Nostalgia can be a balm. Especially when we’re in what feels like a never-ending season of upheaval and change, where every time we start to get our footing, something shifts yet again.

When we’re in the throes of change–in the liminal space, the in-between, the in-betwixt–we as human beings are neurologically wired to seek out what’s known, to reach for comfort and what feels like home. And nostalgia does that for us. It’s no wonder we look back fondly on simpler times, real or imagined.

Because nostalgia isn’t necessarily the truth. And nostalgia doesn’t always serve our growth. Connecting over “Remember when?” can too easily divide us when it becomes a rigid longing for a past that excludes and harms others or ignores painful truths.

So many of us are living and leading in the confusion, disorientation, and discomfort of these liminal spaces of change. Which is why I invited today’s guest to join me for a conversation about the pulls of nostalgia, the discomfort of liminal space, and the courage it takes to lead ourselves and others through uncertainty without losing our way.

Chris Hoff, PhD, LMFT is a narrative therapist, educator, podcaster, and founder of the California Family Institute. His work explores the intersection of psychotherapy, poststructural theory, and speculative futures. Chris is known for his ability to translate complex ideas into pragmatic tools for clients and clinicians alike. He is the host of The Radical Therapist Podcast and co-editor of An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping. Chris’s teaching, writing, and consulting center the creative, relational, and political dimensions of healing and change.

 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How the concept of liminal space can help us normalize the push-pull of the known and the possible
• How the process of Narrative Therapy can help people reclaim agency and possibility 
• Why building coalitions with shared commitments is vital for making change across our differences
• How intentional scenario planning can help people and organizations see what they need to make the best-case scenario more likely
• How nostalgia can keep us stuck in problematic storylines about the past

 

Learn more about Chris Hoff, PhD, LMFT:

• Website
• California Family Institute
• The Radical Therapist Podcast
• Liminal Lab on Substack
• Instagram: @drchrishoff
• YouTube: @drchrishoff
• An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, Erin Segal, Chris Hoff, Julie Cho

 

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• The Unburdened Leader on Substack
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

 

Resources:

• Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
• The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients, Irvin Yalom
• Narrative Therapy
• Collective Cultural Action | The Critical Art Ensemble
• Beyond Community | Liminal Lab
• Therapy Rocks! | Against Nostalgia | Liminal Lab
• Zen at the End of Religion: An Introduction for the Curious, the Skeptical, and the Spiritual But Not Religious, James Ishmael Ford
• Philosophy for Militants, Alain Badiou
• The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought, Fredric Jameson
• The 1975 – Somebody Else
• Andor
• Valley Girl
• Some Kind of Wonderful

Transcript:

Chris Hoff: As leaders, right, we can create kind of these narratives that aren’t really helpful, that aren’t leading to forward thinking or innovation or movement into liminal space, into the uncertainty, which is life, right? That is the experience of life. And it’s okay, I think, to visit places in the past and remember things with fondness and all that stuff, but if we start camping out there, it becomes a problem, and our lives will pass us by.

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Rebecca Ching: Hey, folks! Before we jump into the episode, I just want to do a little housekeeping with you all and really encourage you, if you haven’t done so, I’d be honored if you left a rating, a review of this show. It really helps get this show in front of other eyes and ears and hearts, and I’d be honored for your help to do so, and please share it with some folks you think may benefit from it. I’d be so honored. All right, now onto the show!

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Rebecca Ching: Nostalgia feels good until it doesn’t. Especially when the world keeps shifting under our feet, it’s tempting to look back, not just to remember but to escape. I love talking about some of my favorite eighties pop culture moments, or the early days of my first job in DC where my first loves collided. But when we’re in the thick of change, what feels like comfort can quietly hold us back. My conversation today brings to light the tension we hold as leaders and as humans where we hold the comforts of our past and the courage we need to move forward towards an ever-changing future.

2:00

I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with humans who navigate life’s challenges and lead in their own ways. Our goal is to learn how they address the burdens they carry, how they learn from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

It may not be a surprise to some of you long-time listeners or anyone who knows me, but I am unabashedly excited for the final season of Stranger Things. Like, I crush its ending, but I cannot wait for this journey. I love this show so much, and one of the biggest draws for me is the era it represents, right? The years of the show, how it progresses, matches my own exact timeline. I was the same age as the kids are in the years represented in the series.

So as the show progresses, I’m going through my own yearbook of memories. The props, the clothing, the music, the cultural references, all of it hits. And it reminds me of the times biking with my friends, right, those banana seats, right, neighborhood adventures, teepeeing late at night, doing our best to stand up to the bullies. I even recognize the same bed sheets, in a few scenes, I had growing up. And I’ll yell to my kids like, “Those are my sheets! I had those sheets!” They’re like, “Yeah, cool, cool, mom. Thanks, and chill,” right? Not a surprise. But that moment felt like being seen by the show in this unexpected and oddly profound way.

There’s something powerful about those moments when you feel that rush of memory, when it’s a song or a movie or a smell that brings you back to a part of your life that you don’t often talk about, even bed sheets that you see in a movie or a show.

3:59

Now, another cultural experience that impacted me, similar to Stranger Things, was going to The Unforgettable Fire U2 Tour, right? And that was just full-body responses to songs that would bring me back to memories of basement hangs and high school dances and, ah, first heartbreaks, yes.

Here’s the thing, though, I grew up in a tough time when, culturally, there were all these shows that were airing that were talking about what happens if nuclear bombs go off here in America, and that haunted us. And there was the nuclear arms race. I still have this vivid memory of former President Reagan showing this sign, he had some sort of laminate poster of, “Here’s how many bombs we have, and here’s how many bombs Russia has.” And that just freaked me out. There was the energy crisis. If you were LGBTQ, you were in the closet out of sheer survival, at least where I grew up. And the movies I loved and cherished, like Sixteen Candles, normalized sexual assault, which I did not catch until much later. And my nostalgia bubble popped, right? But there was also a lot going on for me personally. My parents were in a drawn-out, two-and-a-half-year separation that ended in divorce. When something like Stranger Things reminds me that the best part of those years that were all so personally hard, I feel a pull. It’s comforting. It’s connective. But it’s also seductive.

