Centered accountability asks us to move beyond defensiveness and shame so we can see clearly what we did and what repair requires of us.
There’s a concept I return to often when I’m thinking about accountability. It comes from Shannon Perez-Darby’s work on centered self-accountability, particularly the concept of finding your six.
The idea is simple, but deceptively profound.
Imagine a scale from 0 to 10.
At zero, we take no responsibility for what happened. We deny, deflect, minimize. We say things like “That’s not what happened,” or “You’re blowing this out of proportion.” We distance ourselves from the impact of our actions because facing it feels threatening.
At the other extreme is what Perez-Darby playfully calls 1,000 — taking far more than our fair share of responsibility. Instead of grounding ourselves in what actually happened, we collapse into shame. We say things like “I’m the worst,” or “I ruin everything.” It sounds like accountability, but it isn’t. It shifts the focus back onto our distress rather than the impact we caused.
Centered accountability lives somewhere else entirely.
It asks us to return to the middle — to something rooted, honest, and proportional. Not perfection. Not self-destruction. Just clarity.
Finding your six means asking:
What happened?
What was going on for me at the time?
What am I going to do about it?
It’s a humble place. A grounded place. And for many of us, it’s surprisingly difficult to inhabit.
If I’m honest, I can see how easy it is to swing between these two poles.
On one side is defensiveness.
When we feel accused, misunderstood, or exposed, something in us tightens. We argue. We explain. We justify. We withdraw. Our nervous system reads the moment as danger, and accountability begins to feel like a threat to our survival.
On the other side is collapse.
Instead of defending ourselves, we take on everything. We apologize excessively. We declare ourselves terrible. We spiral into shame.
Neither of these places actually allow us to practice accountability.
And for many men and masculine-identified people — myself included — these patterns can take on particular shapes. We may have been taught that being wrong is humiliating, that vulnerability is weakness, or that our worth depends on maintaining control. In those conditions, accountability can feel almost unbearable.
So we protect ourselves.
Sometimes that protection looks like stonewalling, arguing, or withdrawing — the “zero.”
Sometimes it looks like self-blame so overwhelming that we just end up centering ourselves (again) and it derails the conversation entirely — the “1,000.”
But in both cases, the focus shifts away from the impact of our actions.
The work of centered accountability asks something different of us. It asks us to stay present long enough to see clearly what we did, what it meant for someone else, and what we will do moving forward.
That kind of presence takes practice. And often, it takes support.
Mia Mingus has written about how accountability is not meant to be a solitary act of punishment but a relational practice — something that unfolds within webs of care, community, and shared commitment to growth.
Finding our six is easier when we are surrounded by people who can help us stay grounded, people who can say both: You’re not a terrible person and you do have work to do here.
There’s another dimension of this work that I think about often.
Accountability isn’t only about behavior. It’s also about grief.
When we look honestly at the harm we’ve caused — or the ways we’ve withdrawn, dominated, or shut down — we sometimes come face to face with something deeper: the ways we were shaped by the world around us.
bell hooks writes in The Will to Change:
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands that males engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”
That sentence lands heavily for me.
Because it names something that many men recognize but rarely have language for. Long before we learn how to harm others, we are often taught to harm ourselves — to cut off tenderness, vulnerability, emotional expression, and relational sensitivity in order to belong.
Couples therapist Paula Smith describes this dynamic as “halving.”
Halving is the psychological and cultural process of dividing human experience into rigid categories of masculine and feminine and then forcing boys and men to disown the parts labeled feminine. Sensitivity, softness, grief, emotional expression — these qualities are pushed away so that dominance, control, and stoicism can take their place.
But the result is not strength.
The result is a divided self.
Many men grow up carrying only half of their emotional world, often without realizing that something essential has been cut away. That internal split can show up as shame, defensiveness, isolation, or grandiosity. It can make intimacy difficult and accountability feel threatening, because acknowledging harm also risks touching the buried grief underneath.
And that grief is real.
The grief of realizing how much of ourselves was cut away.
The grief of recognizing the ways we hurt others because we were never taught another way to be.
The grief of seeing how many relationships might have unfolded differently if tenderness had been allowed to remain part of our humanity.
When accountability begins to feel overwhelming, it is often because it brushes against this deeper loss.
But grief can also be a doorway.
When we allow ourselves to mourn the parts of ourselves that were pushed away — the tenderness, vulnerability, and emotional fluency that were once labeled unacceptable — we begin to reclaim the possibility of a fuller humanity.
In that sense, accountability is not just about repair.
It is also about re-integration.
I sometimes end reflections like this with something I call a meditation — or sometimes a prayer.
Not a prayer in the sense of asking someone else to fix what we’ve done, but a way of orienting the heart toward honesty.
A moment of pausing long enough to speak gently to the parts of ourselves that are still learning how to live differently.
So perhaps something like this.
For the moments when I wanted to defend myself instead of listening,
may there be courage to stay.
For the times I collapsed into shame rather than responsibility,
may there be steadiness.
For the harm I have caused that I am still learning to see clearly,
may there be humility.
For the parts of me shaped by fear, dominance, and silence,
may there be grief.
For the tenderness that was pushed out of my humanity long ago,
may there be a path back.
And for whatever in me is capable of growing beyond these patterns,
may there be patience.
Accountability is rarely clean or perfect.
But every time we find our six — every time we choose clarity over defensiveness, responsibility over shame — we make a little more space for relationships that are honest, repairable, and alive.