Open letter sent to Teri Dianne Ciacchi in 2017

Dear Teri,

We as your students, your friends, your collaborators, and your community have so much respect and appreciation for you. We have learned a lot from you and grown immensely from your teachings, your mentorship, and your companionship.

A few weeks ago, many of us witnessed you behave towards Michaela in a way that felt unsupportive of a safe learning environment, and then attempt to follow-up with the class in a way that did not feel balanced, fairly represented, or accountable. While this series of events has been disturbing to us, we recognize them as instances that fit into a wider pattern of problematic behaviors we have experienced with you. Through months or years of being in connection with you, many of us have felt very hurt by the ways you’ve treated us, the ways we’ve observed you treating others, and the stories we’ve heard from members in our wider community who have felt hurt by you.

Many of us feel we have reached a fork in the road and are being called to choose between walking away from our investment in relationship with you, and showing up to lovingly call you into accountability for your hurtful patterns. We generally feel confident that you are already aware of most of these patterns and some of us have observed you cycling through periods where your behavior is hurtful and problematic, into periods where you appear to be reflecting, taking accountability, and making changes, then consistently cycling back into periods of enacting harmful behavior again.

We respect your wisdom and experience with the topics you teach.

We appreciate your generosity and dedication to doing good work in this world. We acknowledge you hold trauma and many marginalized identities which have certainly caused people to be impatient, unforgiving, and unfairly question your authority and leadership over the years.

Knowing this supports our intention to approach these issues with patience, understanding, and love alongside firmness and directness. We are bringing our concerns to you because we have confidence and trust in your ability to commit to consistently modeling the teachings you share with us. We have seen and admired your great propensity for self-regulation when you make decisions to keep yourself well-resourced.

Because you are in a position of power where we have paid you money, work-trade hours, and entrusted you with our attention, commitment, and emotional vulnerability, we feel it is reasonable for us to make the following requests of you as our teacher and community leader. These requests stem from specific patterns of harmful behavior we have experienced and observed you enacting. We need to see these patterns change if we are to build safety, stability, trust, and feel respected by and connected with you:

From now on, we request that you please:

Make a commitment to stop mistreating your students, apprentices, and community members

- Do not yell or direct your explosive anger at us (outside of consensual sessions.)

Practice self-monitoring and commit to immediately apologizing after you “snap.” Please use the model: Name, acknowledge, apologize.

Do not intimidate us by use of aggressive verbal tone, eye contact, and body language.

Don’t belittle or mock us when we don’t meet your expectations.

Don’t shame our emotional expressions and vulnerabilities.

Be careful not to make assumptions, mislabel, and misrepresent our stories without making space for us to speak our own truths.

Take the feedback we give you into respectful consideration. Please don’t automatically deflect or invalidate us when we call your behavior into question by:

- - insisting we turn our attention inwards to our own past traumas.
  - framing your mistreatment of us as an opportunity for us to learn to be compassionate about triggers and not to take things personally.

accosting and intimidating us when we try to communicate about having problems with you or the material being presented.

- - blaming us if we are too afraid speak up after being mistreated by you.

leveraging the power of psych language to cause us to doubt ourselves.

Make an uncompromising commitment to respecting CHPC confidentiality.

Some of us have observed or experienced you breaking confidentiality on information shared in class or CHPC sessions.

Provide clear, updated expectations for energy exchanges.

- Clearly advertise the cost of your courses and offerings.
- Implement written contracts with students who enter into payment agreements with you.
- To promote fully consensual agreements, please create and communicate protocols for circumstances when students need to leave your courses or apprenticeships which outline what happens to accumulated work hours and paid/unpaid balances, particularly in cases where students wish to quit due to being mistreated by you.

If a student wants to leave an apprenticeship or course due to being mistreated by you, please do not require them to pay for services not yet rendered.

Prioritize caring for yourself.

- Take measures to meet your needs for self-care and the support you require in order for you to maintain consistent COAL consciousness in the spaces where you act as a facilitator.

Realistically assess your capacity for taking on projects. Consider your role in allowing overwhelm to lead to resentment and lashing out at us in various ways.

Work on acknowledging and taking responsibility for the power you hold as a community leader and exploring how to ethically engage with those power dynamics.

Active check-ins with the accountability team you have organized for yourself.

We are glad to hear that you have already assembled an accountability team and we ask that you share this letter with them.

Please develop your own plan for dynamically integrating our requests into your personal growth work.

A response and sharing of this letter.

We ask that you make space to acknowledge your receipt of this letter in one of the remaining CHPC classes. Please feel welcome to share as much of it as you would like, but at least share the requests we outlined, your response, and your plan moving forward.

- For at least a year from now, if you plan to continue or establish new relationships of an ongoing nature with students and apprentices, we request that you inform those individuals that you are in the process of addressing your harmful behavior patterns.
  We request that this communication occur before you accept payments from them or make relationship agreements. The purpose of this request is for folks to have the opportunity to make informed commitments and feel supported in addressing potential concerns.

We ask that you offer to make this letter available to all of your students and apprentices so they have the opportunity to read it, share it, or save a copy for their reference.

To your own discretion, we ask that you share about your process of honoring the requests outlined in this letter in the many communities where you hold a position of power so that those individuals may also have the opportunity to support you in your work.

We make these requests for our own sake, because many of us would like to continue working with you, learning from you, and sharing community with you. We make these requests on behalf of the many people we care for who have felt very hurt by your harmful behavior. We make these requests on behalf of your future students, apprentices, and community members because we feel worried for them; we don’t want more people to come to a place where they feel disempowered and alone in being mistreated by you like some of us have. We don’t want for ourselves or anyone else to feel like they have to choose between being treated well and benefitting from your amazing teachings and mentorship.

This letter originated because many of us felt unsafe and unsure of ourselves, so we convened a meeting with other CHPC students who we felt comfortable with and had expressed interest in addressing these issues. We have chosen to submit this letter as an anonymous group for reasons that vary among us. For some of us, the mistreatment we have experienced and observed has caused fear that we could be singled out, attacked, and punished by you for speaking up. For some of us, we feel that our individual identities are irrelevant to our goal of sharing this feedback with you. We also want you to know we are dedicated to the work of examining our own triggers, wounds, and self-empowerment struggles around these issues.

We love you, we believe in you, and we want you to get the support you need to bring your sacred offerings through in a way that is healthy for you. We want the incredible work you do in this world to be as powerfully healing as possible, without also deepening the traumas of those who come to you and open their hearts to your wisdom. Thank you for understanding that our intention in making these requests is rooted in our desire to contribute to building a healthy community while supporting each other to fortify it as we respect ourselves and hold a high standard for how we treat each other and expect to be treated.

You are welcome to submit a response to us through Rain Crowe if you need any clarity on our requests.

With love and faith,
Your students

[what has happened since]