Sure, I can see how nostalgia can be such a balm, especially when we’re living in what feels like this never-ending season of upheaval and rapid change. We’re moving through change in whiplash ways at warp speed. Change feels and is a constant, and every time we just start to get our footing, boom, something shifts again.

6:01

And we can choose to befriend the change, manage all that it stirs up in its fast and disorienting way, or we can give way to the pull to comfort and the known our nervous systems love so much. But when we’re in this liminal space, the in-between, the in betwixt, the grey zone of transition, we’re neurologically wired to reach for what’s known, what’s comforting, what feels like home. And nostalgia can do that for us. It’s no wonder we feel that pull to reach back to what feels like simpler times, real or imagined. But here’s the rub: nostalgia doesn’t always serve our growth. I’m not sure if it really does. It can temper our courage. It can keep us looking back instead of moving forward. Sure, it can connect us to one another through shared memories and cultural experiences, and it can divide us when it becomes a rigid longing for a past that really just excludes others or ignores what’s painful.

Now, change theory tells us that in any transition, we go through what’s called a neutral zone, a space where the old way is gone but the new hasn’t arrived yet. It’s confusing, disorienting, and yes, incredibly uncomfortable. And that’s where so many of us are living right now, personally, professionally, and collectively. And it’s a space where a lot of really cool things can happen if we don’t rush it. There’s just, again, a beauty in this time of uncertainty and time of transition, and when we lead change — and listen, I know you all are leading change right now — we’re not just disrupting systems. We’re impacting nervous systems. And if we don’t account for that, especially for those of us carrying the burdens of relational trauma, we risk retraumatizing instead of transforming.

8:06

Rapid change can echo past experiences of instability, betrayal, and disconnection, and those echoes don’t just live in our memories, they live in our bodies. So when we see resistance, rigidity, or shut down, we’re often witnessing a nervous system doing its best to stay safe.

Yes, I still find value in classic change theory like William Bridges’ model of endings, the neutral zone, and new beginnings. It offers a steady frame. But we now know that the “neutral zone,” that liminal space between what was and what’s next, it isn’t just uncomfortable. For many, it’s deeply activating, especially for those whose early experiences taught them that uncertainty equals danger. And right now, where there’s so much changing, it is a lot for all of us to hold.

So if you’re leading people through change, and again, I know you are. If you’re guiding a team or holding space for clients or navigating a transition for yourself, I invite you to pause. Notice the stories that are coming up within you about what’s going on around you and how people are responding. Notice the pace, the pace of your thoughts and the pace of how you’re moving through things. And the same for those around you. Notice the parts of you and those that you lead that might be clinging to certainty as a form of protection. Because when we show up with curiosity instead of control, when we prioritize safety, pacing, connection I think we support true change, even if we’re still not sure which way is up some days. Sustainable relationships through constant change, that’s at the heart of trauma-informed practices, honoring the nervous system, honoring the story, helping each other stay present through the discomfort of what’s becoming.

10:09

And I don’t want that to sound like a little-pat thing. But it is. I mean, honoring the discomfort of what’s becoming, there’s something kind of beautiful about that where, “I don’t know, but we’re in it together.” Again, another cheesy phrase but, I don’t know, for me, I find some comfort in that. And as leaders, it’s tempting for us to want to rush through that discomfort to fix, to stabilize, to return to something familiar.

And I do think we need to find certainty anchors and find moments of stability so we can catch our breath, right? And for unburdened leaders, we learn to stay with that tension of the in-between, to hold space for the grief of what was for us and those around us, the uncertainty of what’s next, and still move forward with integrity. That’s work, and it requires clarity of values, and these days this is a must for us moving through, yeah, a lot of innovation and a lot of change while holding onto who we are and (I know I’ve got a lot of hope here) what we can become together. I’m holding onto that hope. I have to. And yes, let the music and the shows and the shared memories anchor you. Let them connect you to your story, but don’t let them distract you from who you’re becoming.

So this topic of the in-between and nostalgia is why I invited a long-time colleague of mine to join me in an Unburdened Leader conversation about those pulls of nostalgia, the discomfort of liminal space, and the courage it takes to lead ourselves and others through uncertainty without losing our way.

Dr. Chris Hoff is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a Narrative Therapist, is an educator, a podcaster, and he’s founder of The California Family Institute.

12:07

His work explores the intersection of psychotherapy, post-structural theory, and speculative futures. It sounds really fancy! He’s a really smart guy but really down to earth. Chris is known for his ability to translate complex ideas into pragmatic tools for clients and clinicians alike. He’s the host of The Radical Therapist podcast and co-editor of An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping. Chris’ teaching, writing, and consulting center is at the creative, relational, political dimensions of healing and change. All right, y’all, I’m so excited for you to hear our conversation. Now, let’s get to it!

—–

Rebecca Ching: Welcome, Dr. Chris Hoff, to the podcast! I am so thrilled to be here with you and have this conversation.

Chris Hoff: Yes! It’s great to see you again, Rebecca. Thank you for the invitation.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, I’ve been familiar with your work. We’re in social media orbits, and you had me on your podcast. I think it might have been during the pandemic when we were sheltering in or right before that. It’s been a minute. So I’m so glad to be on this side of the mic this time. I’ve got a lot of questions for you around some of the areas of specialty, but it just felt authentic just to check in with you.

Chris Hoff: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: You’re a therapist. You’re an educator, a consultant. You’re a citizen.

Chris Hoff: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: I just want to ask how are you doing in this complicated season of 2025 while you’re navigating the care for others while tending to your own humanity?

