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5:21pm September 14, 2014

Inadvertent reverse cuing while trying to help me eat.

Please see this post for why I am posting various stories about my experiences with assisted typing and other forms of assisted movement.  Please don’t just randomly respond to this post without understanding why I’m posting it, and why I’m posting these stories separately instead of all together.  (I don’t have the spoons to make one giant post.)

One day, I froze while I was eating lunch.  I wanted to finish lunch, and someone decided to help support my arm so I could eat a bowl of… something.  I forget what.  But instead of just feeding me the food, they wanted me to be feeding myself the food, with assistance, and I was perfectly fine with that.  So we set out to do it.

Problem was — and this is not how most people expect this to happen — she had certain expectations about what my movements were going to be.  And I found that I could only move within the constraints of how she expected me to move.  However — this is the part people don’t understand.  It was not that she provided cues that told me where she wanted me to move, and I followed those cues.  It wasn’t that at all.  That can happen, but that’s not what happened here.

What happened, was that whenever I tried to move in a way she didn’t expect, she made it impossible for me to do it.  It was like, suddenly, the support for the movement disappeared every time I tried to do something she didn’t expect me to be doing.  This left me with two possibilities:  Do absolutely no movement, or move in the ways she expected.  See the difference?  It was as if I was in a maze, and she provided the walls.  And I couldn’t move through the walls.  So I could only move down the paths.  She didn’t make the paths, and she didn’t push me along the paths.  She just made walls so that the paths were the only option.

I believe that happens more in facilitated communication than most people are willing to admit.  That it’s not just ‘cueing’ the person to hit certain letters. It’s also making it impossible for the person to hit letters you’re not expecting them to hit.  And that can cause just as much of a problem, if not more so.