After Me, Then You
The Glass Castle, Extractionocracy, and the Promise That Never Arrives
Last week, I wrote about what it means to keep going while the storm is still gathering. Before that, I asked whether we are emotionally mature enough to live inside a new declaration.
This week, the question gets more personal.
This week’s AMP session is The Glass Castle (2017), a film based on Jeannette Walls’ memoir about her unconventional and deeply unstable childhood. Woody Harrelson portrays her father, Rex Walls, with enough intelligence, humor, charm, and force that it is easy to understand why people are drawn to him.
That matters because Rex is not presented as a simple villain. He is magnetic and imaginative. He can make his children feel as though they are living inside a grand adventure rather than enduring neglect, hunger, and chaos.
The Story the Family Chooses to Tell
Near the end of the film, after Rex has died, the adult Walls children gather around a Thanksgiving table and remember him.
They speak about his brilliance, humor, wildness, and larger-than-life presence. Those things may all have been true. But much of the rest of their experience remains outside the room: the alcoholism, instability, manipulation, broken promises, and years in which the children carried what their parents would not.
The scene stayed with me because it reveals something families often do without realizing it. We edit the story so we can preserve the attachment. We remember enough truth to recognize the person, but not always enough to disturb the love we still need to feel.
Families survive by editing the story, but what we leave out of the story does not leave the system. It continues in the roles people carry, the choices they make, and the relationships they enter.
What the Children Learned to Carry
Rex dreamed, Rose Mary escaped into her art, and the children adapted around them.
They carried the uncertainty, hunger, and practical consequences of their parents’ decisions. They also carried the hope that someday Rex would finally build the magnificent home he had designed for them: the Glass Castle.
That promise gave meaning to the waiting. It allowed today’s hardship to be explained by tomorrow’s possibility. Rex kept asking them to remain with the dream a little longer and believe that the future would eventually make the present worthwhile.
That is part of what makes the story so painful. Rex may have believed his own promise. He may have loved his children. He may have genuinely imagined that the Glass Castle would one day exist.
But sincerity does not erase the cost someone else is carrying.
What Invisible Exchange Have You Normalized?
The AMP session connected to this film begins with the balance between giving and taking. At first, that can sound like a simple relationship lesson. It is not.
Every family, marriage, business, institution, and country is built upon exchanges that eventually become so familiar we stop noticing them.
Who gives, and who takes? Who waits, rescues, withholds, pays, or apologizes? Who is permitted to receive, and who has learned that receiving is unsafe, shameful, or indebted?
In the Walls family, the exchange was deeply out of balance. The people with the least power carried the people with the most. The children became responsible for surviving the consequences of adult choices, and over time that imbalance became the family’s normal.
That is how dysfunction often works. The behavior may be painful, but the system gradually organizes itself around preserving it. Instead of asking only what is wrong with a particular person, we might ask a more useful question:
What imbalance is this behavior helping the system maintain?
Families Are Not the Only Ones Who Edit the Story
Nations do this too.
We tell stories about prosperity without remembering all the workers who absorbed the losses. We celebrate freedom without always naming the communities that carried its costs. We honor military glory while allowing wounded veterans and grieving families to disappear from the national picture.
We celebrate technological progress without accounting for the people displaced by it. We enjoy inexpensive goods without asking who was underpaid to produce them. We praise wealth creation without naming the extraction that sometimes made the wealth possible.
We are repeatedly told that if enough good fortune gathers at the top, some of it will eventually find its way down. The economy will improve, we will become great again, and the benefits will spread throughout the country.
Tomorrow’s promise is used to justify today’s imbalance.
Extraction does not always take money directly from us. Sometimes it takes time, quiet, stability, attention, trust, or the character of a place, then counts only the revenue created in the exchange. The costs are immediate, while the benefits are deferred.
The Glass Castle takes many forms.
After Me, Then You
Sue-Anne’s late husband, Tom, had a plainspoken way of describing people whose own turn never seemed to end:
“After me, then you.”
Tom’s birthday is next week, so he has been on Sue-Anne’s, Lura’s, and my mind. I can hear the intelligence and humor in that sentence more clearly than ever.
It sounds almost fair. Your turn is coming. The good fortune will reach you. Just let me finish taking what I need first.
The trouble is that “then” has a way of never arriving. The person taking continues to expand what he believes he needs, and each new level of success creates another surrounding territory to capture.
An arena is no longer enough. The team also wants the surrounding development, restaurants, entertainment, parking, offices, hotels, and other revenue created by the people it attracts.
The actor is no longer satisfied to act. There must also be an alcohol brand, clothing line, cosmetics company, restaurant, or lifestyle business.
The company does not simply want to serve the customer. It wants the customer’s attention, information, habits, identity, and every adjacent transaction.
It is no longer enough to participate in the exchange. The goal becomes controlling the entire ecosystem around it.
That is the accelerating appetite of modern Extractionocracy. It appears to have lost any internal sense of enough.
Extraction and Deferral
For years, I have written about systems that extract value from people while returning less and less. The Glass Castle helped me see another pattern sitting beside extraction: deferral.
Deferral asks us to stay a little longer, sacrifice a little longer, and continue believing that the payoff, promotion, breakthrough, economic recovery, or promised future is almost here. It keeps assuring us that the Glass Castle is nearly built.