Chris Hoff: [Laughs] Great question! Maybe I’ll break it down by all those kinds of categorizations. As a therapist, I think the last several years I’ve become very interested in the idea of liminal space and how we help people navigate liminal space and thresholds and stuff like that.

14:07

And so, you know, as a therapist and then just as a person, I’ve become very interested in helping folks navigate liminal space, helping people deal with uncertainty. And the reason I’m interested in it is because it applies to me too, you know? So how do I play with different scenarios? How do I think about the future? How do I try to practice an ongoingness in the face of a kind of uncertainty?

And then also, as an educator, I’ve become very interested in — well, you know, I had a tenure track job at one point. I was kind of the traditional educator and decided that wasn’t for me and left that. I actually just finished teaching what is going to be my last kind of traditional college course, and I’ve really moved onto doing educating on YouTube and stuff like that. I’ve really enjoyed the more directness and the ability to kind of spread ideas a little bit quicker, things through Substack. I had the wonderful opportunity to publish and co-edit a book that got published last year through Thick Press called An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping. And that was a really fun project to introduce to people, all different kinds of ways of helping them stand outside of the [INDISCERNIBLE] model.

Even though I have struggles with social media, I also understand it to be a pretty powerful tool, and the podcast, of course. It’s a tool to spread your message, spread ideas without a lot of the gatekeeping and bureaucracy.

16:03

Rebecca Ching: I want to circle back. You mentioned liminal space, and when I asked how you were doing, you kind of brought up your interest in liminal space. I’d love to get a little more granular. How do you define it? I mean, I think of liminal space for me as the in-betweens.

Chris Hoff: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And I’m like, gosh, we have been in so many in-betweens, and we’re still in in-betweens. But how do you define liminal space, and what does that look like for you, and how does it help you? So those are three questions there, but first, just how do you define liminal space, for those who may not totally get that. Yeah.

Chris Hoff: I think it gets called a lot of different things. You know, the messy middle, the in-betweens, the betwixt and between. There’s a meme I’m sure you’ve seen where there’s a circle and it says, “comfort zone,” and then there’s another circle that says, “where the magic happens,” and neither one is touching. There’s that space between, right? And I think we always have to navigate that space between.

Michael White, one of the creators of Narrative Therapy, he characterizes it as we often are residing in the known and familiar, and there’s this place of the possible to know, and therapy is pretty much a scaffolding across that liminal space to what might be possible for people. And I’ve come to understand things like what gets characterized as self-sabotage or relapse and recovery or these kinds of things, it’s really just a turning back, in the midst of liminal space, to what is known and familiar. And these ideas support me when I’m in these kinds of in-between places and wanting to maybe go back to what is known and familiar but also help me to sustain, to move forward, to know that there is another place where the magic happens, and it’s on the other side of this kind of liminal space, you know?

18:01

Rebecca Ching: I really appreciate that because there is this pressure, this constant like, “When I arrive…” We’re got to be striving, but there’s this dance. It’s more of a dance. It’s a push/pull, and when people go backwards, they say, “Oh, I feel like I’m going backwards,” and this is part of the dance. And so, it’s almost this going back to the known. It’s so less pathologizing (which I love) and normalizing (which I also love) when there’s this kind of optimization culture that we’ve been in, hyper-optimization for a while.

You touched on Michael White who’s the founder of Narrative Therapy, and this is a podcast where I bring in — I’m a big Internal Family Systems person. I bring that not just to my clinical work but in consulting and coaching. And Dick Schwartz did talk with Michael White before he died and really brought in some aspects of Narrative into the model.

So for those that are unfamiliar with Narrative Therapy and just the Narrative lens, I’d love for you to describe it and then share what initially drew you to this approach.

Chris Hoff: Narrative Therapy is a kind of a bunch of practices that are grounded in the idea that we do organize our lives, our careers, our romances through story, and that oftentimes the stories that are kind of the foundation of our lives become problematic. And when they do that, they tend to blind us or subjugate other potential stories that we might have access to.

And so, I guess a better way of saying how did I come to it is when I started my graduate program to become a therapist, if you would have asked me what I was gonna do, I would have told you I was gonna be an Existential therapist, that meaning-making was everything, and how do we help people make meaning in this very chaotic world that we live in, you know? I was very interested in folks like Frankl and man’s search for meaning and Yalom and the gift of therapy.

20:14

And so, I started my graduate program, and I was at Pepperdine University at the time, and they at the time had this student group called The Social Justice Collaborative. And I met a very important mentor of mine, Dr. Amy Tuttle, who was ten years younger than me, and she was a woman of color but became a very, very important mentor of mine. And in that process, I’d learned that not everybody’s free to make meaning, that there are constraints to meaning making.

Rebecca Ching: Oh.

Chris Hoff: And often they take the form of the -isms and the racisms and the sexisms and those kinds of things. And so…

Rebecca Ching: Can I slow you down for a second? This is big.

Chris Hoff: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Not everyone is free to make meaning, and there are constraints to meaning making.

Chris Hoff: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And so, can you say more about that for a moment, because I feel like I’m always of the mindset like we are meaning-making beings. But I also carry a lot of privileged identity. So I’d love to hear you say more about this.

Chris Hoff: As do I, and so, sometimes it’s easy for me to forget and make assumptions that everybody has kind of this freedom to make meaning, but that’s not exactly true. And when I was involved in a social justice collaborative, I learned about systems of oppression, and I learned about what are some of the constraints to meaning making for folks, and it wasn’t just that easy, right? And so, I became very interested in how problems often are created in the larger social-cultural context of people’s lives, right? And at about that same time, I discovered Narrative Therapy.

22:08

And so, Narrative Therapy, I thought, captured all the things I was interested in about meaning-making but also tended to the larger social-cultural context. You know, the discourses that are at play, how power operates in people’s lives, how the stories get created and stories get imposed on us about who we might be and what is available to us and who we are and all the ways that our agency is at risk.

