12:40pm December 14, 2011

Passivity and naivete aren’t virtues.

All names have been changed.  I have a lot to say and none of it will be pretty.

I have always been very naive and very passive.  

So naive that much of the time if someone said they were my friends I would believe them no matter how much they hurt me.  

So passive that the vast majority of the time I had no awareness that I could affect my world – I had to be trained to nurse because I didn’t even know I could do that.  My strategies for dealing with hard situations were usually passive too:  Forget about it, distract myself, dissociate, whatever. When I was diagnosed with autism at age 14 the doctor saw one of his first duties as teaching me to avoid what he saw as pathological levels of passivity. He failed.  

Note that when I say passive I don’t mean my personality – I mean my inability to notice that situations could be changed. I mean my inability to initiate socially paired with my inability to turn someone away if they initiated. None of these things are absolute. Just strong trends in my life noted by everyone who knew me well ever.  

Also, although I distrust Lorna Wing’s groupings of autistic social styles, I have to admit that I fit passive to a T, and only sometimes fit aloof, active but odd, or formal (all of which require the ability to affect one’s environment consistently).  Also in research into my movement disorder, one of the only strong initial findings they had in terms of which autistic people get it was that those in the passive group get it more.  (I think in my case what caused my social passivity is just one expression of this movement disorder:  Difficulty in starting and stopping anything.)

Now here is my main point because today was the last straw in a long series of hearing autistic people praised to high heaven for being passive and naive:

Passivity and naïveté are not virtues. They are not wisdom. They are not optimism. They harm. They damage. They can even kill. For disabled people to survive in the world we have to – have to – learn to stand up for ourselves, learn to leave bad situations. This isn’t cute, funny, or admirable. This is life and death.

I just read a post tagged “wisdom”. About some children who dumped sand on her son’s face, saying “this is what happens to retards”, as her son flapped and enjoyed it. They then threw the bucket hard at her son’s face and ran off. Her son described this as all having fun. Despite hating what they did to him, she seemed to find her son’s naïveté and passivity, his willingness to see this as playing and having fun, refreshing.

I don’t. I can’t. I am horrified for her son’s future. I am afraid it will be like mine.

I want to tell you about my friends.  I will start with my first friend, Sarah.

Sarah lied to people all the time. I didn’t know or care that she lied. Therefore she was my friend. She manipulated and hurt me. Not badly compared to what was to come but I never protested. One day I showed her a possession that meant a lot to me. The next day it was missing. My mother took me to her house to see if I’d lost it in her belongings. She hadn’t known to expect us. She greeted us wearing the possession around her neck. She said she found it in a tree stump in the woods. My mom talked to her mother and she got it back. Somehow I never really saw her again. I think because my mom helped maintain that boundary.

Next I acquired a friend named Irene. Irene came with two friends of her own. Irene was cruel and frequently taunted and hurt me, and led her two friends in hurting me too.  They went to each other’s houses all the time but only once and never again did one of them invite me over. I never noticed. I had nightmares about Irene. Her group of friends was always splitting up into some who were fighting each other. The groups changed daily. They used me to hurt each other because I never questioned. They were advanced manipulators who discussed things such as tricking each other into doing something wrong and taking photos with spy cameras to show to teachers. And lots of advanced psychological manipulation for their ages.

They made me miserable on a daily basis.  It took me years to leave them and only after, again, others intervened.

I had always thought what my older brother had looked amazing.  He had this big group of friends and they always looked like they were having looked so much fun. I looked up to him and wanted to be like him.

Then one day I had it.  I felt so amazed and happy every day that I had a big group of friends who liked me.

If the previous friends were skilled manipulators, some of the new ones had truly advanced manipulation skills. I watched as some of them systematically but indirectly taught a boy in the group (another who like me lacked social skills) that they were part of organized crime, and that he would die if he told anyone. They would have done a mock execution if another boy hadn’t helped me talk to the guy about how it wasn’t real. They had made him so paranoid that he thought they’d put us up to it.  (Scary note: The guy who thought it up soon went to work for the Pentagon.) This is just background to explain what they were capable of.

On a near daily basis one group of my new friends loved to form a circle around me and sing songs I found disturbing until I curled up in a ball on the ground  with my hands over my ears. I never learned.

Others systematically taught me that I had multiple personalities and how to display such things. (Scary thought:  Two of them now have psychology degrees.)  I thought they were just helping me.  When I periodically lost speech or had slowed movement (I have a movement disorder that caused things like that, it was beginning to progress at that point) one of them referred to it as my having psychotic episodes.  I took all the responsibility on myself for having behaved as they taught me and truly believed it was all my fault.  One of these same people pretended to have multiple personalities so he could pick up what he saw as vulnerable women at support groups.  

