What Survives When We Are Ill-Used

A note of thanks, and a reflection on institutional life

A friend recently shared with me the old Scots tale of Rashin-Coatie. Some stories do not arrive as arguments or interpretations. They arrive as recognition. They put words, images, and movement to something you already know in your body.

Rashin-Coatie is a folk tale about a young girl who is ill-used within her own family. While her older sister is favoured, Rashin-Coatie is sent out into the woods to herd cattle and given barely enough food to survive. There she meets a red calf who quietly nourishes her, leading her each day to a hidden house where she is fed and cared for. When the family discovers this, they decide the calf must be killed and force Rashin-Coatie to raise the axe herself. Instead, following the calf’s guidance, she escapes with him, flees across the land, and fashions a coat from rushes to cover herself. Disguised and working as a kitchen maid in the king’s house, she is later given fine clothes by the calf to attend church, where the prince falls in love with her. She leaves before being recognised, losing a shoe in her flight. Though another woman mutilates her feet to make the shoe fit, the truth is revealed by a bird’s song, and Rashin-Coatie is finally recognised and chosen, while the red calf, who sustained her all along, is honoured and kept safe.

On the surface, Rashin-Coatie looks familiar. The ill-used younger sister. The favoured sibling who carries the family’s projection. The hidden beauty that emerges despite deprivation. It sits alongside Cinderella, Goose Girl, and other tales of domestic injustice. But when read through a group-analytic and Jungian lens, it speaks powerfully to institutional life, and to the quiet ways people survive within systems that cannot or will not nourish them.

In the story, the family system has already organised itself. One child carries goodness, usefulness, compliance, and deprivation. Another carries entitlement, aggression, and favour. From a group-analytic perspective, this is a classic scapegoating structure. The family’s anxiety is stabilised by sending the youngest out into the woods, away from care, away from the centre, with just enough to keep her functioning. Many clinicians will recognise this position instantly.

In NHS and institutional contexts, the Rashin-Coatie figure is often the conscientious practitioner, the trainee, the newly qualified psychologist, the one who absorbs excess demand while being told this is simply “how it is”. Nourishment is rationed. Support is thin. Reflection is a luxury. And yet the expectation remains that the person sent out to herd the cattle will continue to offer warmth, care, and ethical presence to others.

What changes the story is not managerial reform or moral appeal, but the emergence of the red calf.

From a Jungian perspective, the calf is instinctual life, bodily wisdom, and the part of the psyche that still knows how to feed what is being starved. From a group-analytic perspective, the calf represents a counter-matrix. A parallel relational space where something humane can survive. This might be a trusted colleague, a reflective practice group, a supervisor who thinks rather than audits, or a professional friendship that quietly offers nourishment without fanfare.

Each day, away from the persecuting structure, Rashin-Coatie eats properly. She rests. She grows bonnier. This detail matters. Growth does not come from resilience training or endurance alone. It comes from being met in a different relational field. And when institutions notice this growth without recognising its source, they often respond not with curiosity, but with threat.

The most psychologically accurate moment in the story is when the family decides not only to kill the calf, but to force Rashin-Coatie to do it herself. This is the institutional double bind many professionals know well. You are required to participate in the destruction of what keeps you alive, reflective spaces, ethical hesitation, relational thinking, in the name of efficiency, compliance, or survival. The violence is externalised, but the act must be internalised.

What saves Rashin-Coatie is that she does not face this moment alone. The calf thinks with her. Together they find a way out that does not require self-betrayal. This is not rebellion for its own sake. It is relational intelligence under pressure. She strikes sideways. She escapes the bind. She runs.

The rushes that become her coat are telling. They are makeshift. Temporary. Improvised. This is not a story of immediate rescue into comfort or status. Rashin-Coatie enters the king’s house as a kitchen lassie, still close to the ground, still working, still carrying her animal companion. Importantly, she insists the calf stays. She does not split off what sustained her in order to belong.

In institutional terms, this is the clinician who refuses to disavow their values, body, or relational ethics in order to be acceptable. They may move roles, teams, or organisations, but they do not abandon the inner and relational resources that made survival possible.

Even the church scene speaks to professional life. Rashin-Coatie’s transformation does not erase her responsibilities. She asks the kitchen itself to keep going while she is gone. There is an implicit trust that things will not collapse if she steps away. Many NHS systems are still organised around the fantasy that if one person stops, everything will fall apart. This story quietly disputes that.

The shoe fits not because her foot is small, but because it is whole. The violence done to the henwife’s daughter, cutting and paring herself to fit it, is a sharp image of what happens when people mutilate themselves to occupy roles that were never shaped for them. Burnout, moral injury, and bodily collapse often follow.

The bird’s song restores truth to the group. It names what everyone has colluded in not seeing.

What stays with me most, though, is how deeply this story speaks to professional friendships. The ones that notice what is being starved. That offer nourishment quietly. That think with you when the axe is raised. That help imagine escape routes without demanding heroics. That make survival a collective, not solitary, achievement.

Rashin-Coatie does not survive because she is exceptional. She survives because she is met. Because something in the system, and someone alongside her, refuses to collude with her erasure.

So this is my thank you. For a story that names what survives when institutions ill-use their most conscientious members. And for the kind of professional friendship that knows when to feed, when to think, and when to run together towards something that can still grow.