And so, Narrative Therapy — Michael White I think said one time that Narrative Therapy is about restoring personal agency in the face of all these pressures that are trying to remove it from us.

Rebecca Ching: So Narrative Therapy at the root is restoring personal agency in the face of a lot of systemic, or what we say in IFS, cultural burdens.

Chris Hoff: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: Wow. And so, it’s different. It’s not as succinct. Maybe say more about how this particular lens supports healing and growth and even in the leadership and more organizational spaces leading to sustainable change. How have you seen this approach support those things?

Chris Hoff: There is a belief that we are all multi-storied. There’s a great Walt Whitman quote that I love. “Do I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I contain multitudes?”

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Chris Hoff: Right? Yes, and I think, like Whitman’s quote, we all contain multitudes, right? The problem is — and I’m sure you’ve experienced this — and this is for organizations, and it is for people too that once a problem story starts to dominate, it dominates, right?

Rebecca Ching: It’s contagion.

Chris Hoff: Yes, and it blinds us, or it subjugates all these other stories that we might have access to, stories of agency, stories of resistance, stories of possibility, stories of hope or hopefulness, you know?

24:17

And Narrative Therapy is about access, reaccessing these potential stories knowing there isn’t — knowing that the problem story might not completely go away. One of my mentors said no good problem story ever lays down easy.

Rebecca Ching: Well, and I think that’s subjective too, right? What’s a problem to one may not be to another, but no good problem story — can you expand on that quote there a little bit more?

Chris Hoff: Yeah, you know, some of the stories that are problematic in our lives, they don’t lay down easy. Often, a couple will come to therapy, and the problem story would be, for example, “We can’t communicate,” right? I hear that all the time. “We can’t communicate.” And so, that is a problem story that shapes how they relate to each other, for example, right? And so, in Narrative Therapy, we might try to access what we call unique outcomes, sparkling moments that where there were points of their relationship where they were able to communicate, they were able to work through a problem, they were able to do some of these things even if it was just in thought and imagination maybe. I think we have to start there. And then once you start accessing those other stories or those points, those unique outcomes (there are typically multiple of them), we build another storyline of, oh, this ability to communicate. And then all of a sudden, that problem story doesn’t have as much power that it once did. And it’s not a reframe. It’s based in actual lived experience, so being able to reach some satisfaction in their communication.

26:07

Rebecca Ching: How do you hold the tension from your lens of, “I have a story about an experience, and you have a story about the same experience”? What does this lens kind of share that people can go through the same experience, be in the same room but have their own stories that they’re telling themselves about that?

Chris Hoff: The couples come to therapists to have us adjudicate their relationship, right? Like who’s right, who’s wrong. We’re supposed to be the judge. They’re trying to create some sort of story or have us psychologize them. You know, who’s crazy, who’s not crazy. In those particular situations, if it’s problem stories, you might not be too interested in the debate or who’s right or who’s wrong. We would be interested more in moments of connection. With every story we tell, there’s another story underneath that story, right? This is from Derrida who’s an influence on Narrative Therapy that we do what we call double listening. For example, if somebody tells us a story of hopelessness, we know that they have an idea of what hope is because you can’t know hopelessness without some imagination or image of hope, right? So if somebody’s telling a story, there’s probably some wish or some hope or some vision of another way of being with this partner underneath that story. And so, that’s what we would really be listening to, not so much the problem story of what’s happening, who’s right, who’s wrong, but what are they seeking in telling this story? What is the hope in this story? What is the absent that’s implicit in this story that they’re telling us? And we would probably work with that.

28:06

Rebecca Ching: Is there a risk of defaulting to bypassing by doing that, like bypassing the pain or unintentionally minimizing struggle by just looking at the opposite? Or how do you navigate that, so you don’t default. Like I’m just gonna go, “Oh, if you know hopeless –,” then someone listening to this is going, “Okay, I want to focus on hope then,” because if they know hopelessness, then they know hope. How do you navigate — obviously it’s the listener is attuning to that and staying curious about that. But I know there’s a default to want to rush to the positive, often, in the midst of struggle. So…

Chris Hoff: There often is, and when we’re training — I’m sure you see this when you’re working with your therapist too. It’s easy to do. But no, I don’t think there’s a bypassing. Actually, I think you get at the root when you’re looking at the absent but implicit, because the absent but implicit might be, you know, mistrust, but it’s being communicated in a different way. It’s not always a positive that there’s mistrust at play in this relationship and they just haven’t been able to name that. There’s an accounting that hasn’t happened. Like say, maybe in a heterosexual couple, there’s been infidelity, and somebody has already said sorry and why do we keep bringing this back up. And the reason it keeps coming back up is because it hasn’t been appropriately attended to. There’s no bypassing that, but it’s like how do we hold people to accountability, right? So it just depends on what story is showing up.

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: Leading is hard. Leading is also often controversial as you navigate staying aligned to your values, your mission, your boundaries. Navigating the inevitable controversy can challenge your confidence, clarity, and calm. I know you don’t mind making the hard decisions, but sometimes when the stakes seem higher — which I kind of feel like they’re always higher now — they can bring up echoes of old doubts and insecurities during times when you need to feel rock solid on your plan and your action.

Finding a coach who gets the nuances of your business and leading in our complex and polarized world can help you identify the blocks that can keep you playing it safe and small. Leading today is not a fancy title or fluffy bragging rights. It is brave and bold work to stay the course when the future is so unknown and the doubts and pains from the past keep showing up to shake things up. Internal emotional practices and systemic strategies are needed to keep the protector of cynicism at bay and foster a hope that is actionable and aligned.

30:52

So when the stakes are high and you don’t want to lose focus, when you want to navigate inevitable conflict between your ears and with those you lead, when time is of the essence and you want to make hard decisions with confidence and clarity, then Unburdened Leader Coaching is for you and where you deepen the capacity to tolerate the vulnerability of change and the in-between, innovation, and doing things differently than you were taught.

