'It was this slow desensitisation'

For almost 15 years, Tony McAleer was a key part of the neo-nazi movement in Canada.

He denied the Holocaust. He gay bashed. He was an organizer for the White Aryan Resistance and recruited others to the "cause." He also ran a racist telephone hotline found to violate the Canadian Human Rights Act.

He says it brought him "a sense of belonging. A sense of purpose. A sense of power coming from a place where I was feeling powerless."

"The fear by wearing a swastika and traveling in a group of five or six guys was exhilarating."

Tony says he didn't start off as someone with racist thoughts, predisposed to become a white supremacist. He says it was a process.

"I would call it an unconscious reinvention. It was this slow desensitisation in order to deal with the internal pain of stuff that was going on with my childhood and in order to do the acts of violence and the horrible things I did and said..," said Tony.

For Tony, his hatred became a dispassionate one for other groups.

"It's not a hot hatred...It was a cold indifference. I can see how in Nazi Germany people just became ledgers, inventory to move around...Much like you would look at, you don't get angry necessarily at cockroaches in your house. They're just something that need to be removed."

It wasn't until years later, with the birth of his first child at 24-years-old that led Tony to want to leave the movement.

"In looking into those eyes and holding her, I connected to a human being for the first time since I couldn't remember when. I was so disconnected," he says.

Tony's decision to leave also had to do with feeling burnt out and jaded with the neo-nazi movement.

But Tony says that leaving was also a process that included reprogramming his mind.

After training himself to hate for 15 years, his neo-nazi beliefs took some time to get rid of.

"I would kind of describe that as they're almost like phantom thoughts. You know how some people may lose an arm but they still feel an itch.It's a similar sort of thing.

"[A]t the time, where I was, I was my thoughts. But now I observe my thoughts differently from that. I can observe them as separate from them and just look at them as an old bit of conditioning...It doesn't have any significance or meaning anymore."

Tony says he'sreachedout to different communities he has hurt, speaks publicly about his past and works to undo the damage he's done.

But whatalso helped Tony truly reinvent himself this time was accepting vulnerability.

"We have to face our shame and we have to face our pain in order to transform it into something positive. Cause I spent, after I left the movement, a good five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years hiding from it."