selfishactivist | For the last two years, I’ve been actively and covertly being bullied by a group of people who have been engaging in accountability abuse and smears about me in various local communities around Montreal and the general area of the Pacific North West.
This has resulted in the loss of relationships with colleagues and clients, as well as work and income that went along with those relationships, including more recently being asked to step away from facilitation at an ancestral skills gathering, after smears reached some of their stakeholders.
During this time, I’ve also suffered from debilitating chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and vertigo during this period, which has been profoundly affected by the bullying. I’m luckily more resourced, in both a psycho-emotional sense and financial sense, than other people in my community, but I know many people in my community would not have been so lucky and ended up permanently traumatized.
As I am coming out of the worst of my condition, I feel like finally have the energy to address these matters more actively and take the responsibility to protect myself and the people who are connected to my work.
I want to specify that this note is a call for accountability from those who have bullied me, with the understanding that accountability is a path to repair.
Here, I want to share with you how I define what has been happening to me as accountability abuse and a form of defamation.
In the more-than-a-year period of constant secretive communications of projections and fabrications about me being spread in my local communities, I have received no direct contact or engagement from any core parties about the actual claims of me, and therefore no due process, no clarification, and no attempt at verification, all the while I have suffered massive damage to my mental health and relationships.
The innate lack of transparency and accountability of these claims defines what I refer to as accountability abuse – abuses of power that happen under the pretense of holding someone accountable for harm, which in turn abuses the spirit of accountability itself.
Adding to this problematic dynamic has been that the many community members who were engaged by this campaign, many of whom are organizers with ample social capital, would tell me that they cannot share who the claimants or what the claims are because they deserve to be protected, even while they pursued or enabled actions that harm me emotionally and financially.
My feelings about this are very clear: it is problematic for people to be able to say whatever they want about others under such protective anonymity AND have their claims validated through belief and action – it creates an extremely untransparent and unaccountable dynamic that is easily manipulated. For myself, I would love to see our communities adopt a standard that claims are deemed lacking actionable validity until they are specifically backed up by information such as who is the claimant and what they are claiming AND all parties are able to respond to transparent information.
Survivors 100% deserve trauma-informed attention and be heard, that is my core belief as a therapist, but we also need to be held responsible for having courage, in order to facilitate real healing and prevent traumatic patterns causing unnecessary harm through projection and fabrication. What I have seen over and over again is that, without such responsibility, survivor support turns into codependent coddling that reifies trauma.
0 comments:
Post a Comment