(There was another who was truly diagnosed. There was a third who only taught by example but not on purpose – he was one of my first complex socializing attempts and when he said there were lots of him I thought this is just how a person socialized and imitated him.  He used such a model more innocently, to explore his own identity, and later stopped.)

One time I was in a cab with lots of my friends. The cab driver spun the car around until it nearly fell off a bridge. I was terrified. The cab driver saw me and did it more, saying “I had so much fun doing this to another retarded girl.”  All of my friends found this hilarious.

I found out something much later when people were asked by a district attorney to give statements about witnessing one of my friends (a boyfriend – another relationship I passively accepted(*)) physically and psychologically abusing me.  Someone who had lived with me told them I would not have many witnesses because I was not very social and most people didn’t like me.  And she’s not the only way I’ve found out that my big group of friends was mostly me imagining friendship that didn’t exist.

About that boyfriend. He told me that we had a telepathic link. He told me if I broke this link then one or both of us would die or go insane.  This kept me afraid of leaving him even when I became aware I didn’t love him.

Meanwhile our other friends began making up stories about the abuse that they told me were memories I had repressed (in line with their idea of multiple personalities). They spread rumors that he had thrown me down flights of stairs, thrust my head through walls, and stood there kicking me hard in the head over and over while I lay on the ground.  

When I crashed at the end of the school year because I had been pushed past my limits academically, they told anyone who would listen that I didn’t come back because he caused me severe brain damage. They told this to my parents too and acted the part of concerned friends.  They encouraged my parents to sue my then ex boyfriend, which is why the district attorney thing happened at all.  They encouraged me to act out flashbacks to abuse that never occurred.

Mind you:  Abuse occurred. But it was mostly the kind of abuse that can happen because of immaturity.  It wasn’t anything as severe as the rumors told.  My ex actually learned and no further girlfriends have had a hint of complaint. But he had to live with what they did to his reputation for years. He is now somewhat afraid to set the record straight about things my “friends” are doing today, because he knows they could make his life hell with the old rumors.  This is how they control people in general.

One of my friends was known even to his friends as a pathological liar and a sociopath. I remember hearing him brag about how many felonies he could commit at once. He once manipulated someone on a truly epic level and then tried to rape her.  She still thinks he is a friend. He picks his targets for their passivity. The boy who was the brunt of the paranoia stunt… my ex describes the guy as “thinking of all the stunts as all good fun even though everyone else knows they’re just ‘pulling another one on Dave again’, and feeling that being the target makes him still part of the fun”.

My friends had me convinced that they were the only people who understood me, and that my parents and the professionals in my life had everything wrong.  They attempted to tell professionals what to diagnose me with.  The professionals soon realized what they were doing to me and recommended to my parents that I avoid all further contact with them as they were too heavily interested in influencing me in pathological ways, including influencing me to act out whatever diagnosis these friends taught me to do.  They also recommended I leave the support groups my friends had drawn me into and taught me how to act for. I thought they were ripping me away from everyone who liked me so much and resisted.

It got so bad that one time my parents were frantically calling my shrink asking if it was possible to hypnotize someone over the phone. My friends had called me all in a big group. They passed the phone around. I could hear everyone laughing at my responses. I don’t know what was said and I couldn’t understand it even then. (They loved to mess with my language comprehension issues.)  But something must have happened. Because when I walked out to where my parents were I was completely zoned out and disoriented.  My parents were furious. I was miserable but didn’t know that real friends don’t act like this so I continued contact.

I had one friend who had been pursuing me for years while I didn’t understand what was going on. As I neared adulthood I got closer to her. She was nice to me. She didn’t use my vulnerabilities against me.  This made no sense to me. I began calling her “The Exception”. I couldn’t call her a friend because friends aren’t nice.

Then I met another Exception. She was even nicer than the first one. I would, at vulnerable moments, wait and wait and wait for her to hurt me. One day it dawned on me that my other friends were bullies. She had known it long before but knew I wouldn’t understand. She helped me cut off contact and hide from them when they angrily pursued me through my parents.

And they were angry.

I had been their toy. Their possession. There is no pretty way to describe this. I belonged to them. And their belongings never. Ever. Walked away. They were hurt by me because I was their toy and refused to be a toy.

