I Am His Karma

What If Prison Was About Safety?

After living through long-term trauma, I have become less interested in whether people are “good” or “bad.”

I am interested in whether they are safe.

I don’t want vengeance. I want containment.

A tree is not bad. A mushroom is not bad. A wasp is not bad. A tiger is not evil for being a tiger. Something can be dangerous to you without being evil.

Human beings are obviously more complicated. We have agency. We make choices. We are responsible for what we do. But we also have brains and nervous systems shaped by genetics, development, trauma, mental illness, attachment, environment, and experience.

Those things are not excuses for hurting people. They are facts about how human beings become who they become.

Some people have profoundly atypical or disordered patterns in how they experience or process empathy, attachment, aggression, sexuality, impulse, fear, reward, or conscience. Some were severely traumatized. Some were neglected. Some have serious mental illness. Some have neurological or developmental abnormalities. Sometimes several of those things exist together.

None of that makes what they do okay.

Understanding the machinery is not the same thing as excusing what the machinery produces.

After everything I have lived through, I actually have very little interest in making people who hurt others suffer.

I want them to stop hurting people.

That is different.

Some people have demonstrated through their own behavior that they are profoundly dangerous to children, women, and vulnerable people. I do not need to hate them to believe what they have shown us.

And I do not understand why our only imagination is either eventually releasing them back into society or locking them inside a concrete cage designed around suffering.

There has to be something between cruelty and access.

Build secure, humane sanctuaries. Nature. Food. Medical care. Treatment. Structure. Accountability. Purpose. Connection. Dignity.

And a boundary they cannot cross.

The purpose should be incredibly simple: everyone gets to remain alive and safe.

Including them.

Let them see trees. Let them make things. Let them learn. Let them work. Let them eat good food. Let them receive medical care and treatment. Let them have relationships, dignity, meaning, and whatever peace they are capable of finding.

But do not require another woman, another child, or another vulnerable person to become the experiment that determines whether they have changed.

Treatment may reduce risk. Rehabilitation may be possible. I hope it is.

But hope is not a safety plan.

Some patterns of predatory behavior are deeply entrenched. Treatment is not the same thing as a guarantee that somebody has become safe. And eventually, many incarcerated people are released back into communities.

That is the part I cannot get past.

We do not rehabilitate human beings by emotionally, socially, and spiritually starving them inside cages. If rehabilitation is possible, it requires treatment, structure, connection, accountability, purpose, and the conditions necessary for a human being to develop capacities that may never have properly developed in the first place.

But rehabilitation and access are not the same thing.

You can understand how somebody became dangerous without excusing what they did.

You can acknowledge trauma without transferring the consequences of that trauma onto the next victim.

You can recognize mental illness or neurological abnormality without pretending someone is safe.

You can believe completely in another person’s humanity and still say no.

You cannot come near my child.

That is not hatred.

That is a boundary.

And compassion cannot require us to gamble with somebody else’s child.

If we were actually serious about rehabilitation, I would rather see places like this shaped by people whose lives are devoted to discipline, nonviolence, restraint, compassion, and the reduction of suffering. Theravāda bhikkhunīs, monks, clinicians, trauma specialists, neuroscientists, and trained professionals working together.

Not religion imposed on anyone. I mean the philosophy of the environment itself: ethical conduct, mindfulness, accountability, simplicity, treatment, dignity, purpose, and non-harm.

Imagine what containment could look like if the objective were not punishment.

Not revenge.

Not making somebody suffer because they made somebody else suffer.

Just safety.

Sometimes the most humane thing you can say to another human being is: you may live. You may be fed. You may be cared for. You may see the sky and trees. You may receive treatment. You may learn, work, create, have relationships, experience dignity, and find whatever peace is available to you.

But you may not have unrestricted access to people you have demonstrated an ability and willingness to destroy.

After living on the other side of someone else’s harmful behavior, I know what it costs when society gets that distinction wrong.

I do not need the person who hurt someone to hurt too.

I need the hurting to stop.

Compassion does not require access.

Understanding does not require excusing.

Containment does not have to mean cruelty.