To start your Unburdened Leader Coaching process with me go to www.rebeccaching.com and book a free connection call. I can’t wait to hear from you!

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: I want to move forward to something I saw you write that really stood out to me on communities because we’ve been talking about communities on this show, of late. I’m interviewing some experts on communities. And you positioned that instead of building communities we need to build coalitions and that really challenging how many of us have been taught to think about belonging and connection. So that stood out to me because I agree.

32:06

The premise is, “Just find your community!” We kind of offer that as a solution that, in theory, yeah, but in practice it can really land flat and even do some harm.

So I’d love for you to share a little bit and walk me through your thought process on community and coalitions, first.

Chris Hoff: Yeah, so I think that idea started — I want to say I’m not anti-community, for starters. But I think we do romanticize community in a lot of ways and in ways that I think aren’t helpful. I wrote a book chapter for a screener brief. It was a series of work on working with religions, and it was working — we did a case study with an Evangelical family that had a child coming out, for example. The title of the book chapter is “Colliding Discourses.” But anyway, we referenced Judith Butler in that article around her recent work of calling for backgrounding identity claims, trying to build coalitions, trying to reach across difference, so people can kind of come together in different ways.

Several years ago I read a quote. It’s by Critical Art Ensemble, and it’s a piece they wrote called Coalitions Not Communities. And it was, “The idea of community is, without a doubt, the liberal equivalent of the conservative notion of family values. Neither exists in contemporary culture, and both are grounded in political fantasy.” That’s quite a provocative quote.

Rebecca Ching: Quite a provocative quote. Yeah, when you quoted that I was like, “Okay, I want to talk more about this!” [Laughs]

34:00

Chris Hoff: I posted that on my Instagram a couple years ago, and I got a lot of response to it. But a lot of the response was people identifying with it because they’ve been in movements, they’ve been in communities where there was a purity of politics or a gatekeeping or an are you like some — and a lot of movements that started out, like social justice movements, hopefully to make change around transformation and stuff like that were coming apart from the inside because of some of these ideas around community and this kind of exclusion and conformity and gatekeeping that sometimes communities require.

And so, it was kind of frustrating for me at the time to watch some of these, I thought, great potential movements kind of come apart. And I have been bouncing around with these ideas, and so, I decided to kind of put this piece together about the case for coalitional thinking, like thinking about not sameness but how do we work across difference.

And there was a guest on my podcast, Kai Cheng Thom, who said something to the effect that they didn’t want to be a part of any movement that their grandparents couldn’t be a part of. And I thought that was really powerful, and that kind of stuck with me because a lot of these movements, I don’t think my grandparents would have been welcomed in. And I like that, kind of the principles behind that.

But anyway, so I’ve become very interested in coalition as a practice, as a pluriversal practice, as a practice about — you know, I don’t know if you’re noticed, we’re losing our ability to speak across difference anymore, and so, how can we save that? And it’s less about belonging, more about aligning. How can we work on shared commitments — you know who’s great at this is 12-Steps, for example, right?

36:11

Very different people come together to help each other stay sober or stay clean or whatever, and I think that is an example of not about sameness but about shared commitment, and that kind of vision I think is something we should think about more. If we really want to bring about change, we’re going to need to be able to reach across difference.

Rebecca Ching: It stood out to me too with community because sometimes the gatekeeping part, so many people relate to, and it probably goes back to when they were younger. Finding belonging is so part of our being human, finding that connection, that space to be as we are. Even within community, it can get funky. We’re gotten really good at figuring out who we need to be to fit in, but we’re not really belonging, and that community can sometimes send mixed messages.

Years ago, Glennon Doyle wrote, “We need to stop doing circles but build horseshoes,” so there’s not the gatekeeping, there’s always that opening end of coming and going that stayed with me, and this coalition piece, it doesn’t have to be filling every need. As I read it, it’s like but we’re aligned on this specific need or focus or mission, and that the coalition doesn’t have to be everything to me. I have to be everything to it. And then there’s some generative piece around difference because in coalitions, there are gonna be differences then. We can have shared meaning. When I show up at different meetings these days, there are a lot of folks that hold a lot of different lived experiences and identities than me, but we’re passionate about a certain focus at this time in the Year of The Lord 2025. And so, I enjoy that, and that’s not as common.

38:00

There’s something energizing about a coalition of shared vision and mission within the difference, and I think a lot of people, a lot of leaders in particular, get scared about that. But it also requires a skill set, yes? To lead or even leading a coalition or being a part of one, is not as “easy.” Yeah, go ahead.

Chris Hoff: Well, I was gonna say I’m glad you said that. It isn’t easy, but real change and real transformation never is, right? So yeah, but it doesn’t mean we don’t try. We have to try. Our world depends on it right now.

Rebecca Ching: I agree. I’d love to hear you say even a little bit more about well-meaning intentions and limitations of the traditional notions of community as you’ve seen it and studied it, and then contrary, what possibilities open up when we seek to build a coalition instead, how that shift can move us forward.

Chris Hoff: Well, you know, I think it does come down, again, to sameness. A lot of communities, I mean, think about it, a lot of the communities, “Do you think like us? Do you believe like us,” (church communities). But people have experienced a purity thing. Sometimes you can’t bring your full self to communities, right? You can only bring the part of the self that’s accepted in that. And this even happens in seemingly progressive communities, you know? And I direct a community counseling center, and sometimes even in queer communities there’s a lot of gatekeeping that goes on, and we work with young people that are trying to find community and find belonging and are met with some gatekeeping in various ways, and that was kind of frustrating on our part when we’re trying to connect people to social support in general. And I just became kind of critical of community at that time sometimes, that sometimes it can be romanticized in a way that doesn’t play out in reality.

