MY HISTORY
Why I Share This:
Our ancestors lived in small groups, and in those groups they knew everything about one another. This created an organic form of transparency, responsibility, and accountability that is painfully lacking from our modern world, especially with the anonymity of social media. More transparency and accountability is necessary for us to heal today, and part of this page is my effort to practice that. I believe that why we share is just as important as what we share, so this page is partially some of my history, and partially why I share this the way I do.
If you want to get to know me and understand my work better, I made a video specifically towards that goal. This video is probably the best way to understand who I am and why I do what I do. I suggest watching it before you proceed on this page.
(The only elements on this page that were not explained, probably better, in that video are some details of my own history of harm. Having watched that video, whether you agree with my choices or not, you now at least fully understand why I choose to share those here.)
Accountability is personal work, but it can only be done in relationship and community, and can only be done well in diverse community that centers impacted people. Towards that goal, my entire website has been read, edited, and approved by the people in my life who I am most accountable to, especially women and queer folks who are survivors of gendered violence. I share this not as a shield to hide behind them, but as one aspect of my effort to role-model accountability – my work here is not just my own, and it does not exist in isolation. It is undertaken in relation to my community, to whom I am accountable and responsible.
I undertook my initial efforts at accountability exclusively with other young men, and alone. Without the direct input from diverse communities of women who have experienced the harm I was working to address, I was approaching the work of healing from the same mindset that led me to cause harm in the first place. Similarly, for many years my “accountability” centered my shame and how horrible I was. This wasn’t constructive. That self-centeredness often reinforced an identity as “harmful” that created barriers to changing or healing, in a parallel to white guilt. In attempting accountability without recognizing the cycles that led me to cause harm, I was again over-centering myself at the expense of reality, and at the expense of seeing clearly enough to break these cycles of harm, in myself and in the next generations. My woundedness and the harm I cause are always interwoven. Of course, this work of contextualization and releasing shame can very easily slip into minimization, deflection, and excusal. In a related way, accountability must also include the work we’ve done- the work of humanizing people we’ve hurt, our partners, ourselves, and those who harmed us. This is dignifying, healing work that builds cyclically- the more we recognize our own wounds, the more we can see how we have hurt others, and the more we see how we’ve hurt others, the more we can see how wounded we are. This cycle leads us to see the separation from self and from humanity that led us to cause harm in the first place. So simply stating the harm we’ve caused without sharing any of our process to heal is actively misleading. But overemphasizing our healing work risks again minimizing our harm.
So I am walking a tightrope in this work- on one side I risk engaging in performative, self-limiting self-flagellation and shame, locking myself into the harmful cycles I am identifying with. On the other side, I weaponize context, “releasing shame,” and healing in a way that dodges or minimizes the gravity of the harm I’ve caused. I’m guaranteed to slip to one side or the other, and because of how sensitive and personal my work is, my slips are guaranteed to polarize opinions. This page and account is alive and in process- developing as I am.
You may have heard things about me that concerned you. Even if you have no idea who I am, it’s worth understanding some of my history so that you can get a glimpse into where my work and perspective comes from. Many people have found my public work and offerings valuable, and sometimes some of those people feel betrayed when they learn that I’ve caused harm. I understand that sentiment, and for me, the harm that I have caused and my work in healing it is what informs the perspective that many people find valuable. I share what I do in the hopes that others might learn from my mistakes, and that their learning might be much less expensive to their partners, communities, and themselves than mine was. So I offer this brief history towards the goal of deeper clarity and community healing, and so that you might know me better. If you care about community, better understanding how to support people with problematic histories, or about me personally; this is written for you. I hope that it brings us all closer to collective truth and health.
History
[This page contains brief descriptions of sexual violence and suicidality, shaded in red.]
My elder sisters, who are ten and twelve years older than I am, are all staunch feminists. They gave me a deep sense of feminism and critical theory from an early age, and not recognizing the insidious patterns that I had inherited from my father and culture, I considered myself a good feminist ally as a young man. I talked a really good game, and my theory was good.