They began plagiarizing my writing (including private writing) on the Internet, trying to get my current location out of my family, all kinds of stuff.

When I became moderately well known in the autism world they went around spreading rumors that they were my ultra-close friends and that I’d always been perfectly normal and… just making up all kinds of things.  One of them had had my mom take a photo of us together when he visited me in the mental institution I was diagnosed with autism. He now claims this was taken at school and that I was his girlfriend there. (He doesn’t show the photos he took of me with my real boyfriend.)  And yet even in the face of this one part of me doesn’t want to believe they could lie so thoroughly.  They tried to tell the media I’d never been diagnosed with autism even after the media had talked to my family and doctors, gotten old medical records (including the ones saying what my friends had done to me) and vetted me as thoroughly as possible.

They want to still have power over my life and they don’t and this upsets them. I’m the one that got away.

But they did hurt me.  They hurt me in ways I didn’t know it was possible to hurt a person. My continuing belief in them was not wisdom, it was my one way ticket to hell on earth for a long time.

And still even after this I am sometimes too passive.

I can be unusually perceptive at times. I perceived one person as a big bundle of hate under a show of innocence. I didn’t know I could get away from her. So I stood there and watched the hate come closer and closer.  I didn’t know what to do.  She ripped into me. She stalked me. She coordinated attacks on me where she played the victim, like the schoolyard bullies who would punch me, then cry and tell the teacher I punched them.  She even dug up my old “friends” to help her.  I learned that she picks autistic women to do this to, new ones every few years, but that didn’t get me back the friendships I lost to her creative manipulation.  Meanwhile she threatened to kill me and tried to show up at all my speaking engagements to intimidate me.

She and my “friends” had a stated goal to get me kicked off both disability payments and the developmental disability services that allow me to survive.  Fortunately the system never took them seriously – but this was a thinly veiled death threat as well considering how severe my limitations at daily living skills are.

My most recent display of alarming levels of passivity happened at a local recreation program for developmentally disabled people.  I could have died from the results:  Several infections they didn’t want to let me get treated (and that probably resulted from them doing things that threw my immune system out of whack). Long story, but again of I’d been less passive and naive it would have never happened.

It may look like wisdom to some people that an autistic boy took joy in what bullies did to him. I don’t know. To me it’s not wisdom. To me it’s that overwhelming terror that he will grow up to be like me.

Please listen. You don’t want your son to go through the hell I went through. Passive autistic children need to be taught – systematically if necessary – to stand up for ourselves when we are still young enough for the passivity to be less ingrained. Trust me:  It’s much harder to learn this in your thirties.

If a child is this passive about abuse then they will be a magnet for abusers, for sociopaths, for anyone who wants to get away with hurting us. And we will be hurt by people whose only level of creativity is what torture they can invent today for their living toys.  The abuse levels for people with developmental disabilities are astonishingly high. And that’s when the abuse is clearly labeled abuse and when the abusers are caught: The real abuse rates are higher.

I am terrified this boy could grow up to be me. I’m crying because I know what could happen and I never want it to happen ever again to anyone.

This isn’t the only time I’ve seen people treat autistic people’s passivity as a good thing though.  I’ve heard people say its very… spiritual or something… when autistic people don’t seem bothered at being treated like dirt by society.  That’s not spirituality, that’s a learned tendency towards believing we don’t have a fighting chance.  Any spirituality worth its salt would involve finding ways to stop what happens to us.

I do forgive what people did to me, but more in the way the woman sings about in this video (it’s both captioned and in sign language as well as vocal singing).

Forgiven, but not forgotten, and will not forget until this no longer happens to autistic people or any other people. There are people in this world who are cruel beyond anything I can imagine even after having met them and knowing what they’re capable of. They rely on that. Part of the way they manipulate people and get away with it is that most people want to believe a person could never do what they are doing. But they do it, and they’re real, and it happens, and passivity renders a person an easier target, a living toy who will never go away, ever.

I want everyone to get away. What happened to me was wrong. I want it to never happen to anyone again. I don’t want this boy to grow up and call his first friends “exceptions” because friends are the ones who dump sand on your face, throw things at you, and call you retard. That’s already happened to enough of us.

(*) It’s common for autistic women to have abusive relationships rather than no relationships.  We are often passive and our passivity makes us perfect targets, even when our real or perceived abilities are more limited than people would expect us to be in relationships. I have been sexually assaulted or molested many times, as well. Passivity is not a virtue. It’s not. It’s not. It took me so long to go for help because I didn’t know anything was wrong.

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