Accountability is not moral achievement but somatic capacity
Becoming Conflict Secure
Accountability is not a moral achievement. It is somatic capacity.
If love is a practice, and accountability is practicing love, then accountability, too, is a practice — not a virtue, not a stance, not a performance.
People ask me all the time: How do we practice being more accountable?
And my answer is always the same: it inevitably starts with material conditions.
It is incredibly hard to be accountable when you don’t know where you’ll sleep tonight, or how you’ll feed your kids next week. A nervous system in survival mode cannot prioritize repair.
And yet, material safety alone does not create accountability.
I’ve seen people with immense resources live in a constant state of scarcity. Because safety is not only objective — it is experienced. There is the reality we live in, and there is the reality we believe we are allowed to live in. I’ve written a full series of essays about The Somatics of Scarcity, so I won’t go further into this here, but feel free to read it here.
This is where things get uncomfortable, but this needs to be said too:
We cannot hold others accountable. We can only hold ourselves accountable. This is something I have to keep coming back to. I have to regularly stop myselves from believing that over-explaining, proving or convincing are normal parts of a relationship.
Often, when people say “holding someone accountable,” what they actually mean is punishing them. We can call people in. We can be honest, clear, and kind. We can name impact, set boundaries, and withdraw consent. But we cannot force accountability in another person.
Our inability to accept — and grieve — that truth is one of the reasons we have invested so much of our collective energy into punishment rather than into building the conditions that make accountability possible. Imagine our world if, instead of pouring endless money into prisons and police departments, we invested it in collective, free, educative systems—systems that taught us how to pause, take a breath, and listen when our whole body is saying no, before we say yes out of fear, habit, or survival.
Imagine if we were taught that a no is not a threat, not a rejection, not a referendum on our worth, not an invitation for domination—but a beautiful form of connection.
Imagine if we learned to hear our loved ones’ no’s as invitations to relate more truthfully, rather than as stories about being unwanted, unlovable, or disposable.
Imagine the harm that would never happen—not because people were perfect, but because they could feel their feelings fully and knew they had a choice beyond turning those feelings into someone else’s pain.
Imagine if we stopped telling ourselves and each other that this level of harm is simply what it means to be human.
What I’ve learned working with harm-doers—which is all of us—is that violence doesn’t start with cruelty. It stars when somatically, the body loses the capacity to feel grief, fear, anger, or sadness without discharging it onto others; when, relationally, those unheld emotions become control, withdrawal, or blame, instead of connection; and when, politically, society fails to teach us how to feel and hold complex emotions without exporting pain as violence or punishment down the ladder of power.
I’ll say it again and again: trauma is not what happens to us, it is the space between us.
If you’re interested in more reading about Becoming Conflict Secure:
I have written plenty of essays about this topic on Substack like this one.
I wrote plenty of (free and not free) resources & zines about Becoming Conflict Secure, or Embodied Transformative Justice, like this one.
Stay ungovernable,
Care