But I grew up in a violently physically abusive home, and my father was an abusive addict. He held classic 1950s patriarchal household values, and in conjunction with his two PhDs in therapy, this made him a dangerously manipulative and controlling person, who I lived in constant fear and admiration of. I inherited his patterns of addiction and violence, and have spent all of my adult life working to heal from those wounds. I also inherited his deep insecurity and need for external validation.
This combination of my father’s wounds and my sister’s good rhetoric made me all the more dangerous, because I spoke like a safe person but because of my unhealed wounds, I was not. I had a deep emotional need to be seen as a good lover or to be sexually desirable, and this lead me to push my partner’s boundaries in ways that crossed the line into sexual assault.
I had a pattern of consent violation. For a decade after being called out for this pattern, I did not respond publicly, I just undertook the work of healing in private. I think that was initially a good instinct. Over time, however, my loud silence, in conjunction with other things, also came from a place of self-pity, and it’s become clear that allowing rumors and exaggerations to grow is deeply harmful to the broader communities that I am a part of, to my relationships, to my spouse, and to myself. So, here is a summary of my history from ages 17 to 23, (when I was made aware of these patterns, and healing from them became a top priority in my life up through the present.)
- I ignored my partner’s overt body cues and lay on top of her on the floor, effectively pinning her and kissing her until she got so tense that I finally understood that she was not interested and we sat up, at which point she started crying and ran from the house.
- I was hanging out with one of my friends and we had been flirting a little and I hugged her. We talked for a minute or two, and she told me that she was not sure she wanted to kiss, so we talked for another couple minutes and then I leaned over and kissed her anyway.
- A friend and I were kissing, and things were getting more intimate. We had both been checking for consent, and we were exploring power play, by which I mean that she would pin me down and put her hands on my throat, and then we would switch and I would do the same to her. At one point, I was on top of her and decided to go down on her without asking. She became stiff and tense, and I eventually stopped.
- On several occasions, my partners and I have agreed to have sex using condoms. After a while, I would initiate sex without a condom, and if they did not object, we would have sex without a condom.
Given both this pattern and my daily alcohol addiction at the time, I am sure there are other events like these that I remain unaware of. This pattern was first brought to my attention by a close friend in my early twenties. I remember how indescribably hard it was to rectify my identity as a feminist and a safe person with the facts that I had harmed people I cared about. In order to excavate and understand our wounds, we invited a few other men and started a men’s group to explore some of these patterns in ourselves. We practiced sharing vulnerability, accountability, and healing through radical honesty in order to reduce our harmful impacts.
Work
In the fifteen years since then, working on addressing these issues has become central to my life and work. I spent five years informing all new potential partners of my history and my efforts to address it. I volunteered at Women’s and Children’s Boundaries and Personal Defense classes. I attended a lot of classes on Consent, and I realized how little I’d been taught about communication, power, and consent- basically nothing. So in the schools that I taught in, I began working with young people to support them in gaining skills, perspectives, and mindsets that I lacked in order to further interrupt and minimize the cycles of harm that I was learning to see more clearly in myself and my culture. I’ve spent many years in therapy, and many years in various men’s and masculinities groups.
When I was in my late twenties, after 12 years of daily alcohol and drug abuse, I got clean and sober. Since then, I’ve seen ever more clearly how overwhelming the co-occurrence of drug/alcohol use and consent violations are, and were in my life.
Through mutual contacts and professional mediation services (and occasionally directly, which I would not do again and strongly recommend against- this was another harm that I caused,) I reached out to people I had harmed and offered to take part in process, if that would be helpful to them. Some wanted to engage in that work with me, and that has led to some powerful healing. Others have not. Those invitations remain open.
I taught people that I was unsafe; that I was a dangerous and duplicitous person who weaponized the language of allyship to gain proximity that I then exploited. As a direct result of my behavior, they believe that I am dangerous.
