Hello Everyone,
Have you ever been so incredibly proud of an accomplishment, say a late summer hike, or writing a term paper while taking 6 classes and working, that you are completely exhausted from? The calm sense of “it’s done, I can rest” that serves as a springboard for the next push soothing your nervous system and allowing you to finally relax. Only then to realize you forgot something essential, something that should and cannot be forgotten.
The spike of adrenaline and cortisol rushing back through your body can be enough to make you physically sick, and the panic-ridden fear brain of “what have I done?!” starts looking for safety.
In systemically damaged individuals, this can also show up as beating oneself up rather than taking ownership, perceiving the incident as a moral failing rather than a mistake to be rectified, or deflecting and centering the harm on themselves rather where it should be, on those the harm was done to.
I spoke recently on relational enmeshment, framing it as when a person’s conception of authenticity is not rooted internally, but externally, and in organizational adherence. Enmeshment is the opposite end of the spectrum to isolation, but it can have similar effects on our understanding of our authentic selves.
One is hyper-individualized and does not allow for consideration of others in understanding the self, and the other demands consideration for and adherence to a specific set of ideas and protocols that subsume the self.
Authenticity is formed within you but informed by the world and the people around you, and by how you relate to them. We literally cannot understand ourselves at a deep level without contextualizing our Self within the world, and there is a certain level of dissonance that comes along with either enmeshment or isolation.
And yet, we can become enmeshed with the outside context even if it isn’t organizational. Ideology, philosophy, schedules, priorities, anything that influences our behaviors, interactions, and worldview are externalities which we can become enmeshed to for different reasons.
You might have noticed I haven’t been writing as regularly the past several weeks; that’s because I’ve been reckoning with my own enmeshments. The past week in particular has been quite challenging to get through, and so I haven’t read anything except Star Wars books nor written anything public in an attempt to gain space to reground myself in myself, and untangle from enmeshment.
I’ve had tremendous growth this year thanks to some amazing people such as Grace | Kizuna , Jorge Medina , and Nicole Eisdorfer, PhD , who have directly and indirectly impacted me. There is a pretty significant amount of de-conditioning one must do for serious, sustainable growth, and while the lion’s share of the work must be done by the individual, it cannot be done alone without support, and I wouldn’t have gotten where I am without their support and encouragement to say the least.
Perhaps one of the most significant challenges I’ve faced is navigating the slope between bringing what you learn and embody into the world through your own perspective and experience without claiming ownership of it. In an attempt to be unique, feel authentic, and feel as though one provides meaning and value to others, we can sometimes forget to credit our influences.
If you have an original idea or methodology that is further honed by something you learned from someone, if you had a thought previously but never spoke it, you do not get to “own” it. That is the opposite of an animistic, relational stance. That is an extractive, power-over type framework found in corporate capitalism and many other modern frameworks.
We aren’t unique, authentic, or provide meaning to others because we stand apart from each other, but in how we reciprocate the experience of being connected to one another despite differences. This approach is as old as time, and is the base of many folklore traditions where an offering is left out to some entity to maintain harmony.
I mentioned earlier this year that I use an animistic lens for leadership, and when I did, it was as if a weight had lifted off me. My lens is a methodology of relational understanding and pattern recognition I’ve used and cultivated over many years.
But because of my military, academic, and corporate backgrounds, I had gotten enmeshed in the right way to say things, the right way to come across; I never fully had the right language to express my conceptualizations because I hadn’t embraced it fully. I had ideas, but they weren’t clear.
Now, when the weight of performance was lifted, the world opened up. I’ve made new connections, found new opportunities, and every single week I read, watched, and listened to people who seemed incredibly aligned with me in one way or another. It felt like a collective, unconscious awakening. And it may still be that.
But the collective must still be nurtured, offerings must be given. Reciprocity must be maintained, and I fell out of balance.
A technique I’ve used to maintain writing cadence and avoid perfectionism is to just write and publish. Minimal editing, mostly stream-of-consciousness.
The problem with that technique, I’ve now discovered, is that we don’t always credit the sources of our thoughts when we are thinking them, especially if you’ve been around the ideas long enough to make them part of your everyday language.
If you are a voracious reader, looking for community, applicability - and, unknowingly - validation, finally having or using the correct words is important, but they are not yours. So you need to at the bare minimum, acknowledge where they entered your worldview, and respect the lineage it comes from.
So, the reason for my absence is that a very good friend raised concerns about a shift they had felt in my writing that they couldn’t quite nail down. It appeared as though I was either intentionally mimicking or subconsciously appropriating some of the words, ideas, and possibly even writing style of both direct and indirect influences on me. Trusting my intentions, my friend didn’t necessarily believe it was deliberate but still recommended I do a self-audit.
The shock at potentially having done this entered my body as cortisol and adrenaline does, danger, danger, danger. “I couldn’t have, wouldn’t have done this, right? I’m better than this?!” I felt my stomach churning, and things didn’t get better the next few days as I looked back through my writings of the past few months.
I don’t know exactly when this shift began, but I think it’s a little after I started talking openly about the relational stance, the animistic lens I use.
What makes this even worse is that the majority of these influences are from BIPOC and Global South communities. I think that likely, because I do hold an animist worldview and have done for many years, I was drawn to people who think along the same lines and have the same questions, but have languages, lived experience, and lineages of stewardship that I do not, but am trying to find and plant in myself and others.
