The Hard Truth
The last few weeks, we’ve been talking and writing a lot about accountability. At JT Consulting we believe accountability is violence prevention. We cannot achieve a world free of sexual and domestic violence by teaching potential victims how not to get hurt. We have to address the root causes of why people harm each other, why some feel entitled to harm others, and learn the skills that enable us to foster trauma-informed spaces and practice compassionate accountability.
But accountability work isn’t just something we do for others. We have to start with ourselves.
Over the last twenty-three years I have learned a lot and I’ve had the opportunity to facilitate hundreds- if not thousands- of workshops and trainings for others. My Linkedin headline states that I am an expert in sexual and domestic violence prevention. And while it is a title that I have been called many times, it’s one that I am still trying to embrace. There is a hard truth I have to acknowledge: being an expert in domestic violence doesn’t mean I can always protect my loved ones or prevent them from experiencing relationship abuse or sexual violence. And even after two decades of working in this field I am still learning and, truthfully, I am still making mistakes. I can lead a workshop on how to support a loved one who has experienced sexual violence while fully asleep and yet, when this issue hits close to home, I am far from perfect at it myself. I may know- cognitively- what to do or what to say. When I have received a disclosure or witnessed a loved one experience abuse, the impact can completely bypass the intellectual. The profound loss of control I feel makes it all too easy to react from my survival brain; my primitive inclination to protect, to save, to fix things for my loved ones means that I have at times reacted in the exact ways I have trained others not to do.
Years ago, I had a participant in a workshop who had lost a family member to domestic violence. She told the group that if they knew someone in an abusive relationship, they needed to grab that person, force them out (physically if necessary) and keep them somewhere safe until they had “recovered.” I could see in her words and her eyes how much she blamed herself for not doing just that, how responsible she felt for a murder she did not commit but believed she could have prevented. And man, could I relate to that. And while I never attempted to kidnap a loved one, I have done things in an effort to protect someone I cared about and it had an impact far from the one I hoped for or intended. When I tried to pull my loved one away from someone who was hurting them, I effectively pushed them closer to their abuser and farther away from me.
Sometimes we are going to make mistakes when we are trying to support someone we love. Sometimes in our effort to say just the right thing to make them feel better, we find ourselves saying something that makes them feel worse. We may go into fight mode and immediately try to problem solve or threaten to avenge the person who hurt them. Sometimes we will mess up.
But.
Just as we are all capable of making mistakes, we also have the ability to take responsibility and hold ourselves accountable. We can really listen and hear our loved one and acknowledge our impact. Abusers are very good at blaming others- especially their victim- for everything. We can model that in a healthy relationship we will not be perfect but we will own our mistakes and apologize when we have caused harm. We will reflect on our actions and intentions. We can commit to doing the work to do better in the future.
At JT Consulting while we are not perfect, we are here to partner with you to face the difficult and challenging moments of our lives and provide loving accountability and compassion that enables each of us to learn, to heal, to grow.