There is a group of people, the majority of whom I have never met, who believe and frequently vociferously state that I am a violent serial rapist. In the sense that all sexual violence is violence, that it was a recurring patten, and that by one definition I am a rapist. The phrase “violent serial rapist,” however, brings up for most people a very, very different picture than any reality of my past. As part of my own healing work and efforts to heal community wounds that I have contributed to, I have reached out to this group of people on many occasions; through mutual contacts, through professional mediation services, and through public acknowledgement and apology for my past harms and an invitation to process if it was desired. While this group of people has not had any interest in such processes, their energy has gone into efforts to convince social circles, businesses, and websites that I should be canceled.
Language really matters. The last thing I want to do is invalidate anyone’s experience, or prescribe any language. There are people who feel upset with me for not naming myself as a rapist, and simultaneously there are survivors in my personal circles who tell me that it’s actively harmful to them and minimizing of their experiences for me to use any language like to that describe my history. It’s nuanced and tricky. Regardless of what words you personally ascribe to me, I hope this sheds some light on why I stay away from labels entirely, and simply share my past as clearly as I can. My transparency is intended to help everyone share an accurate and complete understanding of my past, without dodging details or misusing labels.
Because my work for many years has been public, directing non-profits and such, I’ve been put on pedestals and knocked off them many times. It’s been an amazing opportunity for self-reflection. It’s also been incredible fuel to force me to learn and practice the depths of self-love that are so often inaccessible to men in our culture. It’s taken me a long time, but I’m at a place where I’m really grateful for some of the misconceptions that people hold about me. They have forced me to really unflinchingly examine myself, and learn who I am. The misconceptions force me to constantly ask: “Who am I? How am I what these people say? How am I not? Where is the truth of my own history, and my own present? How are these old patterns emerging today?”
I remain more deeply sorry for the harm that I have caused in my life than I could ever express, and I wish all of us all the healing in the world.
Evolution of Woundedness
CW: suicide ideation
The support of men’s groups, therapy, family, and friends through this process is the only reason I’m still alive. That’s not hyperbole. I spent years regularly drunkenly sobbing, tasting the barrel of my gun. I have weighed carefully whether I was too wounded or harmful to live. I asked challenging questions: As someone who has caused harm, what justifies my continued existence? Why am I here at all? I believe that these are very healthy questions, even if I spent many years asking them in a very unhealthy way. Much of the work that I do now is to try and help other young men to face these questions in less harmful ways. To spare other young men the decade of cripplingly depressed, suicidal, alcoholic self-loathing that I went through; partially because it’s indescribably horrible and partially because it is simply one, long hindrance to the self-love and forgiveness that are necessary to actually shift the patterns of harm that our self-loathing and distance from self is built on.
Unfortunately, learning about sexual consent does not erase all of one’s childhood programming around relationships that are also reinforced societally. So, my patterns of misogynistic violence have found ever-more subtle ways of expressing in my relationships, and long after I stopped actively hurting my partners in bed, I continued hurting them in ways that were evolving expressions of those same patterns.
Given the fact that my patterns of violence are well-known now, my behavior is always under a microscope in my local community; as it should be. The ways in which I have harmed partners in the last decade have looked like:
- Not communicating key information about what I am doing, in a way that is disrespectful or outright deceitful.
- Not communicating in a timely fashion, or at all, and otherwise disrespecting my partner’s time
- Not thinking ahead to the obvious emotional impacts that my choices and actions might have on my partner
- Avoiding conversations that I think will upset my partner, in ways that make small things wildly more problematic and hurtful
- Generally being more focused on my own needs and preferences than those of my partner
Within my marriage, my only romantic relationship for some five year now, these patterns look like:
- A lack of persistent awareness of my own positionality in culturally mixed spaces
- A use of language in ways that perpetuates patriarchal norms by subtly ascribing myself too much authority
- Not dignifying myself in outside relationships with community in ways that leave more work to my spouse
These behaviors are continuations of the same patterns of dehumanization, disrespect and selfishness that were the root of my more explicit harms in my late teens and early twenties, which are iterations of the same systematic dehumanization of women that our culture normalizes. This has been the heart of my work for many years. It was my struggle to shift these patterns that led me to take a year of conscientious celibacy some five years ago, which was profoundly healing. That year put me in a place of the best mental health I’ve ever been in, positioning me to engage in my marriage, which I very much hope to be in for the rest of my life. I look forward to continuing to heal and grow, and I’m deeply grateful for the support that has brought me to this point. Foremost in that, I am grateful to my wife, whose parallel, reciprocal growth and support is foundational to my being able to do this work in the way that I am today. My work today also involves a lot of excavation of white supremacy- my spouse is Indigenous and their perspective and the work they invite me into is very much at the intersection of my internalized white supremacy and patriarchy.
