CoLiberation
I was given the last word in an article in an issue of Fast Company. It was my last word, too. A word I actually made up. A word I coined so I could describe to people what a “good meeting” is like: CoLiberation.
CoLiberation is not the opposite of codependence. CoLiberation is why we become that way. Why we seek each other out in the first place. What we have to give each other when we are at our best.
CoLiberation is what happens when we work or play extraordinarily well together. Like on a basketball team or in an orchestra, when we actually experience ourselves sharing in something bigger than any one who is present. This is what I call the experience of the “Big WE.” It’s a corollary to the “Big ME” experience of self-transcendence. If the Big ME is the “peak experience,” CoLiberation or the Big WE, is like becoming a whole mountain range.
Even the relatively little WE is something found in a different dimension than the ME. It’s the oddly tangible experience of relationship, of connection, of community. Oddly tangible, because it can’t actually be found in any one of us, but only in the experience of both or all. It’s a collective consciousness of which we may be only dimly aware, and yet completely embraced by, identified by and with. And when this WE is so engaged as to form a solidarity, a oneness, and when the will of the one is one with the will of the many, it becomes transformed, and we with it.
I know I’ve experienced it in games and sports and the performing arts. And, what makes me especially hopeful, I’ve also experienced it in business meetings.
The central experience that led me to write my book The Well-Played Game was, in fact, a game of ping pong between my friend Bill and myself. Let me describe it to you, thereby exemplifying the selfsame example of the kind of experience I hope you will also learn:
“My good friend Bill was and is so much better of a player than I that there was actually no reason for us to try to play a ‘real’ game. Playing for points was clearly pointless. So, we decided to just see how long we could keep a volley going. It was a perfect challenge for each of us. For Bill, just getting the ball to hit my paddle was an exercise worthy of his years of “pongish” mastery. After half the night of this, we managed to sustain an almost infinite volley. We actually lost count.”
That’s all that is asked in CoLiberation — some shared transcendence that made you feel just about as big, ME-wise and WE-wise, as you can get. Larger than life. Enlarged by each other’s largesse. Beyond time. (Something that can be achieved even in the high-stakes heat of professional sports. See the excerpt from Bill Russell’s book.)
Allow me to illustrate with a graph-like chart.
On one axis we have ME or WE. On the other, WE or ME.
The higher or farther out we go on each axis, the more fun, the more complete it feels to be a ME or WE. The closer in, the less.
When the WE and ME are in balance, there is mutual empowerment – CoLiberation. This is indicated by a channel, diagonally equidistant between ME and WE. Here the good meetings, the well-played games, the fun things happen.
Fun is the background, the context, steady state. Games are the rules that help us move up or down the channel, towards and away from the Bigger ME or the Greater WE.
And, corollarily speaking, those exceptional experiences of playing together or working together, when we’re really playing or working and really together. As deliciously distracting as the philosophies and technologies of collaboration may be, when collaboration is it’s at its best, so are we.
I’ve been calling these moments of play and work “CoLiberating.” It’s cute, because it almost sounds like something beyond “collaborating.” But “liberating” is only part of the truth. Yes, in deed, those moments in which we have actually managed to free each other from whatever constraints we usually impose on each other, these are truly and actually what you would call CoLiberating.
The experience of coliberation becomes more powerful as each participant becomes more thoroughly engaged, more wholly involed, and as the group itself becomes more unified, more engaged. Given the wholeness of the self and the group, we approach something beyond CoLiberation, beyond the game or meeting itself. Some coincidence of selves that undefines the limits of our capabilities. A coincidence having almost nothing to do with the game or meeting, and everything to do with the human spirit – shared moments of unusual clarity, vivid communication and spontaneous combustions of understanding.
It’s almost silly even to have a word like this because all liberation is CoLiberation. You just can’t liberate yourself by yourself. You can’t be free if you’re the only one. You can meditate, but you can’t separate. You can become one only if you become “one with.”
As long as there is such a word as codependence — and it makes something clear, well, then, we need a word like CoLiberation, to make something else clear.
