Feeling Your Feelings: Where Transformative Justice, Chaplaincy, and Recovery Converge
Photo caption: Picture of an original work of art by Pink Cat Daily I purchased in the Bay in 2019. Perhaps a snapshot of my previous sentiments about feelings. The image is of a cartoon-style pink cat standing up in yellow boots, puffy jacket and pointy, ribbed hat with puff ball on the end. The cat has their arms bent at the elbows flipping off the reader next to bold, yellow text “FUCK YO FEELINGS” where the letter I is in lowercase with a heart as the dot.
For four years, I was part of a Transformative Justice (TJ) collective in Tennessee, now known as TRANSFORM. TRANSFORM is facilitated by the state-wide reproductive justice nonprofit Healthy and Free Tennessee. We spent the first two years of the collective being trained on TJ elements, and understanding how to facilitate an accountability process. The latter two years were largely spent working in practices that ranged from actual accountability processes to more conflict resolution or container building efforts.
Joining the group was divine timing for me, I was searching for a movement home after uprooting from my hometown, Chicago, to pursue a chaplaincy degree at Vanderbilt University. I’d never lived anywhere else other than Chicago. This collective became a softer landing—somewhere I could stay rooted and deepen the spiritual organizing work that felt aligned with where I was growing personally and politically. It also was a sensemaking space where I could bridge divinity school learnings, personal care and past media-based organizing.
While pursuing my chaplaincy degree, I spent a year working inside the women's prison in Nashville conducting a weekly creative/recovery workshop and the next year as the first intern in the LGBTQ Health Program at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, providing queer spiritual and emotional care to patients seeking gender-affirming care. Parallel to this, I was getting serious about my emotional sobriety and addressing family cycles by fully committing to the 12-step group Adult Children of Alcoholics Anonymous (ACA). I’d gone to a handful of meetings in Chicago but wasn’t ready to do the work at the time. For the first time, I was physically distancing myself from my blood family—especially my mother—while learning how to regulate emotions in a way that neither numbed me nor overwhelmed me.
Emotional sobriety became a loud, common thread for me while learning how to facilitate a TJ process and while learning how to implement spiritual care. (In ACA emotional sobriety is being able to be present with all of my feelings without being defined or controlled by them. For greater context/clarification a lot of folks who go through substance-specific 12-step programs will graduate into ACA once they’ve stopped numbing with whatever their substance of choice was.) Combining the practices of 12 Step with the practices of TJ and queer spiritual care helped connect the personal, political and spiritual with the systemic harm, violence. Accepting there are external systems that shape our world—prisons, police, courts, surveillance—also meant accepting how those systems condition us to respond to harm, often in ways that deepen our own wounds. In addition to that conditioning, many of us carry personal histories of deep trauma—childhood wounds, betrayals, losses—that the punitive systems we live within feed off of. It’s its own kind of abusive relationship.
The role emotional sobriety plays in an accountability process really clicked for me during a 2023 guest training with facilitator Esteban Kelly, a co-creator of the Philly-based TJ group Philly Stands Up. In Kelly’s session, he shared the common barriers of an accountability process are emotions, empathy, and disorientation. It was as if he’d been sitting in on my divinity school classes or my recovery meetings. It was oddly comforting to know that whether in TJ, chaplaincy, or recovery, the same challenges kept surfacing: holding deep emotions without letting them take control, practicing empathy without self-abandonment, and staying grounded when everything felt destabilizing. For so many of us doing those first two things require a dismantling of internalized policing and interpersonal policing that is so counter to the society we swim in, feeling debilitated is a logical response.
So how do we foster a deep sense of self, extend grace to one another, and still move through the hard work of accountability when we’ve been harmed? Finding the answer to this feels as spiritual as it does political.
This piece is about what makes those three things so difficult and why working through them is essential for Transformative Justice—not just in theory, but in the everyday ways we show up for ourselves and each other.
Emotions: Feeling without Weaponizing OR Feeling Your Feelings
Emotions give insight into our needs, drive decision-making and foster connection with others. From pre-puberty to the time we hit 18, we’re developing emotional awareness and empathy. The later ages (12-18) is not only when we’re starting to form an independent identity, it's also when we establish emotional independence AND also deep empathy—where we can both understand and potentially feel what another person is experiencing.
These years were an incredibly volatile time in my life. A mix of abuse and being poor had me operating more like a co-pilot with my mother who took on her feelings and tried to fix them. At 12 I brought home a flyer for a bus driving job with the school district because my mother was finally divorcing my alcoholic father but didn’t have a job. I was helping her budget while also walking on eggshells to not ignite unpredictable emotional outbursts from her. I loved her deeply and was deeply terrified of her. Through therapy and recovery I have a better understanding of how these childhood traumatic experiences taught me to stuff down my own feelings, judge them or spend more time fixing others. Now as an adult when I’m having big feelings, say scared about why my car dashboard is lighting up and how expensive this might be, I can find myself snapping back to being a teenager panicking to find a solution. What I really needed was to sit down, take a deep breath and get back into the present moment. In ACA we call this moving from being a reactor (being triggered by historic trauma) to being an actor (rooting in the present moment to take meaningful action.)
