Vachon Imagined

Violence is not an exception in human nature; it is one of its possibilities. We are not separate from it, but expressions within a wider field that also includes care, restraint, repair, and presence. It is not that every person is “violent” in essence, but that every person carries the capacity for harm under certain conditions—stress, overload, fear, fatigue—and the capacity to repair when there is enough awareness to meet what has happened rather than escape it.

I taught my son that after harm, we do not collapse into “it’s okay,” because it often isn’t. We acknowledge it. We name it. We stay accurate inside it. Not to punish, and not to dominate, but to refuse the shortcut that erases experience in order to restore comfort.

When I first began disciplining him, I did what I was taught: I spanked him. It was not done from calm clarity, but from frustration and inherited reflex. Over time, something in me resisted it. It felt like a violation of something deeper than authority—something in the bond itself that could not hold domination without distortion. So I stopped.

Something in me recognized that he is not an extension of my power. He is not mine in the way ownership suggests. There is difference in role, yes—I am the parent, he is the child—but not difference in moral worth. We are both expressions of the same field of being, and that changes what authority even means.

The first time I apologized to him, I had also taught him a response: not “it’s okay,” but “I accept your apology, thank you.” Because I did not want harm to be erased in the name of comfort. I wanted it to be acknowledged, held clearly, and then moved through consciously.

But when he said it back to me, something surged in me—an unregulated flash of ego and identity: how dare you, you are my child, you will obey. That reaction wasn’t about him alone. It was the collapse of an inherited structure, where authority is assumed to place one person above another in moral standing.

In psychological terms, it was a collision between identity and nervous system activation: the old role of “parent as unquestioned authority” meeting a new reality where repair requires accountability in both directions. When that structure flickers, the body can register it as threat before the mind understands it.

And yet underneath that surge was something more revealing: not defiance from him, but clarity. He was not erasing himself to soothe me. He was participating in truth rather than performance.

Over time, I have come to understand that what unsettles me is not disrespect, but the loss of hierarchy as a place to hide from mutual humanity. We do not heal harm by restoring comfort. We heal it by staying accurate—about what happened, about what was felt, and about who we are to each other in the aftermath.

And that accuracy does something quietly radical: it allows authority to remain, but without domination; it allows love to remain, but without distortion; and it allows two people—different in role, equal in being—to meet each other without either one escaping or disappearing.