Safety does not have to mean vengeance. 🪬

⸻

Cover artwork: “Tigers Hunt Nibbana,” by Kyle Morgan (Old_Sick_Dead). I own the original physical artwork. Morgan also publicly shared the work online alongside his own writing about tigers, predation, sanctuary, neighborhood safety, non-harm, and Buddhist ethical practice.

There is an irony here that I could not manufacture if I tried. Kyle Morgan is also the person I identify as my abuser, and my lived experience of his behavior toward me and my children stands in profound contradiction to the philosophy he presented publicly.

The timing is part of why I chose this particular piece.

On December 2, 2024, Kyle Morgan publicly posted “Tigers Hunt Nibbana” alongside writing about predators, sanctuary, “neighborhood safety,” non-harm, lying, and Buddhist ethical practice.

On December 3, he went to DHS and made a domestic-violence report against me that I maintain was false. I was home working a 12-hour day caring for children in my daycare.

On December 4, I say he threatened to have my children and the children in my daycare taken away from me.

On December 5, he left for the final time.

December 6 would have been our 13th wedding anniversary.

Four consecutive days: the public philosophy, the report, the threat, and the end of my marriage.

Sixty-eight days later, on February 11, 2025, he was arrested. He has pleaded not guilty. I am now the victim and a witness in a criminal case brought by the State against my ex, with trial currently scheduled for February 2027.

What is difficult to explain is how isolated my life had become by the time the alleged crimes occurred.

We had moved to Portland. We became homeless. My world became smaller and smaller until, in practical terms, it was mostly just me and him. I had almost no meaningful contact with anyone outside the home.

Even inside the home, we were separated. He kept us in different rooms. We were physically under the same roof, but we were not living as a connected family.

For more than five years, there were no friends regularly coming through the door. No extended family watching what was happening. No ordinary community around me. No one standing beside me reflecting back what I was experiencing against anything resembling a normal life.

That isolation is important because abuse can become its own closed system. When there is nobody outside of it reflecting reality back to you, the abnormal can become ordinary simply because it is all you see.

After he left, my children began seeing therapists. Those therapists reported concerns to CPS. CPS investigated. Kyle was arrested during that period, and in March 2025 CPS issued founded findings of abuse.

For years, what was happening inside my home stayed inside my home.

Then other people finally began to see it.

The criminal case has not yet been resolved. But for me, the arrest and the later CPS findings marked the moment when something that had existed almost entirely inside an isolated family system finally became visible outside of it.

And that brings me back to the tiger.

His writing asks what happens when people remove the places where tigers hunt: the tiger adapts and continues hunting.

My question, after living through long-term harm, is what we do next.

I do not want to kill the tiger. I do not need to hate the tiger. I do not need the tiger to suffer.

I just do not believe another human being should have to become its prey.

That is what this essay is about.

I started documenting because I was tired of watching the truth disappear.

For years, I tried to explain what was happening while I was still living inside it. Now I’m building the record.

The messages. The documents. The photographs. The contradictions. The things I wrote before I even understood what I was experiencing.

And what happened after I left.

Because leaving an abusive relationship does not always end the abuse. Sometimes it just changes shape.

This is my first-person archive of coercive control, post-separation abuse, survival, and the long process of getting my life back.

IAmHisKarma.com

I was in a 20-year relationship with someone who absolutely hated me and thought I was gross the entire time.

And I didn’t know.

Except he was telling me the whole time.

I just didn’t believe him.

When someone repeatedly shows you they don’t like you, believe them.

How many names can one hidden relationship leave behind?

I put the drawings, photographs, communications, aliases, and public records in chronological order. The article separates what I witnessed, what the documentation shows, and what remains unverified.

Secrecy survives in fragments. Chronology puts the fragments back together.

Read Xavia Phoenix and Associated Identities: A Chronological Record at IAmHisKarma.

Documentation only. Please do not contact or harass anyone named.

Kyle’s felony DV case is State v. Kyle Morgan, 25CR08394. He is charged with Strangulation, a Class C felony, and Assault IV, a Class C felony, and the case is set for jury trial in February 2027.

A narcissistic abuser will protect their image harder than they ever protected your life. And when the truth threatens their image, they will try to destroy you with it.

3 sequential inhales and then an exhale through the mouth. 🫁

Look at ya. 📸