Episode 26 - Agony Letter: The Thing That Cracks Us Open

CW: brief mention of suicidal ideation 

Oh my god, we are so back! As with everyone, this has been a year of hell, or lead paint, or whatever, and I have only been able to release a few episodes. But let me tell you, I am sitting on a few waiting to be edited and have plans for more, getting back into a regular production.

For this episode, I invited the beautiful Dean Spade to respond to a listener letter with me. He has started up a podcast in the wake of his book, with the same name Love in a Fucked Up World, where has been discussing relationships and giving advice about how we can fight and love together better.

This letter came from someone who had a terrible experience with an accountability process and over the years this has caused them to become disenchanted with the ideas of transformative justice, prefigurative politics, community and life . . . It has gotten really bad for them. As Dean has many years of experience with TJ and accountability process, working with different groups in figuring out how to address conflicts, dealing with conflicts in his own groups, I thought that he would be a perfect person to think this through with.

We aren’t able to solve the letter writer’s problem of course, but we explore all the ways that it becomes difficult to deal with conflict, to lose faith in accountability and any kind of movement work, and how inability to figure out relationship issues derail us. We discuss the emotional spaces that all of these issues take us into, the trauma and pain we bring into each room, and the ways we get stuck perceiving others’ perceptions of us.

I personally share a kind of pessimism on accountability with the letter writer (as you may know if you’ve read some of my work), while Dean offers a more capacious understanding: that transformative justice describes any situation where we don’t involve cops, defer to any authority, and no one gets arrested. It isn’t based on the success so much as the attempts to address conflicts. In this way, many of the problems come from high expectations, lack in skills in conflict or mediation, and lingering liberal models.

Some of the advice we do offer pertains more to how someone can try to find healing in themselves and do a process, including grieving, even when people are disappointing them, even alone. As always, I come down to letting people go, letting them and yourself off the hook, and trying to find the simplest soothing such as a hand on your chest.

I hope that the writer takes something from this. Their letter is already very insightful about the issue, and so that seems to me to be a step, not towards a reenchantment, but perhaps something else.

Just to give another content warning, there is brief mention of suicidal ideation and suicide in the letter.

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