Hello dear ones,
I’ve been reading Deb Dana’s latest book Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory and I paused on these words: “We label people in lots of ways. We say they don’t care, they’re not trying, they don’t want to change, or they’re lazy, irresponsible, always angry, or unreliable. What if instead of using these labels we though about people as being dsyregulated?” This question has inspired this writing, which, I want to name. feels pretty terrifying to put out there. And that is all the more reason for me to push through that fear and share these reflections.
I want to name that much of my thinking on this topic is informed by folks in the transformative justice movement. Under Practices & Actions, you’ll find a list of folks whose books you can buy as well as free resources that you can check out.
A few reminders before we dive in:
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THOUGHTS & FEELINGS
I’ve always felt uncomfortable with labels because of the ways in which they take a specific behaviour or characteristic and transform it into a grand totalizing narrative about a person. These labels usually bring with them a judgment about that person: They are lazy e.g. bad or They’re harmful, toxic, abusive therefore the worst kind of human. I think about the ways in which labels sort people into camps of good or bad, right or wrong, worth loving and worth hating. This binary way of thinking has enabled the criminal “justice” system to justify locking people up in cages, depriving them of community, love, and care.
Kai Cheng Thom reminds us that “the person who has caused harm generally still needs connections, friends and life supports in order to be able to change.” (There is so much I want to say about the abnegation of community accountability here, but that is for another post.) I am not a harmful person. I am a person who has caused harm. I want to pause here and define some terms, as the word “harm” often gets used synonymously with “conflict”, “abuse”, and “trauma.”
The definition of conflict that I use is a disagreement in which something we care about has been threatened (that threat can be perceived or real).
adrienne maree brown defines harm as “the suffering, loss, pain, and impact that can occur both in conflict and in instances of abuse, as well as in misunderstandings steeped in differences of life experience, opinion, or need” (We Will Not Cancel Us).
Abuse, according to Kai Cheng Thom, “is the misuse of power to cross someone else’s boundaries.” Abuse tactics include gaslighting, coercion, manipulation, neglect, isolation, denial, minimization, and leverage.
Trauma is the body’s response to real or perceived threats of danger.
I want to return now to my earlier statement: I am a person who has caused harm — I am not a harmful person.
The language we use when addressing harm matters. “You are a [insert bad word] person” a sweeping and totalizing judgment of another human being; “You have done something bad/harmful” acknowledges the humanity of the person involved, and that the harm they caused are behaviours and actions, rather than some innate character traits. “You are” statements activate shame, “You have done x” activates remorse — and remorse is what moves us towards change. (Folks like Brené Brown make the distinction between shame and guilt as follows: guilt is “I’ve done something wrong” and shame is “I am wrong.” I’ve opted to use the word remorse because I don’t like the legal or religious connotations connected to the word guilt).
You might be asking yourself: Why does this difference in language matter? One answer can be found in neuroscience. Generalizing claims about a person’s character (e.g. that they are good or bad) activates shame and shame moves us away from connection and towards protection. Author Shirley Davis explains “When faced with shame, the brain reacts as if it were facing physical danger, and activates the sympathetic nervous system generating the flight/fight/freeze response”. If we experienced high amounts of shame early on in our lives, Dr. John Bradshaw writes, “can result in permanently dysregulated autonomic functioning and a heightened sense of vulnerability to others.” And when we’re dysregulated, we shut ourselves off from curiosity, compassion, and connection — all of which are needed for accountability and transformation to occur.
To protect ourselves from shame, we “hide, disconnect, and make sure no one finds out about who we ‘really’ are,” argues Staci K. Haines in her book The Politics of Trauma. Haines goes on:
“[Shame] can pull our attention to ourselves alone, worrying and judging, rather than being able to be truly present with others. It often feels like if shame is seen, all will be lost. If we are seen in what is so terrible about us, we fear we will be cast from belonging, or even the possibility of belonging forever.”
The stakes of experiencing too much shame are high. In her book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown explains how “Shame is highly correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying. Researchers don’t find shame correlated with positive outcomes at all—there are no date to support that shame is a helpful compass for good behavior. In fact, shame is much more likely to be the cause of destructive and hurtful behaviors than it is to be the solution.”
Another reason we should be cognizant of the language that we use when addressing harm is that shaming another person isn’t trauma-informed and may activate old survival narratives of “I’m a bad person.” For those of us who experienced abuse at young ages, we may have been directly told that we were bad and that was the reason we were being abused; or we may have inferred that we were bad, for how else could we make sense of the abuse we endured? “If I wasn’t so bad, then X wouldn’t have happened” we tell ourselves. My deepest fear is that I’m secretly a horrible person and one day everyone will find out and abandon me, as this is what happened when, at the age of 14, I was slut shamed and bullied after being raped. My closest friends cut off all communication with me and I entered high school totally alone. This shame led to disordered substance use and other high risk behaviors.