40:20

Rebecca Ching: In thinking about this question, I started thinking about, for me, where I feel like I’ve done community well and where maybe I don’t. There are times where I resist change. I like community as it is. I like the known. I like the people. I like what is right now. And there are parts, when there’s gonna be a change in leadership or location or new people coming in or whatever that may be for the different spaces that I’ve been in over the years, I have this wash in me sometimes like [gasp]. I resist that change or I don’t know, or I don’t want to let go of what is. There’s like a white knuckling a little bit of that. And having some compassion for that, right? Like, “Oh, no!” But that’s kind of that rub of being in that tension and the constant process of grieving, releasing, the vulnerability, but how easy it’s felt in those times to go, “No, I don’t want the change. I don’t want the new. I don’t want the difference. I don’t want –,” whatever that may be. And that was humbling to reflect upon because I can see it in others, but I’m like, “Oh.”

Even going back to high school, I was thinking about even on the cheer squad and different yearbook staff and different things over the years when we can be — when I was part of the insular like, “Are you good enough? Are you passing the muster and thinking it’s for the good of the community?” And so, community can not be helpful too, and coalitions can be unhelpful too. I mean, we see that too.

But I think it’s an interesting thing I think, as leaders, we sometimes offer community as a panacea and how we can be creative about helping people find resources or helping move things forward in some different ways, and coalition thinking really brought that to life.

42:15

And I’m wondering where do you see the role of stories when we’re seeking, whether it’s community or building a coalition. And how can we as leaders utilize that lens of stories in this process?

Chris Hoff: I want to be careful about sentimental or nostalgic stories, stories about how — I guess it comes down to what might be possible. I’ve become very interested in my future, futuring, futures as a way of helping people navigate liminal space. And coalition, even community, coming together, trying to bring about change in organizational work or something like that is a journey into uncertainty and liminal space, right?

And so, I’ve become interested in scenario planning and how the stories of the future affect our present. How do we make space for worst-case scenario, best-case scenario, middle-case scenario, and we play with all these kinds of scenario planning, and in a way, just even having those conversations, I think, sustain us to continue to move into the future in a more open way, expecting the different challenges, not being caught my surprise by them, these kinds of things.

Rebecca Ching: Where is the tension with that, because I know there are some folks that can do that internally where they’re just dress rehearsing tragedy, or they’re trying to be prepared for everything to the point where they almost experience it internally, right, where that can shut us down. Are there constraints on that?

44:09

Because I like the idea of thinking about that as a team and how to do some scenario planning as a way to kind of work through stuff. It’s wonderful skill building. Are there any constraints that might be needed because it could go dark too.

Chris Hoff: I think it often goes dark. I think people come to therapy talking about experiences, often talking about experiences we haven’t had yet. The same goes into coaching or whatever, and I think people come to, let’s say, therapy, coaching, whatever, talking primarily about worst-case scenarios, right? And so, that tends to be the tension. But I think there is a purpose for that. People expect the worst. They think they won’t be caught by surprise, that kind of thing. Sometimes people have a hard time thinking about best-case scenario, and, “What might that require of me? Do I have the skill sets, or what are the skill sets that are gonna be needed in that space?”

The worst-case scenario, a lot of people know how to do that. They know what it looks like, tastes like, feels like, right? They can do that all day long. That’s why they’ll talk about it, you know? But once you expand that out a little bit — and if we don’t pay attention to it, we might think that’s where the tension lies. But the tension probably lies in the best-case scenario. “What is really possible, and what is that gonna require of me, and do I have the skill sets or the skills, the knowledge, the wisdom to make that happen?”

Rebecca Ching: I love that. I’m thinking of just some examples of folks I’ve worked with who were selling something and did not plan for the success that they had with their supply chain situation. So I think they weren’t as prepared because they just didn’t believe it could go that well. And that is such a really good — planning for success and planning for levels of success and levels of other alternatives, you know? There is such a great exercise in that, so I appreciate that.

46:08

You touched on this a little bit, and you’ve also written about sentimentality as kind of a quality in the stories that we tell ourselves. I’d love for you to define sentimentality in this context and why you believe it’s important to understand, whether it’s through a narrative lens or a leadership lens, especially for those of us in positions of influence.

Chris Hoff: Yeah, great question! I wrote a piece on my Substack called “Against Nostalgia,” and it was — I think I was watching YouTube or something, and I saw a Fran Lebowitz interview. She was asked about nostalgia, and she said, without missing a beat, “It is one of the most destructive forces in the world,” and that really caught my attention because another provocative statement, right? Our stories often hold pain, but oftentimes they’re just as much lined with a fondness for the past, these kinds of things, and kind of a return. Sometimes we’re seeking a return to something familiar (like I said, the known and familiar), something we used to know, a time before a breakup or a fracture or something in our lives, right? What I’ve come to realize, I think, in the work that I do is that oftentimes stories of nostalgia or sentimentality keep people at the threshold, right? They keep people looking back rather than forward.

I became interested in Mikhail Bakhtin. He’s a Russian literary theorist. I’m a Narrative Therapist, so I was interested. He wrote about this idea around chronotopes, which were how narratives arrange time and space, right? Oftentimes, people will tell you stories about a childhood kitchen becoming a cathedral, relationships becoming a fable, the past becoming a memory that people are trying to live inside again. And so, his kind of conceptualization really helped me work with those ideas about how sentimentality and nostalgia often offer shelter to people. But they keep people stuck, right?

48:20

Rebecca Ching: Yes, I think we’re living that deeply now here in The States, in particular.

