Healing from Harm and Unlearning Violence

“I just want to know,” Mack paused and took a moment to ask what was in his heart, “how do I live with the stigma of being a murderer?” Mack was on the brink of tears. His face was red with vulnerability. Serving twenty-five to life, this man in his mid thirties was participating in a dialogue between victims and offenders at San Quentin State Prison in California. He had just finished revealing the details of his crime thirteen years earlier and was left with more truthful questions about the meaning of his life.

On the surface, Mack had just “taken accountability” for the violence he had committed. But in the deeper poetry of accountability, Mack held the pieces of his life in his hands, felt each for texture, and placed them on the table. Then, in the nakedness of truth, he began the painful journey of fitting them together until the real picture of his life unfolded in a circle of ten incarcerated men, three facilitators, and three victims of violent crimes in the room.

In this exercise, offenders meet with “surrogate” victims—real victims, but of harm caused by other offenders. I was one of three victims serving a surrogate role. Before Mack spoke, I had just finished explaining how childhood sexual abuse had stunted my emotional development. I talked about the years I had spent unlearning patterns I had adopted at age six for survival, and the grueling process of learning new patterns in my twenties and thirties. I told the group I still have trouble trusting men; that I still shove my feelings inside and, like an untended pressure cooker, I explode periodically onto the closest bystander, an emotional event that has cost me many meaningful relationships.

Offenders and Victims Talk Face-to-Face

For many, the moment when a victim and an offender come together is a peak moment of a restorative process. This is the moment when the victims express how they were harmed and what they need today and the offenders take accountability for their crimes. But what is all of the “invisible” work that comes before this moment? For me it’s a commitment to confronting negative behaviors and stunted emotional growth that originated in my childhood. And for the “offenders”—what does it take for them to truly articulate their crime and its impact? What does it mean to make accountability not a buzzword but a solid foundation for a life path? Can one engage in processes of accountability without healing, and shouldn’t they be connected?

Perpetuation by Darius White. Prisma Pencil.

True accountability can’t be faked. True accountability requires an offender to commit to entering those deep, dark, scary, shut-down places and attempt to heal. Healing is hard work. There is nothing easy about finding a new relationship to unresolved trauma in one’s life. There is nothing easy about picking apart how exactly one is locked into the emotions and thinking of a child. There is no simple or singular way out of feelings of shame and humiliation from childhood experiences of abuse or poverty. And for some offenders, what does it take to confront the structural oppression and the historical legacy of colonialism, slavery, immigration, war, or genocide that are lodged in their bodies?

When offenders can see how all of the pieces of their past fit together, they can connect the dots of their life that led up to a crime and experience accountability in a deeply embodied way. There is a saying in this work: “the only way out is through.” It means the way to self-liberation, the way to hold the stigma of murder, to reclaim one’s rightful place in humanity, to repair relationship to community, is to commit to “doing the work” of healing. In restorative justice, we need to embrace all of the important restorative processes—in particular the lifelong work of healing that victims, offenders, and people in the community need to undertake in order to repair.

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