What we need, instead of shame, is kindness. Prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba speaks of the importance of being kind within our social movements:
“I just always want to remind people that we’re all just human. And we’re not perfect. And we need to be able to hold ourselves in all of our contradictions, and also I do think it’s important to be kind. I really do. To me, kindness is a very important value of transformative justice and community accountability work. I want to see how people can operationalize kindness online. It would be good for people to take that as a value from which to work, before launching into things that are about destruction and about vilification.” (“Be Humble” in Beyond Survival)
We are all capable of and will cause harm. Because humans are messy and imperfect and we live with trauma, not to mention the stress of living in late capitalist hellscape that forces us to act in ways not aligned with our values in order to survive. This is not to say that we just shrug off this reality and say “Welp there’s nothing I can do to avoid causing harm.” There is much we can and must do to mitigate harm. And: causing harm does not make you a horrible person undeserving of care, compassion, and connection. Causing harm does not make you a bad person, I promise.
Folks in the transformative justice movement have much to say on the destructive role of shame in calls for accountability. For Nathan Shara, shame is “one of the most pervasive, painful, and insidious barriers to our efforts to fulfill the aspirations of transformative justice” (“Facing Shame: From Saying Sorry to Doing Sorry” in Beyond Survival). Shara goes on to quote therapist and author Harriet Lerner, who writes: “‘If identity—who you are— is equated with your worst behaviors, you will not accept responsibility or access genuine feelings of sorry—because to do so would invite feelings of worthlessness. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?’” Similarly, Kai Cheng Thom argues:
“People who have been abusive should feel guilty for the specific acts of abuse that they are responsible for. They should not feel about what they are because this means that abuse has become a part of their identity. It means that they believe that they are fundamentally a bad person—in other words, ‘an abuser.’ But if you believe that you are an ‘abuser,’ a bad person who hurts others, then you have already lost the struggle for change—because we cannot change who we are. If you believe that you are a fundamentally good person who has done harmful or abusive things, then you open the possibility for change” (Kai Cheng Thom, “What to Do When You’ve Been Abusive” in Beyond Survival).
It’s been wild to witness so many folks who say they’re committed to transformative justice and community accountability default to shaming those who’ve caused harm. So what do we do instead? The authors of Ending Child Sexual Abuse: A Transformative Justice Handbook offer us an alternative:
“While the impulse to villainize or banish may be understandable, we must engage, name the harm, and call upon this person’s dignity in order to hold standards that support safety, connection, and dignity for everyone involved […] Seeing and dignifying the healing needs of people who abuse also runs counter to the idea that some people ‘out there’ are ‘monsters’ who are expendable or need to be ‘weeded out.’ By standing for everyone’s need for healing, we challenge the dehumanizing logic that is central to systems of oppression, domination, and abuse. By standing for everyone’s need for healing, we maintain our commitment to a vision of true liberation.”
Haines talks about the necessity of safety, connection, and dignity in her book The Politics of Trauma, explaining how each are core human needs and how the denial of any or all of these is, in and of itself, traumatizing. When we label people, we rob them of their dignity, usually cutting off our connection (emotionally and/or physically), and thereby jeopardize their safety.
How, then, do we resist this urge to label and throw away? In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown discusses the importance of asking the question “Why?”:
It’s easy to decide that a person or group is shady, evil, psychopathic […] In my mediations ‘why?’ is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That’s because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetuating against us. ‘Why?’ often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, ‘Why?’ makes it impossible to ignore that we must be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances.”
Recalling the quote from Deb Dana that began this post, what we might find when we ask “Why?” is a dysregulated nervous system. The “why” doesn’t become a pass for harmful behavior — “why” becomes a light that points us to what is needed in order to transform harm into healing.
I believe that transformative justice and community accountability are acts of care that are integral to creating a world without police and prisons. Under these politics, we understand that everyone is deserving of care, no matter how much harm they’ve caused. The trick is figuring out who must step in to provide that care, no matter how hard it feels. Moreover, we need communities of care for those who’re supporting the person who’s caused harm — an infinite web of care. This is the world that I dream of and one that I truly believe is possible.
PRACTICES & ACTIONS
Support folks in the transformative justice movement by buying their books, reading their blogs, and following them on social media. Here’s a list for where you can start:
Books & Blogs
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.
adrienne maree brown, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice.
Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (eds), The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities.
Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (eds), Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement.
Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence Blog. Read it here.
Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture.
Kai Cheng Thom, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World.
Courses, Toolkits, Workbooks, Zines
Accountability Mapping, Centered Accountability Course. Find it here.
Accountability Mapping, Self-Accountability: A Transformative Justice Mini-Journal. Download it here for free.
Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence. Download it for free here or order it here.
Generation5, Toward Transformative Justice: A Liberatory Approach to Child Sexual Abuse and other forms of Intimate and Community Violence. Download it for free here.
Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, Fumbling Towards Repair
Mia Mingus, “Pods and Podmapping Worksheet.” Download it for free here.
Spring Up, Transformative Justice Zine. Purchase it here.
Kai Cheng Thom, So You’re Ready to Choose Love – Free Conflict Resolution Workbook. Download it for free here.