Denying, numbing or avoiding feelings doesn’t make them go away; to some extent they get frozen in time. Breathing through the feeling and facing it, though hard at first, brings a release I never thought possible. But if we’ve experienced trauma as a child this could be incredibly scary to do.
I was holding this when hearing Esteban Kelly share why emotions are one of the common barriers in a TJ process, thinking, amen.
Photo Caption: Print image by @Navucko (found on instagram) with words by Lexy Florentina, a Trauma Trained Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Green text on pink background: “The opposite of trauma isn’t ‘healed’, it’s aliveness. The opposite of trauma isn’t ‘healed”, it’s connection. The opposite of trauma isn’t ‘healed’, it’s curiosity. The opposite of trauma isn’t ‘healed’, it’s play. The opposite of trauma isn’t ‘healed’, it’s presence. The opposite of trauma isn’t to find perfection, to become a contained or even calm version of ourselves. But rather, it’s where we begin to experience what couldn’t exist when all our body could do was survive. -Lexy Florentina”
Once a survivor and harmer agree to go through a TJ accountability process, the first step is to have a series of conversations, to hear each person’s account of the harm. The harmer and survivor each share their experiences with a support team-- the people who facilitate and witness their journey for the length of the process. These conversations can happen over many, hours-long conversations and that recounting can surface a range of emotional or emotionally avoidant reactions. Throughout the accountability process feelings will come up but it's in these early conversations that the tone is set for how they’ll be held and if the support team is a safe space to share them again. Sitting with people through these conversations felt kindred to the briefer moments of sitting in the hospital with patients pre or post-op. In one of the practices I co-facilitated, we adopted 12 Step agreements into our own practice agreements with the harmer we were supporting—no judgment and no fixing. In those first encounters or in the case of chaplaincy, possibly our only encounter, these tools are essential at building trust because they make space for what it means to be a messy-ass human.
In those early meetings it’s easy to let shame or self-pity override processing harm that you’ve committed to avoid any discomfort. Alternatively a desire to act quickly on accountability asks could emerge as a way to bypass that same feeling. As we got into a bit of a routine with our check-ins we’d start with just a general update and after the harmer shared what’d been going on in their life, we’d often ask how did that make you feel? It’s easy to list off things that have happened, or things we’ve done but it’s another thing to have them move through your body. Think of the Good Will Hunting scene when Robin Williams (Sean) tells Matt Damon (Will) it's not his fault after they’ve exchanged stories about beatings they took as children.
On the survivor front it can sometimes be hard to allow space for emotions without letting punitive logic take over (this includes self-punishment) or moving to a space of wanting to help all the other survivors harmed by the same person. As a facilitator it was important to validate the pain without centering the punishment. However it was also important not to dismiss those initial reactions from the survivor. It’s a faith walk to create a space where someone can express their anger, grief, or pain in ways that open the door to repair rather than closing it. I’ve witnessed initial accountability asks of a survivor go from retributive to being more transformative or restorative because of this emotional processing. But accountability processes are not linear and you don’t know where you’ll end up and sometimes you can have big setbacks or new harms emerge. It helps to set goals, accountability asks that are rooted in healing and not creating more harm to refer back to. Other times you just have to let the feelings out.
Being present with what you’re feeling in the wake of harm, to feel what is going on through your body, is really freaking hard. I can’t do it all the time but as I’ve worked through historic harm in recovery I was shocked at how feeling my feelings made empathy easier to access.
Empathy: Seeing the Humanity without Excusing Harm
While my hypervigilance and overdeveloped sense of responsibility for the care of my mother overrode feeling safe to feel my feelings, I also over-empathized with my mother. I heard her stories of being abused by her father or witnessed the abuse she experienced from my own and excused whatever she had done to me. Over time empathy or understanding became a safety habit that then became a regular habit in many moments of conflict. The empathy I have now doesn’t erase my experience.
In a transformative justice process I’ve seen survivors move to understand their harmer before fully acknowledging their pain. But empathy isn’t an ending of addressing a conflict or harm, it’s perhaps a middle step. Empathy kicks in to right-size the accountability process, to protect us from wielding it as punishment. For a harmer, accessing empathy is an opportunity to take full responsibility for their actions. But this isn’t about acting incredibly guilty or self-flagellating, saying “I’m the worst person in the world.” Because that can be another way of shirking responsibility. On a very different level I think about this as a white person committed to anti-racist work and liberation. When I make a mistake with a friend or colleague, immediately going to “I’m the worst” is still centering myself and bypassing both empathy and responsibility. Witnessing when I’ve hurt someone’s feelings that I love, even if it was by accident, means I’m not shutting down from shame.
As facilitators we were also navigating empathy without enabling. As we do the work to unlearn equating accountability with punishment, we also need to stop equating empathy with enabling. I find that being curious and having shared goals to refer back to become helpful tools in distinguishing between the two. When I felt myself making an assumption about something being shared in a process (this goes both ways when I was potentially enabling or passing judgment), I’d push myself to ask a clarifying question. When it felt like an action was going against the goals we set for the process, reiterating them was a helpful way to reground. An example goal that could be set at the start of a process with either the survivor or harmer is “not wanting to repeat the same behaviors in intimate relationships.”