Community and personal support have taken many forms, and I would not be where I am without them. Sometimes it takes some work to get through the layers of what community members offer me to uncover the support, though. While it is healthy for a community to keep an eye on people working to heal from patterns of harm, it can also get exhausting. The “Lightning-rod effect” of being identified as a “problematic person” leads many people to interpret all of my behavior through the most aggressively critical lens; i.e. behaviors such as not responding to texts in a respectful timeline are viewed as normal or just annoying in most people, but when they occur in someone with known problematic history, they are immediately viewed as a manipulative or abusive.
It is a beautiful and ongoing challenge to take this level of hypercritical interpretation as fuel for growth. That growth has led to a constant refining of my community, where I have had to create space between my family and people who can only see me as the worst of my past. That practice of boundaries is one aspect of growth, and I wish I had learned it sooner. By trying to stay in relationship with people who could only see me twenty years ago, I caused harm to them and to myself.
The practice of the level of transparency and attempt at accountability I undertake on this page guarantees a wide range of responses. I struggle with this, and it’s one place where I continue to defer to the women I’m closest to and most accountable to who are survivors of parallel harm. I know that I’m working to strike a challenging balance, and I respect the fact that not everyone will agree with where I land in that work.
As I said in the beginning, this is part of my attempt to take accountability for my past. More specifically, it’s an attempt to do so without the self-centered shame that I practiced and I see many men practicing. Shame, in my experience, is generally antithetical to healing. And, I understand how the absence of shame in accountability work can be triggering for people. For years, it was impossibly triggering for me to hear anyone talk about having caused harm without them expressing overt shame and self-judgment. It can feel like describing harm that we’ve caused in these ways without overtly judging, shaming, and dehumanizing ourselves is a minimization of the gravity of our impacts. Personally, I’ve found that it was the shame and dehumanization that were, in fact, minimizations of harm. They allowed me to bemoan what a horrible person I was, without ever actually healing, let alone doing anything to help anyone else heal.
Part of my growth these days is reflected in my work and this page, which changes occasionally as I do. If you’ve encountered critiques of this page and how I present myself before (date), they were of a previous iteration- here’s a link to that old version.
Who am I accountable to?
Accountability is a complicated word today, especially on social media. We seem to carry our ancestral instinct that we should all be wholly accountable to one another, which made perfect sense in small villages, into the world of global social media, and that gets muddy. There will always be people who disagree with anyone who speaks on the internet, and that is especially true when we are talking about issues as sensitive and personal as gendered violence and sexual assault. So for my own sanity, I’m very explicit about my practices of accountability, where they start and where they stop. For me, I practice accountability with the people closest to me. This includes my wife, my therapist, and my very closest circle of friends and family. Many of these people are survivors of SA/DV, and some are professionals in the field. I bounce my decisions, criticisms I receive, and this website off of them. These people are the first to tell me when my integrity does not meet their shared standards. If someone shares a critique of me that brings something up for me, I take a hard look at who I want to be. I also bring it to the people I’m accountable to, and shift until I’m in alignment with my own integrity, as measured and confirmed by their perspectives. This keeps me from drifting too far from integrity with myself and my community, and means that when I am off, it’s nowhere near as far off these days as I was two decades ago. It is because of the fact that I’m held and supported in these close ways that I feel confident and comfortable in what I share publicly. This doesn’t mean I’ll never get anything wrong or say anything hurtful- I will and do. It means that I’m in process and committed to returning to integrity with myself and my community to whom I am accountable. And of course, there are still many people, mostly online, who feel that this is insufficient or inappropriate, and believe that I am unaccountable. This brings us to the different meanings of the word “accountable.” This word is used in a lot of different ways these days; I’ll just share what I mean by it. When I say that someone is accountable, what I mean is that their account is sufficient for my standards or understanding. Since we all have different standards, this means that the same person will be considered accountable by some and not by others. My standard of accountability is with my close personal circle and chosen community.