Chris Hoff: Yes, for sure. And so, as leaders, right, we can create kind of these narratives that aren’t really helpful, that aren’t leading to forward thinking or innovation or movement into liminal space, into the uncertainty, which is life, right? That is the experience of life. It’s okay, I think, to visit places in the past and to remember things with fondness and all that stuff. But if we start camping out there, it becomes a problem, and our lives will pass us by.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh. Yeah, I was thinking about this morning as I was driving my daughter back from school, she had a presentation, and Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” came on the radio, and I’m from Minnesota. He’s royalty from where I grew up, and I actually was in middle school when Purple Rain came out. So it’s very much embedded in my DNA, particularly the Purple Rain soundtrack, and my daughter was asking me questions about middle school, and right after thinking about Prince and just feeling that nostalgia, that sentimentality. And then she goes, “I thought before you said it was one of the hardest times of your childhood, because that’s when your parents were separated.” And I had forgotten, right? I was like, “You’re right.” I said, “I’ve had some of the richest relationships, I made some great friends that stayed through high school, but that was probably a really, really heavy time.” And I kind of forgot about that in my, “Oh, Prince is the best, and that was the best time, and we loved all the videos,” and it was the both/and, and we forget the both/and.

50:06

I’m wondering, maybe you can speak to this, how have you become more skilled at checking the sentimental narratives that you carry? Are there ways that you kind of catch them as they show up in your work and in your writing and in your leadership?

Chris Hoff: Well, I think everything I do is kind of a function of my own challenges, right?

Rebecca Ching: I can relate.

Chris Hoff: Yeah, my own struggles with nostalgia and sentimentality and being lost in the past in some moments, but really being interested in how I move forward or take the leap and take risks and do things creatively, you know? Because a creative life requires a lot of liminal space, right?

First and foremost, I think, is challenging myself, right, or trying to help myself move through these difficult messy middles, you know, the betwixt in-between, because I’m really interested in living a more creative life. I’m really interested in — we’re only here so long, you know? There are still a lot of things I want to do, and if I’m kind of lost in the past, a lot of that stuff won’t get done.

Rebecca Ching: Do you have a tell when you’re falling into that, that you catch and go, “Oh, wait, that’s my data point. I’m defaulting to that”?

Chris Hoff: Yeah, when I start listening to The Cure or something. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] It’s music again!

Chris Hoff: That’s right!

Rebecca Ching: Oh, man.

Chris Hoff: Yeah, and I think you and I come from a lot of the same period, and so, it’s like once I start — and your Prince story is perfect. That’s what kind of happens. I’ll hear a song and then, phew, I’m transported immediately, yeah.

52:00

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, I had to do a reckoning, though, with John Hughes’ films because it’s like, “Oh, wow. Normalizing rape culture and sexism and misogyny.”

Chris Hoff: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: And I celebrate these movies like, “Dangit!” So I still hold the tension of really appreciating what they represent on a macro level in a memory but also, ah, we could have done better too. 

Chris Hoff: Yeah, yeah. They did not age well, that’s for sure.

Rebecca Ching: I’m wondering, too, by checking our sentimentality, how do you see that opening us up? What possibilities does that open up for more agency and accountability and imagination, these things that you’re talking about?

Chris Hoff: Stories shape action that we take, and in nostalgic chronotopes (I’ll use that word from Bakhtin), they tend to slow time, slow possibility. They have a whisper of, “Oh, it was better then.” And so, it shuts down the possibility of the present, the possibility of the future, and it creates kind of a story line that, “It was better then,” and I think that’s a problematic storyline.

Rebecca Ching: What do you think is the best strategy for any of us, wherever we’re leading and living?

Chris Hoff: Well, I think it’s not so much just shifting it to, “No, the best is yet to come.” Even though maybe that’s a path for somebody, but it’s like I’m curious about how people are finding value in their present moment, like what’s happening now that’s important and even challenging or difficult. Because I think once things do get — and that’s probably what’s happening is they’re standing at a threshold. There is some call into this journey of uncertainty and difficulty and not knowing. I don’t know about you, but that’s when I tend to go look back and start thinking, “It was better then,” when I get confronted with liminal space, some new step into the threshold, right? And I want to delay that step, so I’ll start thinking about back then.

54:17

Rebecca Ching: It is a great delayer.

Chris Hoff: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I love to ask my guests this question. I’d love to ask you how you define leadership and how that definition evolved from what you were taught growing up.

Chris Hoff: Like many people, a man of my age, I think we were taught there was a certain masculine kind of way leadership looked, right? And you were the leader, The Hero’s Journey kind of thing. And I think that, in my life, that evolved to kind of a sort of a servant/leader model, trying to be helpful in the world in a particular way, still some residue of that particular you-run-the-show kind of leader thing. And then now I think leadership, for me, has kind of transformed into something much more collaborative, or I would hope it would be.

There’s a quote I love by Michael White where he says, “Our job –,” and he’s referencing, I think, therapy. But I think it applies to leadership, for the people that call us a leader or seek our mentorship or look to us for direction. He said, “It’s our job to stand behind that person, look over their shoulder, and ask them what they see.” And I really like that model of leadership now, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Mm, I think that’s a beautiful place to end, especially with a quote from Michael White. I love that. I also love to ask my guests some quickfire questions! So these are, hopefully, some light and breezy ones.

56:05

Chris, what are you reading right now?

Chris Hoff: I’m actually reading — I read, like, five books at a time. I’m one of those readers. I have a zen Buddhist teacher, I don’t know if you know I’m involved in a Buddhist community, and my teacher just had a book come out called Zen At The End of Religion, and it’s kind of an introduction to zen. And so, I’ve been reading that. I’m reading a book called Philosophy for Militants by Alain Badiou. He’s a French philosopher. I just read a book by Frederic Jameson on post-war French theory. So these are some of the things I’m reading, but yeah, that’s what I’ve been reading.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, some powerful things. What song are you playing on repeat?

Chris Hoff: That’s a good question. I know I’m kind of late to this, but The 1975 song called “Somebody Else” has been playing a lot on my Spotify. I’m an eighties music person too, so you’re gonna hear a lot of The Psychedelic Furs and New Order and Echo & The Bunnymen and that kind of stuff.

