9:47pm September 14, 2014

There are people drawn to FC as facilitators who legitimately scare me.

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.)

There are people in the facilitated communication business who scare the shit out of me.  But it’s very hard to explain why.  Especially because a lot of the problems they cause are subtle to anyone who doesn’t have certain motor and communication problems.

There are people whose presence in the room impairs my ability to communicate.  They make it impossible to discuss certain topics.  They make it impossible to say certain things in certain ways.  They create a whole maze of things that are possible to say, and things that are impossible to say.

In addition, some of them seem to actively make me more likely to react in certain ways and say certain things that they want me to say.  I can pick up on what they want, and much of the time I will deliver to them exactly what they want, even as I sit back horrified watching myself type things that I don’t mean and never meant and have nothing to do with my thoughts.

These people often have a pale glow around them.  At least, in my mind’s eye.  It’s usually slightly off-white, although it can look pure white to someone who has never seen pure white.  It’s usually more beige, pink, or yellow, but very pale versions of those colors.  And whatever it is, it often fills up a much larger portion of the room than it ought to.  People are supposed to take up a relatively small amount of space with the part of themselves that my mind’s eye sees in that way.  People who take up too much space are dangerous.  But they often get read as “highly spiritual” by new age types who don’t know any better, and that includes new age nonverbal autistic people who think they have found in these people a spiritual mentor.  

This is very dangerous, I cannot overstate the matter.  These are people who are really good at controlling people.  That light that comes out a certain distance, is the distance that their sphere of influence over other people reaches.  People who can fill a room by walking into it are dangerous people because they change the entire tone of the room, they influence everyone in the room whether people are aware of it or not, and they have a big ego.  That light that so many people see as ‘spiritual’ is actually their ego, which is the least spiritual part of themselves.

Generally with things that are spiritual, there’s a version of something that’s real, and a version of something that’s unreal, and to an untrained eye they can look the same.  And they’re the opposite of each other, complete opposites.  People see a glow around a person, and they think it means they’re spiritual or connected to whatever gods they worship.  But often the glow they see around a person is the person’s ego, which is, as I said, the least spiritual part of a person, and dangerous when it’s bright and large like that.  When a person is truly transparent to the universe, it looks very different, the light is different, it comes from a different place, and it doesn’t look like a property of the person themselves.  That can happen to anyone temporarily, it’s rarer long-term, and I’ve never seen it happen in these new age circles where everyone has a big ego glow all around them.

So anyway, many autistic people are extremely sensitive to these people.  I am one such person.  I think people who are highly sensing are more likely to be more sensitive to these things, and many people who use FC are very sensing.  And that makes me extremely alarmed.  Because these are people who are able to influence the content of my communication from across a room.  

They enter a room and my entire ability to communicate is changed.  I may be able to communicate less, overall, just any attempt at communication gets shut down.  I may be able to communicate less of my own thoughts, and more of their thoughts.  (This is not telepathy, it’s sensing resonances and patterns and body language and things like that.)  I may be unable to communicate on certain subjects, at all.  And yet feel compelled to communicate on certain other subjects.  I may feel compelled to praise them, to apologize to them for things I didn’t do wrong, to be extremely submissive around them in a way that is foreign to my personality.  It’s like getting a personality transplant, it’s very unpleasant, and it makes me spiritually nauseated.

Not all autistic people realize that this is a bad thing.  Some autistic people, like some nonautistic people, are fooled by the idea that light is always good and dark is always bad (neither of which is true), and they see this light around these people and think it means that they’re extra good people, extra spiritual people, people they should follow.  So not only are they being involuntarily influenced, but at some point they choose to be influenced even more.

And what scares me the most — these are people who can influence the content of my communication heavily, from across a room, without even touching me.  What must it be like to have one of them as your facilitator, touching you on an intimate basis every day?  I remember a man who had realized this was bad, and he begged me to teach him to type independently so he could get away from her.  I told him that since my journey with typing was so different than his, I sadly had no way to help him learn, and that he should ask someone who had gone from FC to independence.  He is now on his way to being able to speak, and I am really happy for him.  But anyway, lots of people, for lots of reasons, get these people as facilitators.  And that’s very bad news.

These facilitators don’t mind that they are influencing their clients, and they in fact often believe that their influence is proof of their clients’ special telepathic abilities.  They may even encourage their clients to believe they are telepathic.   But even when they don’t go down the telepathy route, the thought of one of them touching me makes my skin crawl.  I can’t imagine the amount of influence over me they would gain if they had the ability to touch me when I was highly vulnerable to influence on my movements.  Hell, even without that vulnerability, even on my best communication day, I would not want one of them touching me.

And these people are overrepresented in FC circles.  And they scare me to death.  They scare me more than a lot of people who should technically scare me more.  They scare me because I can see what they are doing to people, and I can see them getting away with it.  And because people so often look up to them.  I can barely stand being in a room with them, but go to any conference with lots of FC users and these facilitators will be everywhere.  And they don’t understand why I spend so much time and energy walking around the room in strange patterns that they can’t understand, but the patterns I walk around the room in are to avoid the big glows they have around them, and trying to avoid their spheres of influence.  Not to mention trying to avoid attracting their attention, which is hard when you’re a big fish in a small pond.  It’s draining to be around them.  It feels like being pummeled by their egos, even if I don’t react, even if I don’t do anything, it’s just exhausting.

And the thought that these are people who seem to be especially drawn to this line of work frightens me.  Because they can influence people so easily.  They can influence people who are fully verbal and never have to type to communicate.  They have no business touching people to ‘help them communicate’.  And when what comes out of the communication is gushing praise for these facilitators, it makes me want to throw up.

(In general, when someone gushes praise about facilitators it’s a warning sign that they’re very afraid of something.  In this case it’s also a warning sign that this is what the facilitator wants.  But when everything they say about someone is positive, overly positive, too positive, it means they’re scared of something.  Like scared of having their communication taken away if they step out of line or say the wrong thing.  And those are legitimate fears.)

TL;DR:  There are people who gravitate towards facilitator roles in the FC community who scare me.  They scare me because they have big, influential egos that fill entire rooms and can influence people who are not even being facilitated at the moment.  The influence they have over people who they are touching to facilitate them, is even stronger.  And the whole thing is dangerous to the ability of people to freely communicate our own thoughts.

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