as small as a world and as large as alone, clatterbane: youneedacat: lichgem: That...

4:02am September 2, 2014

youneedacat:

lichgem:

That reminds me that mental health programs tend to assume that if you’re alone it’s your fault. That you’re ‘self-isolating’ or ‘need help being integrated in the community.’

I’d be able to ‘integrate with the community’ if it wasn’t ableist as hell and completely inaccessible to me.

I’ve also told my workers that I’m alone because of bullying and abuse and they wrote down in my file ‘has issues getting along with others.’ Thanks a lot, shitheads.

I was first sent to counseling because I was being bullied in school. That was the first reason I ever saw a shrink. I was seven years old. We were all treated as if we were there for various social problems. (It was both group therapy and individual therapy, with an MFCC who did both. My parents told me that because the counselor was very fat, she would understand being bullied. She didn’t seem to understand much of anything really, but I don’t really think you can expect an MFCC in 1987 to understand autism, either. She decided I was different because I’d fallen into a duck pond as a little kid, then she made me draw it over and over.) We were all treated as if bullying was part of our problem, rather than a problem on the part of the bully. It was really weird. You never saw the bullies getting made to see a counselor.

Coincidentally, I got referred at 7 too, for pretty similar reasons. Mine was specifically about my supposed “severe anger problem”, and got blamed on my parents’ divorce the year before basically unhinging me. AFAICT that problem consisted of showing any anger at all when some other people didn’t like it. It couldn’t have been a series of normal/understandable reactions to getting treated like crap in school, not at all. :-| Thankfully that didn’t last more than a few sessions. But yeah, the often sneakier aggressive-behaving ones who are actually causing problems are not the ones who end up getting blamed for those resulting problems. Much less viewed as in need of help with changing that behavior. It’s really disgusting.

Yes one of the things that happened when I was seven, was I started actually noticing a lot of social stuff, and I started getting bullied a lot worse. People say sometimes that bullying doesn’t start until the age of 7 or 8, but they’re wrong. I was bullied from the moment I set foot on a playground at the age of 3 or 4 in nursery school. I remember it vividly because any time I got on the play structures I’d get shoved off by groups of other kids.

But anyway, bullying did really pick up when I was seven, and so did my social awareness in general. I became more aware of other kids. And I developed a hair-trigger temper as a result. Like at home, I’d snap at my parents, yell at them, all for little things that weren’t a big deal – and I mean, for real they weren’t a big deal. I just had this fight/flight/freeze response going on and sometimes it got stuck on “fight”. My parents kept telling me “not to be so negative” and “calm down” and stuff but it obviously didn’t fix the problem, especially because I didn’t know what the word ‘negative’ meant except that my parents used it when they were fed up with me. (Another example of my receptive vocabulary being extremely low for my age. It’s weird when I remember words and realize I had no idea what they meant at the time. Like the time I aced an IQ test and didn’t know what “test” was, and didn’t know what “IQ” was either. I heard “testingwithSarah” as one word (they said that every time I went for testing), and even then didn’t get what it was referring to.)

So I’m sure my temper was part of why I got sent there, that and the fact that I was so afraid to go to school that my parents would deliberately keep me home some days because they felt bad for me. But I still maintain there’s something seriously weird when bullied kids go to therapy and the bullying is seen as part of our problem, while the bullies don’t have to go to any kind of therapy at all. It reminds me of a staff person who, as a teenager, tried to kill herself to avoid being raped by seven of her male relatives. She got put in the state hospital for years. Everyone knew her father raped her, everyone, nobody disputed it, but he never served a single day of time. So basically she did time in a mental institution for her father’s crime, but her father never did time in prison or anything. (And while I don’t like the idea of prison, I do agree that there needs to be some way to keep child abusers away from kids.)