Surviving and doing sexual harm: A story of accountability and healing.

In all of my years trying to find resources, I’ve only come across three stories of people who’ve done harm and only one of them had enough information, enough of the person’s real story, to actually be helpful to me.  I want to tell my story to help people who are trying to work on their sh** and also to help people who are supporting that process or who are mentors to have some idea of what might be going on for that person who still doesn’t understand themselves—to help folks be better support for accountability processes.

For most of the harm that I’ve done, I’ve never really been called out for it, so I don’t have other people’s names for it, just my own names.  I consider myself to have sexually assaulted people, also crossed people’s boundaries in sexual ways that aren’t sexual assault, and just generally had patriarchal behaviour.  And then the last thing that’s always a little more difficult for me to talk about is that I also molested a relative of mine when I was young.

My accountability process started in my early 20’s.  The violence and harm I had been doing wasn't just a one-time thing where I messed up once, it was like an on-going pattern that was chronic, and happening over and over again in my life.  There were a couple of moments when I was able to stop myself in the moment when I was doing harm, like when I hurt someone I cared about very much, seeing her weep when I pushed her sexual boundaries, what I see as sexual assault, I said, “Sh**.  I need to stop right now.”  But even then, that horror wasn't enough to let me intervene in the big, chronic patterns.  It took a lot more before I could start changing, even when I was recognising chronic patterns of harm I was doing in my life and hated that I was doing those things.

By that point in my life, I was a total wreck.  For years and years of my life, my mind had been filled almost with nothing but images of doing gruesome violence to myself.  I was having trouble keeping my life together.  I was under huge amounts of stress, having total breakdowns on a fairly regular basis, and was just being ripped apart inside by everything.  And also, being ripped apart by trying to keep myself from the knowledge of what I'd done.  It was too much for me to even look at.  At the same time, I really wanted to talk with people about it.  I was just so scared to do it because of the particular sorts of thing that I had done.  You know, like, people who sexually abuse are the most evil of all the monsters in our cultural mythology.  And everybody is basically on board with doing nothing but straight up violence to them.  And so much of my life had been organised around just trying to keep myself safe that it wasn't a risk I could take.  It wasn't even a question of choice.  It just wasn't a possibility, even though I wanted nothing more.

At some point, I started spending more time around people involved in radical politics and feminist politics.  And so one person that I knew, I’ll call him Griffin (not his real name), one of their friends had been sexually assaulted.  So I just happened to be at a table when Griffin was having a conversation about what people were going to do about it.  And that was the first time that I had ever heard of Philly Stands Up.  Where I was living at the time was really far away from Philly, so it was just basically a name and an idea.  But, you know, that one tiny seed of an idea was enough to make me realise that it was possible.  That there were people that I could talk to that weren't going to destroy me.

It was a few months later.  There was a lot of stuff going on in my life where my history of doing violence to people and my history of surviving violence, they were coming up over and over and over in my life.  But I still refused to acknowledge either of them.  And it wasn't like a conscious thing.  I don't know exactly what it was, but I hadn't gained the moment of insight yet into understanding that that is my history.  I ended up talking with that same friend, Griffin, who had mentioned Philly Stands Up, and just in this one conversation, my whole history came out.  It was the first time I talked with anybody about either my history of being raped or my history of doing sexual violence to other people.  That was a moment when I stopped running from my past.  Those two things in my life, surviving violence and doing violence, are inseparable.  I started coming to terms with both of them in the exact same moment.  That was the first time I ever broke my own silence.  And that's when I started trying to find some way of doing accountability.

Part of what made this possible was the particular relationship with one of the people I had harmed, June (not her real name), a person that I loved tremendously, and somebody who, even though I haven't seen her for years and probably won't see her again in my life, I still love tremendously.  So the pain of hurting somebody that I love that much was part of it.  And part of it was that I had someone to talk to.  I'd never been able to communicate with people about anything in my life before.  And part of it was that things got so bad at one point that I didn't have the choice anymore of not seeking support.  I had a breakdown where somebody came into my life and listened to me, and I couldn't hold it in any more.  And so I had started learning how to communicate from that.  And then Griffin, the person I had the conversation with, really started off my own accountability process.  I think for me, it was about that friend.  I didn't feel threatened by them.  I had a trust with them that if I talked to them, they would still care about me and see me as a person.  But it's all part of this much larger context.  It wasn't just something about that one particular friendship that made the difference; it was this whole arc of all these huge things that were happening in my life, all of these breakdowns and changes and new commitments and new understandings that were all developing together that brought me to that point.

Actually, there was a moment a couple of years before that was really the first time I'd ever broken my silence, but in a very different way.  For a few years before that moment, I'd started being exposed to feminist politics and things like that.  And for the first time I knew that someone that I loved and cared about was a survivor of rape.  I was in kind of a tailspin for a while trying to figure out how to respond to that.  I started seeking out more information about how to support survivors of sexual violence, but it hadn't really been connected to my own life.  I started to understand the importance of having the violence that was done to you being acknowledged, and decided that I needed to step up in my own life.  So the real first time that I ever broke my own silence about the harm that I had done was when I talked to the person who I had molested.  I approached them and said, “Hey, I did this.”  But I didn't have the capacity yet to actually engage with it.  And so I talked about it with that person and totally broke down and put that person in a position where they were having to worry about caretaking for me, you know, the way that it happens so stereotypically.  I gave them some resources, like a rape crisis number to call and things like that.  That person asked me if they could tell a particular adult in their life, and I told them, “You can tell whoever you want.”  But I didn't have the capacity in my life yet to work through everything that meant, and so I just brought the shutters down and the walls and everything else and cut that part off from my life again.  After that, I shut down and I became totally numb, totally blank, for months.

By this point a couple of years later, I had two friends that I ended up talking with, disclosing this to, Griffin and my friend, Stephen (not his real name).  And I didn't tell anyone more than that because I was scared, I was scared of everything that would happen.  Before Griffin mentioned Philly Stands Up, the only thing I'd ever heard in the scene that I was part of was that all perpetrators should be ridden out of town on a rail.  Just like that, along with my own fear of violence that I'd carried for at least a decade by that point, made me really scared to talk about it with anyone else.  It was just Griffin and Stephen.  Those two were the only ones that I had talked about any of this with for like a year.

Over the course of that year, I ended up finding out that I crossed two more people's boundaries, even though I was committed to doing everything that I needed to do to make sure that I didn't.  The first time it happened, I thought that I was asking for consent, but I wasn't.  Or I wasn't able to communicate enough in order to actually have real consent.  And so that person, when I crossed that person's boundaries, they confronted me on the spot about it.  They were like, “Was that sexual for you?”  And I was like “oh damn,” but I was like, “Yeah.  yeah, it was.”  And they were like, “I didn't consent to that, and that was a really difficult thing for me because of this and this and this.”  And then later on, it happened again, when I thought I was doing everything that I needed to have consent.

Part of what was going on at that point, was that I still had a huge amount of guilt and shame and traumatic reactions to being vulnerable.  But after the second time that I crossed someone’s boundaries, I realised what I was doing wasn’t working and I needed to take accountability a step further.  I decided to do all of these disclosures to people in my life.  When I was doing these disclosures, I wasn't able to be present at all.  I was forcing myself to do it, over and over again, and was totally emotionally overwhelmed and burnt out.  I didn’t think about how I was doing them and how that would impact other people.  Because I wanted to be 100% sure that I wasn't going to cross anybody's boundaries, I dropped out of everything and socially isolated myself.

It also seemed like everyone was totally happy to let me become isolated and let me drop out of everything.  Nobody reached out to me, or as far as I know, people didn't really talk amongst each other or anything.  I think people didn't know what to do with the information, so they didn't do anything.  Griffin and Stephen had moved out of town, so they weren’t there to support me anymore.  In that period, the only two people who did reach out to me were people whose boundaries I had crossed.  And they were offering support, but I was just like, “No, I can't put you in the situation where you're taking care of me.”  Because by that point—during the year when I'd been keeping quiet about things and trying to deal with it by myself, I started reading a lot of zines about survivor support, stories of survivors doing truth-telling and that kind of thing.  By that point I'd learned enough to know that there is the pattern of survivors having to emotionally caretake for the people who had done harm to them.  So I put up the boundary and I was like, “Thank you, but I can't accept your support.”

I was doing all this stuff that was self-punishing, having no compassion for myself—just this  combination of a desire to be 100% certain that I wasn't going to be crossing anybody's boundaries and this destructiveness that came out of intense self-hatred.  And then it kept going, but I left town.  I got way beyond burnt out; I wasn't even running on fumes any more, just willpower.  But, I didn't cross anybody's boundaries!

What were the stages of change for me?  The first stage, which isn't one that I would recommend that people include in accountability processes, was the self-destructive one where I would just step back from things.  A component of this could be good, but not in a self-punishing, destructive way.  That was really the first step, isolating myself from everything.  And then, doing some research and self-education at the same time.  I was also going to therapy and was coming to understand my own history better, was able to articulate for myself that what I needed to do was containment—figure out the boundaries that I needed for myself to make sure that I wasn't going to hurt anybody.  It took me a while to understand that because of the ways that people who are socialised male in this society, they're never expected to assert any boundaries on their own sexuality.  Both in terms of, “I don't want to do this,” but also in terms of actively seeking other people's boundaries, seeking out to understand what other people's boundaries are.  So basically that whole first period was just tracking myself, figuring out in what sorts of emotional states I was most likely to cross somebody's boundaries and what it felt like when I was getting there; what sorts of situations were likely to trigger it and also in day-to-day interactions, what kinds of boundaries I needed for myself to make sure I wasn't getting close to any of those things.

Then once I had that containment figured out and had the space where I was trusting myself not to be crossing people's boundaries, then there was room in my life to be able to go inwards and start working on self-transformation and healing.  Part of that, too, was that I was still crossing people's boundaries on a regular basis.  Every time it would happen it would be a crisis for me.  Sometimes I would get suicidal.  Sometimes I would be freaking out and paranoid and have huge flare-ups of guilt and shame.  So when I was crossing people's boundaries, there wasn't emotional room for that transformation and healing to take place.  I needed to create this sort of containment, not just for the worthy goal of not doing harm, but also to make sure that I had the capacity, the emotional space, to be able to work on that healing and transformation.  That was the second phase, when I was working with an accountability group that I sought out for myself.  There was a lot of healing and self-transformation.

At this point, I feel like I've gotten enough of that worked out that I'm getting to a place where it becomes an ethical possibility for me to start reaching back outwards again, and starting to work on getting involved in organising or perhaps have relationships.  Because for this whole time I've had a strict rule for myself around abstinence and celibacy, just not getting involved in people because I know that any time that would happen, that all these things that I haven't dealt with would come up.  And once all that unresolved trauma flares up, then the game is basically lost for me.  So now, the potential for having intimate or sexual relationships starts to become more of a reality for me and at this point I feel like I've learned enough about where all that's coming from, and I've healed enough that I can communicate about it enough to understand my limits and boundaries and to reach out at the same time.

Another shift that's been happening, too, is that towards the beginning it was basically like I couldn't have people in my life that I wasn't able to disclose to.  There were some people that were either an acquaintance that had power over me that I didn't really disclose to.  But basically, every person that I was becoming friends with, at some point I'm gonna need to tell them as part of the process of being friends.  As I'm getting to the point where I'm putting people less at risk, I feel like I'm gaining back more of the privilege of retaining my anonymity.  It's still really important for me to disclose with people, and there are some situations in which I'm probably always going to be disclosing to people really early on.  For example, any time I want to get involved in anti-violence work, that's going to be a conversation I have at the outset, before I get involved.  But I feel like I'm regaining some of that privilege of anonymity now, too.

Now it’s been years of seeking support through political groups working on accountability and therapy and staying committed to the process.  The things I now understand about healing, in the wholeness of my experience, as both a survivor and a perpetrator, look very different than the ones that I've read about or that people have talked to me about, where it's healing only from surviving abuse or violence.

The three biggest emotions that I've had to contend with in that healing and transformation—and this is something that I've only articulated in the last month of my life—the three biggest things are guilt, shame and a traumatic response to being vulnerable.

I think those three things, in myself at least, are the sources for the self-hate.  It took me a long time trying to figure out even what guilt and shame are.  What the emotions are, what they feel like.  I would read those words a lot, but without being able to identify the feeling.  Someone told me that it seems like a lot of my actions are motivated by guilt.  And that was strange to me because I never thought that I had felt guilt before.  I thought, “Oh, well, I feel remorse but I don't feel guilt.”  It was years of pondering that before I even understood what guilt was or what it felt like in myself.  Once I did, I was like, “Well damn!  That's actually just about everything I feel.”  I just hadn't understood what it felt like before, so I didn't know how to identify it.

Now my understanding of guilt is that it's the feeling of being worthy of punishment.  That guiltiness crops up when I become aware of the harm that I've done.  I might engage in minimisation, trying to make that harm go away, so that I don't feel that guiltiness for it anymore, so that I don't feel worthy of being punished.  I might try denying it—same sort of thing.  Maybe I'm going to try to numb myself so that I don't have that feeling any more.  Or maybe I'm going to make that punishment come to me, trying to bring a resolution to that sense of impending harm by harming myself.

Another thing that I can see in myself is trying to get out of that sense that harm is gonna come to me by dedicating my life to amending the harm.  But the thing is that it's different from compassion, trying to right wrongs because of guilt instead of because of compassion.  Doing it through guilt, I notice that I can't assert any boundaries with myself.  It's like a compulsion, and it leads me to burnout.  Because any time that I stop, that feeling comes back, and it's like, the harm is gonna come.  I’m learning how to stay present with that difficult feeling and breathe through it.  It helps me a lot.

As far as the shame goes, my understanding of shame is it's the feeling that I am someone who I cannot stand to be.  I was at this workshop where somebody was talking about their experiences with addiction and said, “My whole life, when I was in the middle of this addiction, I had this combination of grandiosity and an inferiority complex.”  You know, this sense that I was better than everyone else and that I was the worst scum of the earth.  That's the manifestation of shame—that this is who I should be and this is who I really am.  When I've seen myself in that kind of place, then usually I'm reacting to the shame either by trying to drown out that awareness of the side of me that's scum, and one of the primary ways that I did that was through finding ways of getting sexual rushes or something like that.  And the other thing that I've seen myself do is trying to eradicate that part of me that's the scum.  Mostly that happened through fantasies of doing violence to myself, targeted at that part of myself that I hated, that part of myself that I couldn't stand to be, and trying to rip myself into two.  I think that's a lot of what was fuelling my desire for suicide, too.

One of the things that happened with the accountability process is that once I started talking to people about the things I was most ashamed about, and making it public, then that grandiosity went away.  And instead I had to come to terms with this other understanding of myself that wasn't as caught up in illusions of grandeur and instead was this forced humbleness.  Like, I'm a person and I'm no better than anybody else.  I'm a person and I can also change.  Through talking about the things that I'm most ashamed of, that shame became transformative for me.  That was a really big aspect of healing for me.  It required a lot of grieving, a lot of loss.  That's something that I was going through during that first year when I was talking with people about it.

As I was talking with other people about it, all these possibilities were closing off in my life.  I'll never be able to do this thing now.  I'll never be able to have this type of relationship now.  The world was less open to me.  Like, I can't think of myself in the same way anymore.  A lot of times I didn't have the capacity to really face it.  But in the moments of insight I had, where I was coming to terms with it, I was grieving, weeping, over the things that I was losing because of the accountability.  That was a big part of healing for me, finding and connecting with and expressing the grief.  And also the grief over everything that I had done.

There are still some things that I probably will have to let go of but that I haven't allowed myself to grieve yet, some possibilities that I'm still clinging to.  I've found that when I get on a power trip and find myself in this controlling attitude, one of the things that resolves that is if I can find a way to grieve.  The power trips, the controlling attitudes, tend to happen when I'm trying to control things that are changing.  If I can just accept the change and grieve ways that possibilities are changing, then that brings me back.  I mean, I've come to terms with a lot of the things that I was grieving when I first started talking with people about it.  I'm starting to be able to find ways in my life now to some of the same things that I wanted for my life, but paths that have a lot more humility in them.  And I think that's one of the really valuable things that accountability has given me.  Any time I start that thinking big about myself, then I bring it back to this accountability that I'm doing.  It's helped me a lot, helping me find ways to stay connected to humility.  That's something that I really appreciate about it.

The third one's a traumatic response to vulnerability.  This is one that I don't understand that well because I'm just now starting to have some understanding of it.  But like I was saying before, because of the violence that I've experienced in my own life, a huge portion of my life has been dedicated to keeping me safe.  And for me, those behaviours have been enforced in myself through that same type of self-hate and violence.  So if I leave an opening where I'm vulnerable, then that self-hate comes to close it down.  If I ever mess up in a way that left me vulnerable, then I find that I start having all these fantasies of doing violence to myself.  It’s a way of enforcing in myself to never let that happen again.  I don't really understand it.  One of the things that I've been working on more recently is learning how to be open to vulnerability.  That's the last part of self-hate that I've healed the least.

One thing that my history of surviving violence has created is a huge dedication in my life to making sure that I never allow myself to be vulnerable.  In the past, it's been impossible for me to allow people to see that I'm any sort of sexual being and has also made it impossible to talk about any emotions of importance.  Or just asking for consent, there's a sort of vulnerability that's involved with that.  So this created this wall that set me up to make it really, really hard to have consensual sexual interactions with anybody.  In my family, we had no communication about anything whatsoever.  I didn't have any models around communication.  Now that I'm in a world where communication is possible, it's hard for me to convey to people what it's like to be in a world where that's not possible.  For a huge portion of my life, there wasn't even a glimmer of possibility.  These things that I was feeling, they weren't in the realm of talkability.  It meant that I couldn't ever be present enough with the emotions to learn how to intervene.  Any time they would come up, I would just try to eradicate them with all this violent self-imagery, without even realising what I was doing.

I have a friend that's been involved in a lot of accountability work, and he's insisted to me that what I'm doing isn't accountability because there's not survivors somewhere who are issuing a list of demands or that kind of thing.  But for me, that's only one aspect of accountability.  There’s another aspect that's being accountable to myself, making sure that I'm living the values that are important to me in the world.  Ultimately, accountability is a commitment to do what I need to do to make sure that I don't repeat those patterns, that they stop with me.  Part of that has been the work around creating boundaries for myself.  Part of that has been the healing and transformation.  And part of it is also engaging with the world, to not see it as an individual thing, but to see myself as part of a social struggle.  I need to be engaged with the world to be part of ending all of this sexual violence that's everywhere.

Accountability has this gift of humility.  One of the things that is valuable for me about that humility is the amount of compassion that it's allowed me to have for other people.  I still have superiority complexes, but nowhere near like I did.  I'm able to understand myself as being the same kind of human as so many other people.  I don't put myself on a different level from them.  So I feel like I have a much greater ability to understand people's struggle and pain, and to learn from it, and to love people, coming out of that compassion and shared struggle.

That ability for real, authentic love is something I never had.  I thought that love was this obsessive thing.  And when I realised that I needed to stop that, I had this moment of grieving and loss and doubt, because I thought, “Well, if I stop this, will I ever feel love again?”  It required this huge shift.  Once it quieted down, once I stopped it, then the whole landscape was silent.  It took me a while to re-tune my hearing so that it wasn't just the roar of obsession, but that I could hear the birds, and the insects, and the breezes.  From there, learn a sort of love that's based in resilience, and shared commitment, and sacrifice.  That's been a real gift.

Another thing too, is that I can bear to live with myself.  I never could before.  Most of the time I'm okay being in my own skin.  It’s been huge—even though I went through some extremely dark and difficult periods where the basin of depression that I'd lived in for so long in my life dropped into an abyss.  Coming out of that abyss, through a continuing commitment to accountability, it's the first time in my life when I'm starting to feel I'm free of this depression and this crippling anxiety and paranoia.  I have emotional capacity now; I can feel things.  I'm still not in a place where joy is a big part of my life, but it seems possible now.  Through all this grieving and everything that I've done, I've also had a couple moments of clarity and lightness that I'd never experienced before.

Something else that has been a real gift for me is the possibility for having lasting intimate relationships with people, whether sexually or not sexually.  And having some capacity for pleasure—sexual pleasure, even.  Because before it was so caught up in shame and guilt and feeling triggered that I only ever felt horrible.  Now I don't feel like I'm consigned to that for the rest of my life.  I feel that there's a possibility of being liberated from it.