational code of the institution. Stories about how things are done here become inherited scripts. Each generation of leaders reinforces them, adapts them, or occasionally disrupts them. This is why culture is so sticky. People often imagine culture as values on a wall, but culture is really recursion made social. Meeting after meeting, decision after decision, incentive after incentive. A thousand loops sedimented into norm. A company that rewards speed over reflection will recursively produce haste. A company that punishes dissent will recursively produce silence. And a company that says it values collaboration but rewards individual heroics will recursively produce performative teamwork and private competition. Institutions become what they repeatedly rehearse. This dynamic extends into governance, markets, media, and society at large. Economic systems are recursive. Wealth generates access. Access generates opportunity. And opportunity generates more wealth. Disadvantage compounds in similar fashion. Inequality isn't just a snapshot, it's a feedback structure. Media ecosystems operate through recursive amplification. We all know by now that attention flows toward novelty, outrage, fear, and conflict. Those signals are rewarded with visibility, and increased visibility normalizes those signals. Then public consciousness is shaped by the very dynamics the system most rewards. The machine trains us while pretending merely to reflect us. Social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and humanistic philosopher Eric Frome argued that societies cultivate particular character orientations, and those orientations in turn reproduce the society that formed them. A culture organized around having rather than being doesn't just produce economic behavior. It shapes desire, identity, aspiration, and even what people believe a human life is for. So the loop isn't merely external. We build institutions, and then institutions build us back. And this is where recursion becomes politically and ethically important. Because once a pattern is socially normalized, it can start to feel natural, inevitable, beyond question. But most social realities are not eternal truths. They're repeated arrangements, human-made loops with a long half-life. Which means they can be changed, but only if they are seen. For leaders, this matters enormously because every interaction, each repeated decision, is not just solving a problem in the present. It's training the future behavior of the system itself. Recursive systems can generate learning, adaptation, and resilience, but they can also amplify dysfunction. That's one of the reasons recursion matters so much today. We're living in an era of accelerated feedback loops. Algorithmic systems now mirror and reinforce human attention, preference, fear, and bias. Social media platforms feed our past behavior back into our future information environment. The result isn't neutral personalization. It's recursive identity shaping. What we click becomes what we see. What we see influences what we feel. And what we feel influences what we click next. The loop tightens. Mental health can follow similar patterns. Rumination, doom scrolling, self-criticism, compulsive comparison, and trauma reenactment all operate as recursive cognitive emotional spirals. The mind becomes both the producer and the consumer of its own distress. Conflict does this too. In families, organizations, and political culture, recursive loops of trigger, defend, counterattack can create a false sense that the other side is the sole problem, when in fact the pattern itself has become the real antagonist. Everyone feels confirmed, and so nothing changes. We all stay stuck. Economic inequality compounds recursively. Wealth produces better education, stronger networks, safer risk taking, and better resilience to failure. Poverty compounds through its own brutal feedback loops of stress, scarcity, reduced optionality, and institutional friction. So recursion isn't merely a beautiful pattern, it's also a warning. What repeats does not always heal. Sometimes it hardens, sometimes it escalates, and sometimes it becomes destiny because no one interrupted the loop in time. The question is whether we can become conscious participants in them. Three practices can help us do that. One, meditation, training awareness. Meditation strengthens the capacity to notice recursive loops of thought, emotion, and sensation without immediately reacting to them as if they were reality. Awareness creates just enough distance for choice to re-enter the system. Meditation isn't primarily about relaxation, it's about strength, power, and presence. Neuroscience research increasingly supports this. Studies using brain imaging show that consistent mindfulness practice changes both brain structure and function. For example, long-term meditators show increased gray matter density in the hippocampus, associated with learning and emotional regulation. It also reduces activity in the default mode network, the brain system associated with rumination and self-referential looping. And a large meta-analysis published in JAMA found that mindfulness meditation produces moderate improvements in anxiety, depression, and stress. In other words, meditation literally changes how recursive mental loops operate in the brain. It strengthens the ability to observe the loop rather than automatically becoming it. And once we observe the loop, we gain the ability to intervene. Number two, self-reflection, examining the pattern. Meditation helps us notice the loop. Self-reflection helps us understand it. But reflection is different from thinking. Thinking often just spins inside the same recursive cycle. True reflection steps outside the loop long enough to ask different questions. What am I repeating? What is this pattern protecting? What is it costing me? What would happen if I fed different information into the system? Practices like journaling, therapy, contemplative inquiry, or honest dialogue with trusted people create space for that examination. Psychologists often refer to this as metacognition, the ability to think about our own thinking. Research consistently shows that metacognitive awareness improves emotional regulation, decision making, and conflict resolution. When combined with meditation, reflection builds the capacity to slow down during conflict, to listen before reacting, to ask better questions. And over time, it allows us to interrupt destructive feedback loops in ourselves, in our relationships, and even in our organizations, before they harden into identity or culture. Number three, manifestation directing the loop. The final practice is more advanced, but extremely powerful. Manifestation. The word often gets misunderstood. At its core, manifestation isn't magic, it's attention-directing recursive systems. What we repeatedly focus on shapes perception, behavior, and ultimately outcomes. Psychologists sometimes describe this through mechanisms like selective attention, expectancy effects, and self-fulfilling prophecies. When we hold a clear intention, our brains begin scanning the environment for signals that align with it. This is partly driven by the reticular activating system, a network that filters the enormous amount of information entering our senses every moment. Focus determines what enters awareness, and what enters awareness influences the actions we take. This is why athletes visualize performance before competition, why cognitive behavioral therapy encourages reframing thoughts, and why goals become more achievable when they're repeatedly brought into conscious attention. Manifestation at its most grounded level is simply this: choosing which patterns we feed into the loop. Over time, the loops we reinforce become the reality we inhabit. The hopeful thing is this: in recursive systems, small interventions matter. A new thought repeated, a different response practiced, a repair made sooner. A policy changed, maybe a meeting run differently. Tiny changes repeated over time can reshape the loops that shape our lives. And when the loops change, reality changes with them. There's one final twist worth considering. A human mind studying recursion is itself a recursive system observing recursion. This show is an example of that. Douglas Hofstattler once wrote that human beings are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference. But recursion isn't a trap, it's an opportunity. Because once we see the loops we're inside, we gain the ability to change them, to more fully know and reshape our identities, to strengthen our relationships, to create more ethical and effective institutions, iteration by iteration. Perhaps by stepping back and seeing the pattern more clearly, we can begin moving forward more wisely, toward more conscious lives, healthier systems, and a more peaceful and flourishing world. I'm Mary Schaub. This is Fractals of Change, wishing you curiosity, presence, and flowers.

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Mary Schaub

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