The Mutuality of Redemption

“I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.”
—Carl Jung

“In every voice—in every ban—
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”
—William Blake, London

There are prisons you can see—brick and steel, locked doors, razor wire. And then there are prisons that remain unseen, forged not of iron but of shame, grief, fear, and anger. Blake named them more than two centuries ago: mind-forg’d manacles. Such invisible shackles bind not only the incarcerated but every one of us who has ever been trapped by our stories, hemmed in by regret, or crushed by the weight of what we imagine ourselves to be. We yearn for redemption as we yearn for air.

When I sat with Shaka Senghor, author of How to Be Free, we returned again and again to this truth: the hardest prisons to escape are the ones inside. Shaka knows both kinds—the cell blocks of solitary confinement and the quieter, lonelier confinement of despair. At nineteen, in an act of violence that would haunt him for decades and devastate another family, he took another man’s life. For that, he was sentenced to 17–40 years and spent 19 years behind bars, seven of them in solitary confinement.

That’s the hard truth of his story—one step in the long arc to a freedom that began even before he took another man’s life. But the hard truth is not the end of this arc. His book, and our conversation, remind us that freedom begins when we dare to name the manacles, when we refuse to let them define who we are.

Jung’s reminder echoes here: I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become. Shaka worked hard to overcome his identity being bound to his worst act. He doesn’t eschew responsibility for his crime, but he is moving beyond being defined solely by it. He tells of the moment when philosophy—Plato, James Allen, Malcolm X—shook him awake. The unexamined life is not worth living, he read, and suddenly he saw his life with a new kind of clarity. How had I ended up here?

That question—the question at the root of all radical self-inquiry—wasn’t an act of self-flagellation. It was an act of accountability. It was an act of agency. To ask how I ended up here is to resist being reduced to circumstance. It is to claim the possibility of becoming.

And what is true for Shaka is true for each of us. Leaders, parents, neighbors—we all stand at the threshold of becoming, faced with choices that can free or imprison us, choices that ripple through the lives of those around us.

Shaka is quick to remind us that his freedom was never his alone. Older men serving life sentences, men the world had long since discarded, saw something redeemable in him. They put books in his hands, challenged his thinking, called him “young blood,” and insisted he might yet walk free. Their gift of redemption—given even as they remained behind bars—became the seed of his own transformation.

Years later, Shaka would pass that gift on. When his younger brother Sherrod was murdered, Shaka wrote a letter to the man who pulled the trigger. In it, he acknowledged his anger, his grief, his heartbreak—and still he extended compassion. He wrote as one who had also taken a life, who knew what it meant to inflict irreparable harm, and who therefore could not abandon even his brother’s killer to his worst act.

This is the mutuality of redemption. We are redeemed by others, and we redeem others in turn. We are freed by those who see us as more than our failures, and we free others by holding out the same vision.

In Reunion, I wrote about how we respond to the incarcerated reveals who we are. To see only a criminal is to see only with fear. To see a human being still capable of becoming is to see with love. And in that act of seeing, we redeem not only the other but ourselves.

Shaka’s story also reminds us that redemption is sustained by hope. Twice denied parole, he realized that freedom could not wait for a stamped paper. Freedom had to be chosen daily, practiced in thought, word, and action. He had to free himself on the inside before he was ever allowed to walk out the gate.

In Saved by Hope, I wrote that flimsy optimism cannot save us. What saves us is the sturdier hope born in sorrow, baptized in doubt—the kind of hope that does not turn from suffering but walks straight into it. Hope is the discipline of imagining what lies beyond despair. (You can read that full essay on LinkedIn.)

Shaka embodies that discipline. His hope is not abstract. It is the father who dares to love again. It is the mentor who passes on a book to a restless young man. It is the letter written not to condemn but to open the faintest possibility of healing.

This is not just Shaka’s story. It is a call to each of us. Redemptive leadership is not about dominance or charisma. It is about creating the conditions in which mutual liberation becomes possible. It is about calling forth the redeemable in others, even when the world has written them off.

For those of us in positions of power—in organizations, families, communities—this is the work: to notice the mind-forg’d manacles at play in ourselves and in others, and to practice the kind of hope that dares to believe those chains can be undone. To refuse to define others by their worst moment is to refuse the same reduction in ourselves.

Jung reminds us: we are what we choose to become. Shaka’s mentors chose to see him as more than a convict; in doing so, they became redeemers. Shaka chose to respond to violence not with vengeance but with compassion; in doing so, he redeemed himself as much as he sought to redeem the one who had harmed him.

The mutuality of redemption insists that none of us walk free alone. My redemption is bound up with yours, and yours with mine.

So perhaps the question for us, as leaders and as human beings, is this: Whose redemption am I willing to hold in order to redeem myself?

Because the truth is this: the manacles can be broken. The prisons—seen and unseen—have doors. And every time we call forth the redeemable in another, we find the key waiting in our own hands.