TJ work gave me the gift of learning how to access accountability and empathy at the same time. I would take this with me when providing queer emotional and spiritual care for patients at Vanderbilt’s hospital. Whether it was correcting medical staff for misgendering a patient, or de-escalating a non-affirming parent who wanted to somehow still support their now-adult child through major surgery. The first step was to follow the patient’s lead—what were they needing in the moment and how could I be helpful, not make the situation worse. While these moments were not as extensive as a years long TJ process, they were opportunities to interrupt a harm (whether it was accidental or not) to ensure the environment was centering the patients’ needs and care. This sounds far easier than it was and required a level knowing myself, if I was regulated or spiraling.
Disorientation: Staying Grounded with Your Feelings
Through recovery I’ve experienced many moments of disorientation—as I’ve accessed my feelings, maintained both accountability and empathy for my mother, I freed myself from the roleI play in her narrative. I freed myself from her narrative that I’d internalized for 33 years. While this sounds liberating it was frightening—who do I get to be if I am not trying to save her or somehow make her love unconditional? This sort of dysregulation appears in other moments, too. As I mentioned earlier when I was feeling scared about whatever was wrong with my car, realizing I had the agency to fix it and also could talk through my fears with a loving partner was wild! It’s amazing to feel how I was so confused in childhood, adopted behaviors for safety and now letting go of those very behaviors I am again unmoored.
Dysregulation can show up in so many ways in a TJ process. Trying to stay grounded with feelings, empathy and accountability can elicit a flight, fight, freeze or fawn response. Or if something happens in the process that triggers either the harmer or survivor a kind of panic can set in where you can seek comfort in old habits. These moments require co-facilitators to pause without abandonment—keeping everyone in the process even when it’s difficult. It also requires knowing when not to push.
Within ACA I’ve been meeting weekly with a fellow traveler to work through the Loving Parent Guidebook. In every ACA resource but especially this one there’s an acknowledgement that spiraling or getting overwhelmed to the point of disorientation will happen. But that doesn’t mean to throw away the workbook or it's not working. Instead, naming this up front also often comes with somatic tips or other re-grounding techniques. This was helpful to bring into TJ processes– saying directly this can feel disorienting at times because there is an unraveling happening. While we were disrupting a narrative of self or a relationship in the accountability process, ensuring the survivor and harmer had a pod of support (therapists, close friends, their own 12-step groups, etc.) meant when more historical things were coming up, perhaps including childhood trauma, they could be held. In my own partnership how we build our queer home, family and community majorly disrupts the kind of relationship I had to home. I used to never be in my apartment in Chicago, always out and about, overworking myself. But now I don’t see home as something to be scared of, instead it’s a sanctuary of nourishment. While that sounds dreamy, I’ve had to process my discomfort with it with my therapist and even in my recovery group or especially with my best friends.
Conclusion: Living the Work
I have an incredible amount of gratitude for the community that welcomed me when I moved South of the Mason Dixon Line in 2020. While it was hard to leave the deep community I’d built in Chicago, leaving has been incredibly healing. At the intersection of Transformative Justice, chaplaincy, and recovery, I’ve found that accountability is as much about tending to our own emotional landscapes as it is about repairing harm with others. Feeling our feelings, practicing empathy without self-abandonment, and staying grounded through disorientation are not just personal skills—they are necessary capacities for liberation work.
Engaging in accountability is not a linear path. It is a practice, a muscle that must be exercised over and over again. Whether in a TJ process, a recovery meeting, or a hospital room offering spiritual care, the same core tensions arise: how do we hold the weight of harm with our emotions? How do we extend empathy with accountability? How do we navigate disorientation without retreating into old patterns?
For me, the answers are not final destinations but ongoing commitments. They show up in the choices I make daily—how I tend to myself when big emotions arise, how I show up in conflict, how I build relationships that do not mirror the harm I’ve experienced. This convergence of personal, political, and spiritual growth is the work of a lifetime. But if I am serious about creating a world beyond punishment and isolation, then I must be willing to start with myself—to feel deeply, to stay present, and to keep moving forward with my people.
Photo Caption: Picture of my 2023 chaplain badge, please appreciate that chaplain is spelled like Charlie Chaplin. A slightly fanned out stack of plastic cards is on a scuffed up silver, metal table. The cards are held together by a silver badge clip with a round button clipped on top that has the text “She Her” in white font on a grey background for the top 75% and the bottom part of the button has “VANDERBILT HEALTH” in white font with a logo on a light blue background. The top badge card under the button is white with a brown bar on top. Affixed towards the top right is a rectangle rainbow pride flag sticker and rectangle trans flag sticker. Below the stickers is a square picture of a 33-year-old woman with bleached blond/grey hair, dark eye liner and light eyes wearing a red jacket in front of a dark blue background. The card text on the left half says “Andrea” in bold and underneath is “Pastoral & Spiritual Care,” “Chaplin Intern,” “VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY,” “MEDICAL CENTER.”