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4:50pm April 21, 2015

karalianne:

withasmoothroundstone:

madeofpatterns:

withasmoothroundstone:

madeofpatterns:

Do any of y'all know things about how FC works?

Is it as brutal and invasive as RPM?

RPM has a huge tendency to induce imperius curse effects. I don’t know whether or not that’s true of FC.

Do you?

Yes, FC does the same. Or can do the same. Both of these things are simultaneously necessary and terrifying.

Is it built into the instruction in the same way? Like do they say push really hard and go fast, and ignore all behavioral or verbal indications of distress?

Yes they often do say things like that. Also they inevitably in all circumstances regardless of verbal skills will tell people to ignore spoken words and only focus on typed words. Which is something I tell people to do if I’m both speaking and typing at once but that’s different, it’s my choice.

I’m trying to remember when I did my training with Char Brandl (in like 2005, just a workshop), and I’m pretty sure she didn’t say to go fast and ignore other cues. She did have us pulling back on the person’s hand pretty hard; the concept there is that the resistance makes it easier for the communicator to pick the letters/words they actually want, and it helps with the presumed motor control difficulties.

I’ve needed the extreme resistance before, but in that case the person giving it was not trained in FC, she just assessed the situation and went “holy shit you can’t get your hand up off the table can you?” and proceeded to yank my hand up with all her might.  (I was sending her a lot of nonverbal “help me type” signals.)  At which point she was sweating from the exertion and saying “Oh my God” because she had no idea how much backwards pressure it was going to take to support my hand.

In that case, what I needed was basically the following:

1.  Hold my hand back from the table, so that 

2.  I could move my hand from side to side and up and down over the keyboard without getting my hand stuck to the table (that entire side of my body had seized up and was trying to plant itself into the table)

3.  She needed to detect the difference between the automatic hand-towards-table motion, and my deliberate attempt to bring my hand down towards the table

4.  At which point she would let up just enough that I could peck out one letter on a key

5.  At which point she would yank my hand away from the table so it wouldn’t get stuck to one key again

6.  And this would repeat for ages until I got one line of text out.

Honestly I think someone probably should’ve been calling an ambulance at that point, because half of my body was rigid and the other half was limp, straight down the middle, which can be a sign of a stroke.  But it can also be a migraine thing, and an autistic catatonia thing, and being surrounded by people with movement disorders, and knowing I had a migraine (which can also be a sign of a stroke, mind you), people were inclined to ignore the medical side of the situation.  Not that I would’ve liked to have gone in an ambulance to a hospital unfamiliar with me, but if it had been a stroke it would’ve been important.

The woman who did this got very pissed off because they wrote her up in the newsletter as my “facilitator”, when she had no FC training and didn’t see what she was doing as FC.  She just saw it as an extension of what she did for me already for my autistic catatonia, except involving typing.  (I tend to call what people occasionally do for me “assisted typing” because they’re never trained in FC or RPM.  It does have many of the same pitfalls though, especially when done wrong.)

But what she was doing was very much like FC, she just had no experience of FC to know that.  And I can attest that it completely wore her out the degree to which she had to pull my hand away from the keyboard, but it looked to bystanders as if she was guiding my hand towards the keyboard.  That’s a common misconception.

It is possible to guide a person’s hand while providing only backwards pressure, though.  Fortunately, she was not doing that.