I’m in the process of deconditioning and reawakening to what feels like a shared, fundamental, and ancestral understanding of the world, one that many others have preserved at great cost and with deep rootedness, while I have only recently begun to recover it. I am a healing amalgamation of so many systemic, shallow, and rootless identities that it is of the utmost importance that I embody that understanding and reciprocity, not as an origin point but as a conduit.
In the attempt to fully embrace my authentic self and my worldview that I not only use to try and help leaders and organizations grow but also live by, I let go of one systemic enmeshment - corporate professional speak and percieved legitimacy - but got tangled up in another by claiming kinship to othered communities without reciprocity or permission. A marker of the colonial enmeshment I’m still attempting to shed.
It hurts. Despite that pain showing the privilege of knowledge accumulation and extraction I was trained on, it is nothing compared to the hurt and harm felt by others who have had their ways of knowing and being appropriated endlessly and cyclically.
Because I carry whiteness and veteran status, I am systemically and statistically safer to say what others have risked everything to speak. I don’t say that to convey a sense of shame or guilt, or even “white-savior-ness,” but safety-as-responsibility absent authority.
I’m realizing that many of the conceptualizations and language presentation of my animist, relational, and sovereignty-based ideas I’ve held for years but only this year have been exploring publicly, were deeply shaped by several individuals that I have credited in some form or fashion throughout the year, but as of late their specific perspective and words have been finding their way into my writing expressed as my own, rather than influenced by or in relation with. I want to clearly name these influences now as I recognize them in my own work.
None of these thinkers, authors, or mentors are responsible for my errors. Any harm or confusion that arises is mine to own. Their influence is named here in gratitude and apology, not to excuse missteps, but to honor my shaping and offer accountabilty.
Chief among these and most directly, my mentor and friend, Grace Aimoto, whose work on Existential Leadership™ and Kizuna Existential Literacy™, interiority, and scaling connection have helped me crystalize and articulate what I’ve long sensed as being connected in terms of individuals to systems, as well as the importance of an individual’s interiority, curiosity, creativity, and imagination in leadership.
Other influences I’d like to name are the academics Bayo Akomolafe, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen.
Bayo Akomolafe expresses many concepts familiar to me from my political science education and research career with language that only comes from his lived experience, and his writing acts as a bridge between much of the western theory I learned and the theories surrounding interconnection and interbeing (“interbeing” coming from Thích Nhất Hạnh) I’ve been exploring, allowing me to better understand the connections between the human and more than human world.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work in Braiding Sweetgrass helped me better understand how to translate my lived animistic experience in Appalachia into words and stories that others without my experience might better understand.
Tyson Yunkaporta’s many writings and interviews have helped me break down some-but not all- of the remaining barriers of western epistemology and ontology, ways of knowing and ways of being in relation to each other. A specific phrase that comes from Tyson is “right relation.” or “a way of being that is grounded in respectful reciprocity with all of creation.”1
Rune Hjarno Rasmussen is not an academic whose work I have not engaged with as much this year, but his explanations of entities and animism from the Nordic perspective has been foundational in my own understanding of entities and sentience. I likely would not have seen the relational qualities of my thinking on leadership and organizational culture as animistic without them.
Apart from these named influences, the many dozens of people on Substack and LinkedIn I have read, engaged with, reposted, and shared in my seed catalog, all of you have shaped me into what I am today …
I offer this writing not as excuse for harm, distance from their labor or yours, but in gratitude for it.
I think what happened is that rather than seeing my shift to openly talking about animism as a lens for leaders as a beginning, or a waypoint on the journey, I saw it as a departure, and an endpoint. As freedom. Which, it was, but an end is the beginning of something else, and care and attention can’t be dropped on your way out the door, and freedom still demands responsibility and consideration for others (consideration being another aspect of leadership Grace taught me about).
This is something I’ve seen many leaders experience, but never thought I would myself - experience and knowledge creep. Where once you get to a certain level of something (typically understanding, capability, comfort, or responsibility), you forget what was needed before you got there, and deprioritize it in favor of the tasks and sensibilities that are more apparent to where you are at daily.
But just because you grow in self or station does not diminish the importance of the respect and reciprocity expected of you when you were learning. In fact, it becomes even more important. Truth is, we never stop learning, or we shouldn’t.
I’m sharing this with you not as an apology to say “oh look, I messed up, haha, forgive me!” nor as a lecture. Not writing for closure, but because accountability like detangling from enmeshment, is a process, and this is one step I can take.
I’m sharing it because I want to be accountable for my actions, to those who influence me and those I influence. I slipped from the path because I wasn’t paying attention, and I only got back on it because someone else was. Thank you, Jorge, I couldn’t ask for a better friend.
To those I have influenced or who have resonated in with my work: if you ever see your own voice in my words and it’s not credited, I welcome the call-in. And if you’d like me to do the same for you, please let me know.
I still don’t feel good, I don’t know how this writing will be received, but since my appropriation was in public, it seems my attempt at reparations should be.
Whether or not one is forgiven for causing harm is not the measure of accountability, but rather whether one continues to act as if reciprocity and responsibility are sacred, and that is something our communities keep us in check with.
I’m (re)learning that integrity is not the performative endpoint display of appearing right, but the commitment to being in right relation. So as I recommit, I’ll invite you to do the same, publicly or privately.
If this resonates, take the opportunity to reflect on the lineages, influences, and relationships that have and continue to shap your path. What are you still enmeshed to?
I’ll go live on Friday, December 19th, 12pm EST, for the last Cultivar Coffee Chat of the year. If you have any questions, concerns, or responses to this newsletter, I welcome them.
Until then,
Chris
https://climate-creativity.com/blog/right-relations/