Old Patterns, New Eyes
On reciprocity, matching energy, and what it means when someone shows you who they are
These are the real-time field notes behind the framework. The lived experience that the Embodied Shadow Work CEO and the archetypes were built from.
When does generosity become a lie you tell yourself?
I’ve been sitting with that question. Not abstractly — in my body, in my actual life, in the specific texture of relationships I’ve been in and the ones I’ve finally had the clarity to step back from.
Because I am a giver. I have always been a giver. And for most of my life I called that a virtue. I show up. I reach out. I acknowledge people — even in the middle of my busiest seasons, even when I have seventeen things moving at once, I take two seconds to let someone know they matter to me.
What I wasn’t looking at was what I was doing with people who didn’t do that back.
There are a few different threads I want to pull on here. Because this isn’t one story — it’s a pattern that shows up across the different kinds of relationships in my life. And each one has taught me something different about what I’m no longer willing to accept.
Thread One: The Man
Let me start here because this is where it lives most viscerally.
I know what it feels like to be in something with a man who exists for you primarily in a screen. Who is online — actually online, you can see it — and makes a choice about whether you’re worth a response today. Who sends a good morning and then disappears into a version of his life that you are not actually part of. Who has time for the warmth and attention you give freely, who consumes your energy and your generosity and your care, but does not have time — real time, physical time, showing-up time — for you.
I kept engaging anyway.
I told myself things. That he was busy (and he was and is). That this was just how he communicated. That the connection was real even if the container was thin. That consistency on my end would eventually create something worth having.
What I was actually doing was hoping.
And here is what I know now that I didn’t want to know then: men know what they want. When a man wants you he shows up for you. Not perfectly, not without his own limitations, but toward you. The current moves in your direction. You don’t have to wonder if you’re too much or not enough or if you said the wrong thing — because his actions are not a puzzle you’re trying to solve. They’re just clear.
When they’re not clear — when the presence is vague, when the availability is selective, when you’re good enough for the easy parts but not prioritized in the real ones — that is also clear. We just don’t always want to receive it as the information it is.
No one is ever too busy for what they actually want to make time for. I have run businesses and managed moves and held client work and built things from the ground up, and I still took two seconds to acknowledge the people who mattered to me. When I didn’t do that — when someone wasn’t on my radar — it wasn’t because I was busy. It was because they weren’t a priority. I’ve been on both sides of this and I am telling you plainly: busyness is not the reason. Choice is the reason.
There is something that happens in your body when you are being ignored by someone you’ve opened yourself to. It is subtle at first — a small contraction, a held breath, a noticing you talk yourself out of. Then it accumulates. The nervous system keeps score even when the mind is busy making excuses. And at some point the body just stops being able to pretend.
Mine stopped pretending.
Stepping back from this — not with a speech, not with an ultimatum, just a quiet withdrawal of my availability — felt like a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. That breath was the information. That exhale was my body telling me what it had known for a long time.
Not being chosen by this particular person does not make me unchosen. It makes me unseen by him. Those are not the same thing. And I am done collapsing them.
Thread Two: The Clients Who Are Actually Doing the Work
I want to be precise here because this matters to me.
The work I do is heavy. I put people in places that take time to move through — emotionally, somatically, in their businesses, in their sense of who they are. I know this. I have structured everything I create specifically so that the people in it have space to do the work without feeling pressured or monitored. I do not expect constant communication. I do not need to be updated. I trust the process because I built the process to be trustworthy.
And I can feel my clients. I mean that literally. I know before someone reaches out what is happening with them. I can feel when someone is moving something deeply, when they’re in the thick of it, when the silence is the work and not the avoidance.
When a client opens an email fifteen times over two weeks before responding — I understand that. They are going back to it. They are rereading it. They are letting it move through them at the pace it needs to move. That is not disrespect. That is the work happening in real time.
What I want to say to those clients — and I hope they feel this — is that acknowledgment still means something. Even a single line. Even I received this and I’m sitting with it. Not because I need the validation, but because when someone goes fully silent I lose my ability to help them. I cannot track what’s landing and what needs to shift. I cannot be a guide to someone I have no thread of connection with. The communication is not about me. It is about keeping the container alive so the work can actually complete.