Sometimes those promises are deliberately manipulative. Sometimes they are sincere. Sometimes the person making them believes every word.
But the emotional effect can become remarkably similar. People live on tomorrow’s promise while paying today’s cost.
A vision is not measured only by the future it promises. It is also measured by what it asks of people while they are waiting.
I Am Not Outside This Pattern
I cannot write about The Glass Castle as though I am standing outside its pattern.
For much of the last twenty years, I have carried a vision of work that I believed would eventually support my family and help others. My family has heard those promises too.
They were never hungry. They grew up in safety and had educational opportunities I am proud we found a way to provide. We lived in one of the wealthiest areas in the country, even while I continued driving my 2005 Honda Accord and trying to build something that had not yet found its sustainable form.
But they also lived beside a dream that kept asking them to believe just a little longer. That matters.
I am not comparing myself to Rex Walls. The circumstances, choices, and consequences are not the same. But the emotional pattern deserves my attention.
When does a sincere vision begin asking too much of the people closest to it? When does perseverance become deferral? When does faith in a future begin to excuse an imbalance in the present?
So when I ask whether Declaration of Independence 2.0 could become another Glass Castle, I am not only questioning my country. I am questioning myself.
How do I know I am not asking people to believe in another beautiful promise that never becomes something they can live inside?
The Opposite of Extraction
The opposite of extraction is not simply generosity.
Generosity can still leave one person permanently giving and another permanently receiving. It can preserve the very imbalance it appears to relieve. The giver may remain above the receiver, while the receiver feels indebted, dependent, or unable to offer anything of value in return.
Receiving requires trust and allows someone else to matter.
Reciprocity is different.
It does not mean every exchange must be equal at every moment. A parent gives more to a young child. A community may temporarily carry someone who is sick, grieving, displaced, or overwhelmed. A founder may carry the early risk of a business. One generation may plant trees whose shade it will never enjoy.
Reciprocity is not a ledger that must balance every evening. It is the living recognition that value must remain in circulation.
Power carries responsibility. Those who benefit do not permanently separate themselves from those carrying the cost. Those who give remain capable of receiving, and those who receive are not diminished by needing help.
The exchange remains alive.
Extractionocracy destroys that circulation. It turns exchange into capture and relationship into sequence: after me, then you.
Reciprocity offers a different promise:
As I rise, the exchange must remain alive.
A Declaration We Can Live Inside
A new declaration cannot merely announce a more beautiful future. It must change the exchange.
It must ask who is carrying the cost of our prosperity, technology, institutions, and visions. It must tell the parts of the story we have learned to leave outside the room.
It must give people meaningful participation while decisions are still being shaped, not simply opportunities to speak after power has already chosen its direction.
It must recognize that intelligence is not serving life when it helps the most powerful extract more efficiently from everyone else.
Most of all, it must become something ordinary people can increasingly live inside.
Vision must eventually become something the people we love can live inside, not merely believe in.
That applies to families, companies, movements, and nations.
And to me.
Before You Begin
AMP sessions are designed to be experienced in a particular order. Please begin with the AMP Intention Session before watching The Glass Castle AMP session.
The Intention Session helps you enter the process consciously. It establishes your willingness to change while allowing the work to unfold on your own timing, with grace and ease.
You do not need to force a reaction or agree with every statement. Notice what resonates, pause when needed, drink water, breathe slowly, and take care of yourself as you move through the process.
Begin with the AMP Intention Session
Continue with The Glass Castle AMP session
Watch the film in its entirety
This AMP Is for You If…
You regularly carry more than your share in your family, relationships, work, or community.
You are usually the giver and find it uncomfortable to need, receive, or allow others to contribute.
You rescue people, wait for them to change, or apologize to preserve the relationship.
You have accepted promises in place of responsibility.
You learned to minimize painful parts of your family history to preserve attachment.
You feel responsible for managing another person’s emotions, choices, or consequences.
You carry an important vision and want to understand what that vision is asking of the people around you.
You want to create relationships and systems rooted in reciprocity rather than extraction.
The purpose is not to suppress ambition, love, loyalty, or hope. It is to transmute an unconscious imbalance into a more mature exchange.
Intention
I am willing to see the invisible exchanges I have normalized.
I am willing to recognize what belongs to me, what belongs to others, and where responsibility has become distorted.
I intend to create relationships, work, and systems in which giving and receiving can move with greater balance, dignity, and freedom.
Let Go
I let go of carrying what is not mine to carry, using giving to avoid the vulnerability of receiving, and accepting promises that require endless waiting without growing accountability.
I let go of the belief that love requires me to edit the truth.
Allow
I allow reciprocity to become a living part of my relationships and choices. I allow other people to contribute from their own initiative, and I allow myself to receive without shame or indebtedness.
I allow vision to become reality in forms the people I love can actually live inside.
About David
David Barnes is the co-creator of the Alignment Movie Process with Sue-Anne MacGregor and co-author of Taming Your Dragons: Making Peace With Your Emotions and It’s Just Commerce: Returning Balance to Business. His work explores emotional pattern recognition, human sovereignty, commerce, AI, and how stories can help people move beyond reactivity toward more mature, life-serving systems.
David also works with a framework that helps people and organizations identify the unseen emotional, cultural, and extraction-based patterns that shape what they build, what they optimize for, and what they miss.
To learn more about the Alignment Movie Process and explore how it works, visit AMP EXP.