Just as we now understand how we can sicken a relationship by becoming too dependent on each other and how mutually sickening things like alcoholism and racism and spousal abuse can become, we now need to rediscover how we can heal a relationship by setting each other free, how mutually healing things like play and teamwork and human relationships can become.
©1992, Bernie DeKoven
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I like the term. The peak shared experience (in my experience often experienced in group play and rarely experienced in meetings. Sad.) so well captured in your phrase, ” …those moments in which we have actually managed to free each other from whatever constraints we usually impose on each other…”. Virtually everyone who has done creative things with groups has experienced it.
It DOES however feel a lot like the opposite of codependence, which appears to be a shared experience of mutually constraining one another. I was part of a very codependent writing group, for example, at one brief time. The seemingly “powerful” leader kept everyone in His little box through criticism and anger that came from His insecurity (and if you didn’t happen to fit into His little box you were either deemed unworthy of His group or He would kindly build a custom box for you that would contain you better than His).
I would value more clarification on how coliberation is not the opposite of codependence, and even invite you to add a paragraph or two to this excellent article. That’s funny; I’m inviting you to your own party.
I have appreciated your work for many years. It’s enjoyably helped keep me and others stay young.
Peace,
–Michael
Hi, Michael!
Thanks for the great comment. I really value how you were able to so readily attest to the experience and power of coliberation.
As for the opposite of coliberation, I have (thanks for the opportunity) just recently arrived at a word that feels opposite enough. How’s this: “co-oppression”? )Maybe without the hyphen?) You know, when people actually oppress each other. A condition which, sadly, is all too familiar to those of us who’ve worked for the man (and sometimes even the woman) – especially a wo/man like you described. You know, how you everybody starts competing with everyone else, does their darndest to make everyone else lose or look like a loser, how they even go so far as to take credit for or even sabotage each other’s best work.
Codependence, according to Wikipedia is: “Codependency (or codependence, co-narcissism or inverted narcissism) is unhealthy love and a tendency to behave in overly passive or excessively caretaking ways that negatively impact one’s relationships and quality of life.” Which, for all its unhealthy implications, is a lot less destructive than cooppression (which also isn’t a word – yet).
I’d put codependence somewhere on the “we” side of the coliberation channel. Definitely outside the experience of coliberation. Definitely something antithetical to coliberation. A condition that we would want, sometimes desperately, to free ourselves from, but are too weakened to free each other from.
My appreciation for your good thoughts and this opportunity to explore coliberation yet more deeply.
OK, the light is coming on. I am seeing that coliberation is what happens when a group of well adjusted people interact selflessly, and coopression is what happens when maladjusted people interact co-dependently. Co-dependence then is actually more the opposite of selflessness. Coliberation is to selfless interaction as coopression is to co-dependent interaction. By selfless, by the way, I don’t mean unaware of self and yes I do. Aware of self and others, but not self consciously (self judging) or critically (other judging).
Those are some thoughts.
–Michael
Yes, except that cooppression is a systemic condition. People in a cooppressive system are all too well-adjusted to the political exigencies of their shared reality. (See Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed).
Here ya go makin me think again. LOL
At first I thought that coopression should go in a diagonal line starting at zero, like coliberation, but then go into the negative instead of the positive. (picture an x and y axis that meet at zero. your coliberation line starts at zero and goes into the positive for both x and y.) It seemed like you have it favoring the “we” too much. But then I realized, how could you oppress someone without someone to oppress? And then I decided this was much too negative a topic to think about, and started to wonder who made the question mark, and off my mind goes onto entirely different thoughts altogether.
Love and laughter,
Lily
I couldn’t agree more. Well, maybe I could.
I had to raise the coopression flag, because it’s a real thing. But then, like you, I decided there are certain parts of reality that I’m not here to ponder. Fun is where it’s at, where I’m at, and cooppression, as real as it is, is a reality that I don’t particularly want to explore no more no more.
You too with the love and also the laughter.