Accountability from a Survivor’s Perspective

An interview with JAC Patrissi

JAC Patrissi is a bit of a celebrity to many of us who do accountability in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. A survivor of domestic and sexual violence, JAC has dedicated much of her life to making this world safer for others. She is the co-founder of Growing A New Heart, which is a nonprofit collective that fosters respectful relationships and community healing. She also co-founded A Call for Change, the first warmline for people who have caused harm and the template upon which The Spark, Violence Prevention Warmline, was created. 

JAC is a powerhouse, but more importantly, she’s at the cutting edge of accountability work. She doesn’t just do the work. She leads the way and turns on all the lights so the rest of us can see better. She is a true visionary in this work, which is why The Spark Connection wanted to talk to her about why working with people who have caused harm is so important. 

Why a Survivor Works with People Who Have Caused Harm

Before jumping into the topic, it’s important to understand why JAC does this work. She didn’t jump in because she had a lifelong desire to work with folks who had physically or sexually harmed others. She is a survivor herself and was working at the Vermont Network against Domestic and Sexual Violence. “I was sent to a meeting because the person who was supposed to be at the meeting was out,” she says, “and it was a time when they were re-looking at the standards that were used for what was called batterer intervention at the time.” 

On her way to the meeting, JAC said out loud to the office “I don't do batterer intervention. All my time and talent is for survivors, because I've given enough personal time over the course of my young life to working with people who cause harm, and I'm not giving any more!” But she went to the meeting, and she found the conversation so disturbing she had to speak up.

“And you know, when you speak up, you end up with a job,” she says with a wry smile. But it was that initial meeting that drew her to the transformative work that she does. It was then that she rolled up her sleeves and said “okay, then, we're gonna look at this question, which is so important to survivors.” She was referring to the question of what standards accountability work should meet, and one thing she knew was this: “It should be done in a way that is rooted in survivor's wisdom.” 

How Accountability Work Is Survivor-Centered

One concern that has been voiced by many about accountability work is that it could take away from the work done directly for survivors. JAC remembers how she felt when people talked about “supporting people who cause harm” so she doesn’t use that language. Instead, she talks about supporting the conditions for people to become reliably safe, which helps survivors “because survivors should not be suffering the consequences of people not having the conditions to become reliably safe.”

Striking a Balance between Compassion and Accountability

One of the concepts that JAC teaches and works with is compassionate accountability. A phrase she often uses to encapsulate the concept is that “compassion without accountability is collusion. Accountability without compassion is domination.”

According to JAC, the sequence to opening the door of accountability begins with compassion. And “it's helpful to have community members and other folks doing transformative work because it's not fair to ask someone who's directly impacted (a survivor) to lead with compassion to open the doorway to the other's accountability.” 

JAC sees this as deep, transformational work that requires her to notice how the client is behaving in relationships and create a sequence of inquiries that allows them to learn from their own answers. These inquiries also have to come from profound connection, and in order to do that, she sometimes has to work through the rage and frustration that arise while she’s listening to their stories and find a place inside herself where she can meet them with deep care and compassion. She calls this her “field of peace.” 

Why This Work Must be Done with the Heart

JAC is clear that this is not brain work. “People have to feel you,” she says.  “That's part of creating the conditions. They have to feel that this is not an intellectual exercise about doing what's right and forgiving. They have to feel my heart struggling with its own humanity, and that I truly believe that they can do this, and what it's going to take is not going to be easy, and I know it's not going to be easy.”

“The feeling is the threshold to the healing, and grief is the doorway,” she says. “If you want to create something new, something healing, if you want to expand, you're going to feel profound grief.” The grief she describes is about letting go of beliefs and behaviors, but on a deeper level, it’s about letting go of who you were so that you can truly transform and become new. 

Could This Work Be Enabling?

When asked how she deals with people who might use manipulation to protect themselves from accountability, JAC says “even the best manipulators will become immensely bored with our line,” she says, referring to A Call for Change. “Since they don't know what change really sounds like or feels like,” JAC says, “the conversation peters out. They don't have any of the answers that show actual movement.” 

So, what does movement look like? How is accountability identified when it shows up in conversation? According to JAC, it takes a while “because first there's the minimizing, denying, and blame shifting. Then they have to get through the experience of shame and through that doorway until they're really actually feeling the impact that is not reflected through [other people’s perception of them]. They have to get through that process before the accountability starts.” After all of that, JAC describes a shift in the process where they begin to grieve who they thought they were. It is at this point, where people really begin to grow and the growth is not linear. It’s messy and takes time. 

How Does a Warmline Measure Success?

The path to accountability is long and arduous and the warmline is anonymous, so one might wonder what success looks like for the warmline and how they measure impact. After five years in service, JAC says they’ve found that despite the anonymity, responders get to know callers through their stories and connections and are able to follow the trajectory of individuals as they reach greater levels of awareness. “It's really rewarding when a couple years later, they'll be like ‘I did it! I told the truth and they left me and that's good for me.’”

Despite the wins, accountability work is difficult. It’s emotional. It requires you to connect deeply with others, which can be beautiful and yet painful at times. And yet people like JAC are passionate about doing it. For JAC, the work is very personal and though she entered in as a survivor, she has other reasons for putting her energy into this space. 

“I think of the end of my father's life,” she says. “He’d had a lengthy, debilitating illness. I did my part to manage his care and visit for years, all while juggling a young family. At the very last stage of his life, I remember the moment a nurse approached me in the waiting room. She said, ‘You’ve done all you can do. Your dad is in good hands now.’ I felt deeply how much she was acknowledging that I wanted him to be cared for and also, that this next part required something more and that it was not a role I could fulfill. 

“This makes me think of brothers and sisters, other family, and close friends who care about a person who is causing harm. It makes me think of partners or ex-partners who have really done all that they can do. They have no doubt tried to reach this person in so many ways. 

What we don't have is a robust network of people saying, ‘You have done all that you can do. They’re in good hands now. We’ve got this.’

"It’s not that being abusive is an illness—it’s that it takes a whole community of people with deep skill and practice to hold others in effective compassionate accountability.” 

For JAC, this is the most important piece, to lift the complex work of creating conditions for accountability and change from the hands of survivors, where it never belonged, and to put it in the hands of a deeply trained community, where it does belong. Her hope is that those who may not feel drawn to this work may still be able to recognize the benefit to survivors of having more capable hands in which we can entrust those who have caused so much harm.