Critiques
These days, I get messages every day from people about this website and my content. The overwhelming majority of them are from young men who are facing their own patterns for the first time, and they are heart-wrenching. I often find myself, because of the page you are reading, being the first person that many young men feel safe reaching out to about having hurt people close to them. I hope that their contact with me and my work helps the future partners of those young men to experience less harm. I get far, far more messages than I would ever have dreamed from young men telling me that they were attempting suicide until they encountered my content, often specifically the page you are reading. Many messages are also from women who, from the descriptions I share of my past harms, are facing for the first time that they are survivors. They thought, like I used to think, that the behaviors I described were simply “normal” sexuality. And I get some generally well-intentioned concern that the stories on this page aren’t mine to share or that I’m minimizing the harm I’ve caused.
So holding these pieces, to whom am I accountable, on a global scale? Am I accountable to these young men, these women, and their families? Am I accountable to the young women in these wounded young men’s futures, who may include your daughters? Am I less accountable to them than I am to people I harmed two decades ago? And, in another sense, I can never take responsibility for all the messages I get, for all the overwhelming need expressed in them. If there were ten of me, I couldn’t respond to them all, let alone with the attention, love, and support they deserve. I use the income from my content and work to expand both my capacity to offer more healing work and to support my wife’s work. Sharing the details of my past actively helps men heal, and that reduces future harm to the women they will encounter. That reduction of harm is my priority, and it’s more important to me than anything else. And, as a survivor of both domestic and sexual violence, if anyone who has assaulted me wants to share the details of their behavior as part of their harm reduction and in order to reduce future harm, I wholeheartedly support that. That’s my practice of integrity.
And I get a fair amount of generally much more aggressive and critical communication from the right, to the tune of “you’re selling out men” and “you’re pandering to women by showcasing your feminism and so-called growth.” To the men who feel this way, I would ask a different question: What do you feel is the nature of the “masculinity” which I am selling out? By which I mean- if you conceive of your masculinity as tough or strong, how is it that my voice can threaten that, any more than me saying that an oak tree is weak does not make it any less strong? If it is actually as tough and strong as we were taught to believe, then one man speaking about healing masculinity, or vulnerable masculinity, should have no effect at all. So what is it in my words that evokes the desire to write and tell me how wrong I am with such passion?
I share this because being the only one receiving all these communications gives me a unique perspective on the impacts of sharing my history the way I do here. The scope and trends of the communications I receive inform how I think of the impacts of this website, so I mention them here in the hope that they also help you see this page a little more holistically. I respect a diversity of opinions and tactics, and I wanted to honor some of the critiques that this page receives by naming them here, and naming I have considered all of these questions with the people I am accountable to.
If the people who feel that I could do my work better have any interest in hearing my suggestion to them, it would be this: Show me. It is so incredibly easy to tear apart people who are doing anything different. Show me how you think it should be done. If you’re white, show me your website outlining vulnerably the harms and growth of your white privilege. If you’re a man, show me how to practice holistic accountability in a way that helps young men heal and minimizes harm. Send me your work, I would genuinely love to see it.
Because of my positionality and my platform, I’m in a constant practice of discernment and balance. The women & fem queer folk I practice accountability with and I feel that this is a time when men who are prepared to do so should practice public accountability, and share the messiness of our harm and healing so that the next generations of men can learn from our mistakes. This page is not an end point, for me or for anyone. So I promise to disappoint you. And- I commit to returning to my own accountability circles and always working to be in integrity with my values and beliefs, and this page is in service of the healing of masculinity and the minimization of harm.