shout out to my fellow struggling people who are still sitting in the same bedroom they grew up in. the ones who can't get a job, can't make new friends, can't find a partner or partners, can't move house and can't go to school.

you need collective boundaries that everyone in sys knows and follows on how to deal with these situations and how to avoid them too. if someone in sys doesn’t like a collective friend, or a specific sysmember’s friend, you need to communicate that with that friend and between sys members so conflict doesn’t arise. say “x doesn’t like you very much but i still want to be friends, lets just talk when im fronting and x wont talk to you at all when their fronting.”

if someone in sys says something rude or shitty to another members friend its not about taking accountability and saying sorry like you did it, but you should say “x doesn’t speak for me (or the sys as a whole) and what they said to you was not cool, is there anything i can do to make you feel better?”

But for us... it would just promote internal conflict and division within our system, which we work very hard to avoid. Our internal relationships are important to us, and oftentimes there are cases where one headmate might be okay with some forms of treatment that others of us are not, or may be actively hurt by.

This framework appears to assume that you can model a given system as totally individual people. To an extent this may work, but in most systems we know, headmates are not perfectly separate like this; something one headmate does usually does have impacts on the system more widely, whether we like that or not.

That's probably a large part of why the conversation can often seem so flattened and simplified, a lot of the times we see it, in my opinion.

the conversation around accountability should be less of a conversation around accountability and more of a conversation on how to deal with external conflict. its not about saying “im sorry for what i said (weather you were technically the one to say it or not)” and more of a conversation with your system and the people in your life who you are all close with (and know youre a system).

if you do stand by what a sysmate said to some extent, or a sysmate is just “saying what you were all thinking.” then the conversation is no longer about accountability for an individual’s actions its a conversation about how to deal with your external relationship moving forward. you still dont have to apologize for their actions (unless you want to) but you& need to work as a collective to decide how to move forward and as prev said, what works is going to be different for each system.