You're not carrying your own weight. You're carrying theirs.
What Els van Steijn's De Fontein reveals about the invisible loyalties shaping how you lead.
By Mees Loman · Loman Leadership · Reading time: 5 minutes
There is a question I ask almost every leader I work with at some point in our work together. Not about their team or their strategy. About their family.
Whose role are you playing? Whose load are you carrying? And how long have you been doing it without knowing?
Els van Steijn's De Fontein is the book I recommend to anyone who finds that question uncomfortable, which is to say almost everyone.
A fountain with many layers
Van Steijn's central image is simple and quietly devastating. Imagine a fountain with multiple tiers, each flowing into the one below. At the top are your ancestors. Then your grandparents. Then your parents. And at the bottom, your tier, is you.
Each layer has its own place. Each place is specific. And the water flows in one direction: downward.
When the system works as it should, you receive what comes from above and pass it on. You stand on your own tier and carry your own weight.
But most people are not standing on their own tier. Most of us, without knowing it, have climbed up. We are standing on our parents' tier, or our grandparents', carrying what was theirs and living out what was never resolved. The further up you have climbed, the more exhausted you are, because you are spending your energy on a place that was never yours to occupy.
The patterns that show up at work
Van Steijn is clear on this: the pattern you carry in your family system does not stay at home. It follows you into every team, every organisation, every leadership role you take on.
I see it constantly. The founder who cannot delegate, not because he doesn't trust his team, but because he learned very early that if he didn't do it himself, it wouldn't get done. He climbed up to his parents' tier as a child and has been working from there ever since. The manager who takes responsibility for everyone's mood, everyone's performance, everyone's wellbeing, who feels guilty when someone on her team is struggling as if it is somehow her fault. The leader who gives endlessly and cannot receive, who finds it genuinely difficult to ask for help or let someone else take the weight for once.
These are not professional problems. They are systemic ones. And no amount of leadership training will resolve them if the underlying pattern goes unexamined.
What belongs to you and what doesn't
One of the most liberating ideas in the book is the distinction between what is yours and what is not. Van Steijn describes how family systems carry unresolved pain, unacknowledged loss, unexpressed grief, and how later generations, often the most sensitive ones, unconsciously take that on. Not out of weakness. Out of love. Out of an invisible loyalty to the system they belong to.
The child who becomes the emotional caretaker of a struggling parent. The eldest who carries the family's ambitions on their shoulders. The one who never fully succeeds because unconsciously, succeeding feels like a betrayal of someone who didn't.
"When you learn to descend to your own place in the fountain, you find rest. You let go of what belongs to another and attend to what is yours. You set boundaries, not from fear, but from clarity."
That word, descend, matters. The work is not about climbing higher. It is about coming back down to your own tier, your own life, your own weight.
Systemic laws that run silently in the background
Van Steijn introduces several principles that operate in every family system, whether or not we are aware of them.
Order. Every member of a system has a specific place based on when they arrived. Disrupting that order creates imbalance that ripples through generations.
Belonging. Everyone who has ever belonged to a system continues to belong, even if they were excluded, forgotten, or never spoken about. What is excluded does not disappear. It returns through the behaviour of those who came after.
Balance between giving and receiving. Healthy systems have flow in both directions. Chronic over-giving or an inability to receive is almost always a sign that something in the system is out of balance.
Acknowledgement of what is. Pain, failure, loss, and difficult histories need to be acknowledged. What is not seen tends to repeat.
These are not abstract concepts. They show up in boardrooms, in team dynamics, in the friction that no intervention seems to resolve, because the friction is not about the present. It is about something much older.
Why this matters for leaders specifically
Leadership puts the systemic pattern under a spotlight. When you lead, you take a position above others. For someone who grew up carrying their parent's weight, who learned that being above means being responsible for everything and everyone below, that position activates very old material.
The inability to rest. The compulsion to fix. The guilt when something goes wrong on someone else's watch. The loneliness at the top.
These are not leadership failures. They are loyal responses to a system that needed something from you a long time ago. The good news is that loyalties that are made conscious can be released, not betrayed but released, with respect for what they once served and with the clarity that you no longer need to carry them.
"You find your place not by climbing higher. You find it by coming home to the tier that was always yours."
What I take from this book
De Fontein is the most accessible introduction to systemic thinking I have come across. Van Steijn takes ideas that are complex and sometimes esoteric, family constellations, systemic loyalties, transgenerational patterns, and makes them readable, recognisable, and immediately applicable.
For leaders, it offers something that most leadership literature does not: an explanation for why the hard work of self-awareness is never just about you. It is always also about where you came from, who you were loyal to, and what you took on so that someone else didn't have to.
Understanding that does not solve everything. But it changes the question, and sometimes that is exactly where the real work begins.
Recommended reading
De Fontein by Els van Steijn
The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté
Theory U by Otto Scharmer
It Didn't Start with You by Mark Wolynn
Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a boutique leadership development practice based in Amsterdam. He works with individuals, teams, and organisations on authentic leadership, psychological safety, and sustainable high performance. Systemic Coaching is one of the core frameworks he uses in his work.