Rebecca Ching: Ah, gosh. Some good stuff.

Chris Hoff: If you’re in my car. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] What is the best TV show or movie that you’ve seen recently?

Chris Hoff: I’m big on Andor right now, the Star Wars thing.

Rebecca Ching: It’s good! We’re not done yet, so no spoilers.

Chris Hoff: Yeah, I’m not gonna spoil.

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Chris Hoff: But I would say that’s where I’m at right now, Andor.

Rebecca Ching: There’s so much with the Star Wars universe, though. I have to pause all the time and ask my husband, “Okay, what –,” and there are so many big names. I need a flow chart for who’s what in what timeline. It’s a lot for me for the Star Wars lore. But I really do like Andor.

58:04

You’ve touched on a few already, but would you add to any favorite eighties piece of pop culture you haven’t mentioned already?

Chris Hoff: You mentioned the movies. My favorite eighties movie was Valley Girl.

Rebecca Ching: No, the Nick Cage — oh, my gosh, you’re going back! [Laughs] Oh, that’s a good one. Oh, my gosh.

Chris Hoff: Yeah. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: That whole eighties trope, whether it was the boy or the girl, and it was usually gendered that way, but someone was wealthy and someone was from the other side of the tracks. I mean, Pretty In Pink did that. Anyways, oh, my gosh.

Chris Hoff: Some Kind of Wonderful did that.

Rebecca Ching: See, that’s a sleeper John Hughes one. Actually, that is probably my second favorite because it had Eric Stoltz who’s an awesome redhead too, so I have to just rally for him. Oh, my gosh. I’m delighting. My eighties pop culture parts of me are having a party right now.

What is your mantra right now?

Chris Hoff: “No is a complete sentence.”

Rebecca Ching: Ah, true story. What’s an unpopular opinion that you hold?

Chris Hoff: That’s a tough — I mean, I think I hold — the beyond community thing that I wrote that you’d mentioned. Thick Press did a zine for it, and they just let me know that it’s gone viral. They sent me some screenshot that it was at 80,000 views already. And some people aren’t really big on that idea.

Rebecca Ching: Nice.

Chris Hoff: Yeah, I made the mistake of reading the comments, which I always make that mistake. But so… yeah. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Ah, we all do. We all do. Who or what inspires you to be a better leader and a better human?

Chris Hoff: I have two nieces. I don’t have any children of my own, but I have two nieces, 10 and 12, and they’re wonderful. And so, when I think about your question about being a citizen, I think I do want a better world for them. I do want a better future for them. And then I’m, you know, blessed to have a bunch of people I love and care about in my life who just make me want to be a better person, a better man, a better leader.

Rebecca Ching: Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. If folks wanted to connect with your work and your writings, where can people find you?

Chris Hoff: Yeah, so thank you for that question. My website is www.drchrishoff.com. I’m on Substack as Chris Hoff. It’s called Liminal Lab, but that might change. And of course, I have The Radical Therapist podcast. Those are some easy ways to find me.

1:00:41

Rebecca Ching: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate this conversation!

Chris Hoff: I appreciate you and the invitation, Rebecca. Thank you very much!

—–

Rebecca Ching: Hey, all. I really valued this conversation with Chris, and I really hope you did too. I keep coming back to several things, particularly his reminder that we’re always standing at some kind of threshold between what was and what could be. That is kind of a perpetual state. That’s liminal space, and if you’re anything like me, that space can be disorienting, exhausting, and full of echoes from old relational wounds that whisper, “Go back to what you know. Go back to what was safer.”

And Chris also reminded us that when we’re in these uncertain places, it’s natural to turn back toward the familiar, but that turning back isn’t failure. It’s data. It’s part of the process. What matters is how we respond to it and how we lead through it. We talked about nostalgia as both comfort and constraint, and how sentimental narratives, especially in times of constant rapid change, can feel like shelter. But too often they can quietly stall our growth. They slow time. They whisper, “It was better then,” and keep us stuck at a threshold instead of moving forward. And we’re seeing how that’s playing out in our culture right now and in our world, not for the better.

1:02:12

And here’s where Chris’ Narrative Therapy lens brings such clarity. The stories we tell ourselves aren’t fixed. They’re shaped by power, identity, cultural messaging. Some stories get imposed on us. Some we inherit. Some we construct to survive. But the work of leadership, especially unburdened leadership, is learning how to examine those stories, notice which ones still serve us, and open up space for the ones that are yet to be told. That’s pretty cool.

Chris also challenged the romanticized ideal of community, and instead, he offered the idea of coalitions. I’ve been thinking a lot about that too. Spaces where difference is experienced, where belonging isn’t dependent on sameness, and where shared commitment matters more than shared identity, yeah, it just feels like watching episodes of Andor and the coalition that was built to take on the Dark Force. But, you know, that’s a reframe leaders need right now is less purity, more purpose; less talking around, and more building bridges.

So here’s what I’m taking away from this conversation, and I hope that you do too. Change is relentless. It’s not the enemy. The stories we default to in uncertainty, they hold power and possibility. Trauma-informed leadership practices aren’t about rushing to resolution but making room for the mess of becoming. Nostalgia can be an anchor, but we need to be honest about when it’s holding us back. And coalitions across differences with clear commitment may be one of the most powerful ways forward.

1:03:57

So I invite you to notice what you’re reaching for in times of uncertainty. Are you using nostalgia to numb or to ground? Are you camping out in the past or courageously crossing the threshold towards what’s next? Keep rumbling with these questions because this is the ongoing work of an Unburdened Leader.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Unburdened Leader! You can find this episode, show notes, free Unburdened Leader resources, and ways to work with me and sign up for my new Substack at www.rebeccaching.com. And if this episode was meaningful for you, I’d be honored if you left a rating, a review, and shared it with a few folks you think may benefit from it. And this podcast episode was produced by the wonderful folks at Yellow House Media!

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