6:38pm July 17, 2014

➸ DIFFERENCES, SEX AND POWER: INTERVIEW WITH DAVE HINGSBURGER

youneedacat:

into-the-weeds:

People are abused because there are abusers out there. We pass policies limiting the behavior of people with disabilities instead of passing policies limiting the power of staff.

This is really intense and really thorough and really good.

And really, really triggering to me because the author is an abusive horrible woman who tried to ruin my life as well as she possibly could. And I’m still afraid to tell the whole story because I’m not sure anyone would ever believe the extent to which she fucked with my head. Especially when she has such a wonderful progressive reputation for interviewing Dave Hingsburger about sexuality and power and all that. She was a monster.

And I’m afraid to tell you even that much. I’m still afraid of her. I’m still afraid of everything she did, I’m still afraid she could hurt me now, and I’m still afraid that telling you this will somehow bring on more hurt from her. She was a master of abuse and neglect and above all, lies and lies and lies.

Do not believe anything good about her based on this interview. Do not believe anything good about her. She says all the ‘right’ things in this interview, but she is horrible beyond anything.

She was my first exposure to the Regional Center system and she could have gotten me killed for all the work she did to keep me alive. It’s a very good thing that services in California are two-tiered — there’s your case manager at the Regional Center, who manages your money, and there’s your case manager at the actual service agency. I had a good case manager at the service agency and that saved my life. If I’d only had this woman, and her alone, I don’t think I’d have survived. She also threatened to throw me in a level three group home when I complained. (For those unaware, that’s “Care, supervision, and ongoing training for persons with significant deficits in self-help skills, and/or some limitations in physical coordination and mobility, and/or disruptive or self-injurious behavior.” There’s only one level of group home beyond level 3.)

I can’t read this without being triggered.

I can’t read it for what it is.

Because it’s the first thing I ever found when I searched her name on the web.

And it still just throws me into blinding terror that I’m going to die and nobody’s ever going to believe anything I say about myself and stuff. She used to write lies down in my file and then claim I told them to her, and if I said I never told them to her, she’d tell me there was something wrong with my memory. And when my doctor faxed her my list of diagnoses, she just made up a bunch of diagnoses that had nothing to do with the list my doctor faxed her, and claimed that I’d told her these diagnoses as well. (“Chronic Epstein-Barr virus” was one of them — something I’d never even heard of, let alone been able to tell her about, and it certainly wasn’t in my medical records because I have my complete medical records and I have the fax he sent her.)

Even though I had tape recorded the meetings with her, she’d still tell me later that I’d said things in the meetings that I never said. Like, things that couldn’t even be said to resemble anything that had been said by anyone in the meeting at all. I eventually had my other case manager formally request her to stop calling my house because it stressed me out too much, and then that same case manager watched in incredulity as she kept calling me over and over and over again.

And this is besides the “You’re your own case manager now, goodbye!” stunt she pulled. I later found out it was all a lie. She told me I was my own case manager so that I would stop trying to communicate with her. Then she told me I had to write my own IPP, which I was incapable of doing. I had Cal Montgomery, who’d worked in the field herself and had experience writing such documents, write my IPP. Because the one written by this case manager was full of lies to the point that if anyone who knew me, either through the system or through friendship, read it, they couldn’t believe it was about me. Like they literally could not find anything about it that resembled me in the slightest. Anyway I found out years later that to become your own case manager requires training and a whole process, and that what she’d done was tell me I was my own case manager, and then stop doing any work for me at all, because she knew I didn’t know enough about the system to contest what was going on.

Without having a case manager in another agency I’d have starved to death among other things. Or been put in that level 3 group home. One or the other.

And all the while, people from the Regional Center were telling me what a saint she was for doing things like writing this article. This article makes me want to slam my fist through a wall. Because all it is, is a vehicle for her hypocrisy, I don’t even know how many lives she has ruined. Everyone kept telling me “There’s a certain kind of client she’s very good with” but I don’t believe it.

Oh also speaking of this article?

She wrote in my IPP all this stuff about me being a lesbian and wanting help making contact with the lesbian community. This was without my permission to disclose to anyone, and it’s not something I even asked for her help with, she just knew I was a lesbian. This was part of her sexually progressive image. I just remembered that, just now, after years of blissful forgetfulness. That is the sort of thing she did after making this article.

Thank you for telling.

I know the exact kind of person you mean. I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell from the article. But I believe you.

She called me “provocative and confrontational”. I still don’t know why, because I was pretty damn meek at the time. It was in the part of the IPP where you describe the client. Something like “She can be, in this caseworker’s opinion, provocative and confrontational.” When I asked her about it, she said “Isn’t being provocative and confrontational a good thing?” She knew damn well it wasn’t meant to be a good thing.

But for years since then I wanted a t-shirt or a hat or something that said “PROVOCATIVE AND CONFRONTATIONAL” in huge letters.

Just like when another Regional Center person got me in trouble for “going AWOL” I got a t-shirt that said “AWOL: A Wild One’s Loose”. Which I guess was somewhat provocative and confrontational, but under the circumstances, trust me, anyone would have been a little snarky. Because there is no conceivable reason to refer to an unconserved adult outside the military, prison, or other institutions, as AWOL. Ever. But I got called AWOL for walking out of a self-advocacy meeting.

Notes: