How to reduce neurological distress:

The Neurology of Accountability

[originally published on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-reduce-neurological-distress-k-noel-amherd-m-a-ph-d--c52dc/]

I am a practitioner of Restorative Justice and have facilitated multiple dialogues between the targets of violent harm and the person responsible. Most of these have occurred in prison settings where the person who did harm is incarcerated for that crime. My work in Restorative Justice has shown me some aspects of our human condition:

• Harm is a kind of relationship that bonds people through pain

• Since harm is born from relationship, so is healing

• Both parties are wounded from the violence and each has a capacity to provide a unique healing to one another

• Something is exchanged in acts of violence and harm and healing compels another exchange from a shared desire to end suffering

The greatest wounds we have in life come from relationship so the potential for greatest healing comes from relationships with accountability. In retributive systems like law, accountability implies the intentional infliction of pain, deprivation, or suffering because it’s said to be deserved (which is a definition of punishment, by the way). Someone responsible for harm doesn’t have to own their action in a legal system nor will those harmed have much if any voice. The law monopolizes the process in the name of a victim in order to focus punishing an offender.

From a restorative point of view, accountability means someone responsible will:

1)        own their part,

2)        listen to the impacts of their actions directly from the person/s harmed, and

3)        be willing to fulfil whatever needs and requests are made by the harmed as a way of making amends.

Some dismiss this as soft. In my trainings, I ask each attendee to consider the number of betrayals, abandonments, or harms we’ve done and how it feels thinking of meeting those we’ve hurt face-to-face so they can tell me the impact of what I did. I’ve had folks say to me that it’s easier to face a judge giving 25-to-life than to sit across from the person they harmed.

The aspiration of Restorative Justice is to heal, to make things as right as possible, and transform the root causes giving rise to harm. While retribution focuses on and punishes individuals, restorative accountability can be seen as concentric circles expanding outwardly emphasizing the ecology of relationships in which we each actually live. If we want different outcomes, we have to change the obdurate relationships we’re in.

Research shows that lack of accountability produces illness to both the body and mind. If we look at shame and guilt, studies have shown an increase in depression and anxiety, while the body reacts to shame with an inflammatory response as if having been physically wounded ( Martinez, M. E. (2016). The mindbody code : how to change the beliefs that limit your health, longevity, and success. Sounds True). Victimization produces a cascade of ill effects as is well documented in the body of trauma research. Unaccountable harm persists as a type of wound between people/s producing negative mental and physical health outcomes. (https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html;https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6603306/; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3181727/; https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/grandmas-experiences-leave-a-mark-on-your-genes; DeGruy J. (2005). Post traumatic slave syndrome: America's legacy of enduring injury and healing. Baltimore: Uptone.)

Harmed and harmer need healing. Yes, one can work on healing alone, yet each can provide a healing for the other that is unique. The fulcrum rests on taking full responsibility by the one who has done harm. Revenge lives in the absence of accountability.

Problematically, this country promotes an absence of accountability. And the more power people have, the less accountable they are while doing more harm. Studies show that systems that promote inequality and consolidation of power produce a kind of venality in those at the top. (https://www.prisonexp.org/; https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/from-psychopaths-to-everyday-sadists-why-do-humans-harm-the-harmless/#.)

Their greed-is-good justifications cause them to see those with less power and resources as less than themselves and even as less than human. A system like this creates a class structure of manufactured sociopathy. Such deviance itself ripples outward producing illnesses of body and mind throughout the society. (Wilkinson, R. G., & Pickett, K. (2010). The Spirit Level : Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury.; Bezruchka, S. (2022). Inequality Kills Us All. Taylor & Francis.; Freudenberg, N. (2021). At What Cost: Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.)

And to make the necessary point for our times, unaccountable deviance produces disease within the systems of life itself. Latest research is showing how a majority of life sustaining systems on Earth are close to tipping points. (https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/output/infodesk/tipping-elements; https://earth.org/tipping-points-of-climate-change/; https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021RG000757)

These harms have sources. These harms have been granted impunity. Those with the most power and benefit from these harms are unaccountable.

While global in scale, the response I want to focus on however is something right underneath each of us – the fact of our feet on Earth. Bringing attention to your connection with lands and soil on which you live is the restorative dialogue between you, Earth, and healing. As the womb of all organisms and the tomb to which we return life’s building blocks, we receive healing when we connect to Earth’s constant support of life’s relational balance for all beings. And in turn, Earth can receive healing as we acknowledge her need for our responsibility to restore and maintain relational balance for all beings. And something as apparently simple as repeatedly sitting on a small patch of soil can become a re-attunement of your relationship with Earth as a kind of healing for both of you.

As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. But healed people heal people. So now we need healing people healing the ecology of reticulated relations for the benefit of all life, the other-than-humans as much as humans.

As BEHOLDEN, Jared and I are engaged in the creation of learning opportunities to address these conditions and others in our lives. Sign up for our January course, Nature and The Nervous System, as we re-attune accountability with the lands where we live. Visit our website www.thebeholden.com for more information on our efforts and future courses.