9:08am June 16, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: youneedacat: Trying to find the right words: To continue with my...

youneedacat:

youneedacat:

Trying to find the right words: To continue with my points about physically disabled people throwing other people under the bus

fogwithwheels:

let me remind you,

when you do this, you are attempting to gain privilege by removing yourself from the negative associations…

Yeah. It even kind of goes around in circles. With everyone at the bottom of the heap being glad they’re not each other. :-(

There are actually a lot of similar dynamics we’ve noticed in the autistic community and in the plural community. We’ve tried to write about this a couple of times, but it always seems to dead-end because AAJDGDFG BRAIN BARF, when you realize you’re trying to get out thoughts and feelings that have been stuffed inside you for over ten years, needling at you constantly, And you don’t know how to write about that huge amount of material, that huge number of observations you’ve made, dynamics and interactions between literally hundreds of people or systems, without either getting buried under an impossible task or just exploding with frustrated rage.

Anyway… like people have mentioned, in the autistic community, and in the broader disability community, it seems like too many people are out to prove they’re Not A Retard and pointing out people who can be safely thrown under the bus as “retards”. Too many people don’t question whether there is a problem with the concept of “retards” in the first place, or the idea that it’s the worst thing you can possibly be, and don’t do anything to protect or defend people whom they consider “retards.” One of the reasons why we don’t really feel like we’re part of the plural community nowadays is because there are a lot of people out there who do *really similar* stuff.

Except with them, it’s like “delusional” is the worst thing you can possibly be, and they’re out to grab the people they think are “really delusional” in order to throw them under the bus in their own bid for acceptance. They start out their explanations of themselves with “This is not schizophrenia, this is not psychosis,” and then don’t do anything to challenge the hate for people considered schizophrenic and psychotic. The only thing that matters to them is proving that whatever those things are, *they’re not it.*

This is also why we feel awkward as fuck when we run into someone in the community who may *genuinely* be delusional. I’m not talking about people just “believing weird things” about themselves, or having unusual subjective experiences. I’m talking about people who have demonstrably false non-subjective beliefs, fears and paranoias that they can’t control. We may disagree with modern psychiatry in many cases about what’s best for people experiencing delusions, but they defintely are a real thing. I mean, we’ve seen people in our birth family experience them. And it was not something they “chose” because they “sucked and were stupid” or because they were “too obsessed with fantasy” or whatever. It was far more complex than that.

But anyway, the long and the short of it is that when we do genuinely run into people like that, it feels like we’re being pushed to throw them under the bus, or to hold them up as an example of This Is Not Plurality. Which is, actually, bullshit. It is possible to be both delusional and genuinely plural, or for specific people in a system to experience delusions while others don’t. And the fact that this is possible does not instantly make it so that everything trolls and snarkers have ever said about plurals being delusional losers obsessed with fantasy is true and can’t be contested. It just means we can have the same range of experiences as any other person out there. But it seems that there are a lot of people who assume, without question, that it *does,* so they must instantly rush to distance themselves from People Who Are Just Delusional And Not Plural.

And about the thing where it goes around in circles, with everyone at the bottom of the heap being glad they’re not each other… people regarded as delusional, for any reason, whether they’re being called schizophrenic or manic or depressive with psychotic features or delirious or “just stupid,” are very often down near the bottom of that heap in the disability community, along with people regarded as “retards.” Even within the psychiatric disability subset. People will say things like “I may have depression and severe anxiety but at least I’m not DELUSIONAL.”

Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why we get so irritated when we see people taking their entire idea of multiplicity from Tumblr, without knowing where the community has been in the past, because the currently popular theory to explain our existence in mainstream psychiatry— which mostly no longer takes dissociative disorders seriously after all the scandals in the 90s, and cautions therapists against “fascination with alters” and insists that “alter personalities are not persons”— is “delusional separateness.” That we were all traumatized as kids and used our dissociative abilities to make believe that the trauma was happening to someone else or that we were somewhere else while it was going on, and the goal of our therapy is to make us “understand” that all of that is just made-up bullshit, a coping mechanism that’s outlived its usefulness, that there are no other people and no places inside and never were, just one delusional person who needs to face the truth now. This can also involve (and we’ve heard this from a number of systems who experienced it personally) giving plurals antipsychotics to “make the voices stop,” because some doctors apparently no longer distinguish between internal communication, which a lot of systems perceive as being like thoughts spoken aloud inside their head, and auditory hallucinations. (Although some people with auditory hallucinations actually deal with them successfully by talking back to the voices, but that’s neither here nor there, right now.)

So yeah. Seeing people try to deal with trolls by finding other people to throw under the bus. It’s disturbing and depressing, no matter what community you’re in. We still continue to think that the best defense against people who insist you can’t exist is research— finding proof that people like you have existed and been described in the past. Not offering up someone else to them in your place with the insinuation that here, you can have this one, THEY’RE the one who really is like everything you’re describing, and deserving of your scorn. (And knowing that some of the “crazy multiples” and “crazy soulbonders” stories that go around in certain communities are actually hoaxes invented by stalkers and trolls doesn’t help.)

We’re not condemning anyone who may have done this out of fear and panic, by the way. In fact, we think nowadays that the *most difficult* thing about any form of self-advocacy may possibly be resisting the urge to find other people to condemn and throw under the bus, or ‘police’ your entire community to make sure no one can get away with saying anything that you disagree with, to make sure everyone stays ‘on message.’ Calling people on things you disagree with is fine, sometimes necessary, but you cannot prevent everyone everywhere from holding opinions you disagree with (and may even be honestly, genuinely destructive), no matter how hard you try.

I mean, there’s a post we keep trying to finish, about an “activism project” we got into that ended up as a complete disaster, and how in almost all the self-advocacy projects for plurals we’ve been in, near or around, people inevitably seemed to think they had to make a big statement of “why we are not delusional”— and sometimes we had a hand in this too. But the way we see it nowadays, anyone who’s ever had a psychiatric label put on them is automatically part of an oppressed group of people, whether they were delusional or not, whether their differences caused them any distress or not. And that challenging the dominant culture’s ideas of “OMG SCARY CRAZIES” might actually be a better use of time and energy, in at least some cases, than trying to advocate for plurals and *only* plurals, and doing so at least in part by trying to find people to push down and insist “We’re not like them, and this is why we deserve to be taken seriously!”

-Tamsin and Riel