To those clients: I see you. I feel the weight of what you’re carrying. I built what I built so you don’t have to be perfect at this. You just have to stay in contact.
Thread Three: The Ones Who Are Fickle
This is the thread I am losing patience with.
There is a different kind of client — a different kind of collaborator, a different kind of person — who goes quiet not because the work is hard but because they are avoiding. Who reappears not because they’re ready to go deeper but because they need something, or want the attention and care I give freely, or have decided it’s convenient again. Who treats what I’ve built for them as optional. Who consumes and disappears in a cycle that has nothing to do with depth and everything to do with their own inconsistency.
I can feel these people too. I know who they are before they even reach out. I am not confused about the difference.
What I am done doing is pretending I don’t know.
The work I do is not casual. It is not a service you dip in and out of when the mood strikes. It carries a specific kind of attention and craft and energetic investment that I do not give lightly. And I will not continue to pour that into containers that are not being tended. Not because I’m keeping score — I don’t work that way — but because my efforts and my time deserve to be respected, even when others choose not to respect them. Especially then.
If I am the only one showing up, I am not in a collaboration. I am in a performance with an absent cast.
This applies to clients. It applies to creative partnerships. It applies to anyone who wants access to what I bring without being willing to bring something in return. Those are not the relationships I am building my work around. Those are not the people my best efforts are for.
I know the difference between someone who is struggling and someone who is taking advantage. Life happens — I get it, I genuinely get it, and I hold that with real compassion. But compassion and self-abandonment are not the same thing. I can hold space for someone’s difficulty without endlessly subsidizing their avoidance.
What All Three Threads Have in Common
A man who is present online but absent in real life. Clients in deep process who need gentleness and continued contact. Collaborators who are fickle with what I offer.
Three different dynamics. One pattern underneath all of them.
I give generously and I give first. I reach out. I create. I show up. And I have spent a long time waiting for that to be matched — hoping that consistency and care on my end would eventually build reciprocity.
Sometimes it does. The clients who move through hard things and come out the other side and write to me months later — those moments are real and they matter enormously to me. The relationships that build slowly and become genuinely mutual — those exist and I am grateful for them.
But I have also been giving into voids and calling it abundance. Staying present in dynamics that were only alive because I was holding them up. Making myself available to people who were not, in any meaningful sense, making themselves available to me.
That is not generosity. That is self-abandonment dressed in generous clothing.
And even when others do not respect my time and my efforts — I must. That is not negotiable anymore.
What I Am No Longer Available For
I want to close without softening this.
I am a boundaried woman. That is not a pose or an aspiration — it is how I actually move. And what that means in practice is that when my attention and affection stop being met, I pull back. Not dramatically. Not with a speech. I simply become less available. I stop making someone a priority in my communication because they have shown me, through their choices, that I am not one in theirs.
You will feel that. Because the difference between my full presence and my measured presence is not subtle.
I value who I am. I value the effort I bring to everything I touch and everyone I love. I don’t have to know you long to care about you deeply — connection moves fast for me and I don’t apologize for that. But connection is not a one-way current. It has to move in both directions or it isn’t connection — it’s consumption.
I am not available to be consumed.
Not by a man whose online presence is more reliable than his real one. Not by clients who want the container without doing the work. Not by collaborators who appear when it’s convenient and disappear when it costs them something.
My good efforts are for people who show up for them. My full presence is for people who bring theirs. My time — which is the most real thing I have to give — is for people who understand that no one is too busy for what actually matters to them.
I matter. And I will act accordingly.
Even when — especially when — someone else’s choices are trying to tell me otherwise.
Christina Rae Blackmon is the force behind Momentive Media and Christina Rae + Co—where AI strategy meets embodied truth. She’s a marketing architect, intuitive coach, and creative provocateur helping entrepreneurs dismantle performative business, reclaim their voice, and build from who they actually are. Her work blends consciousness, somatics, and cutting-edge AI to create brands that don’t just get seen—they get felt.
In her spare time, she writes poetry, creates art and handcrafted pieces for sale, hunts for antiques and rare treasures, and tends to her garden—harvesting herbs for her own teas through Moon Phase Collective. She also creates and sells moon and shadow work journals designed to support deep self-exploration and transformation.