as small as a world and as large as alone

10:14am September 28, 2014

madeofpatterns:

xekstrin:

#1 tactic emotional abusers will use to get you to comply to their wishes is threatening suicide or self harm, don’t fall for it

If you notice whenever you get real with a person who is treating you like shit, and they immediately shrivel up into this pathetic ball of self loathing so that somehow you’re the one comforting them, they are an emotional abuser.

don’t fall for it

It is SO HARD to learn not to fall for this.

OMG I remember a person who did this.

She also picked fights with people and, the moment they fought back, crumpled up into a ball of victimhood who couldn’t understaaaaaand why everyone was so meaaaaaaaan to her.  Except that people tended to go out of their way to be nice to her, it’s just that she made that impossible after awhile by being insufferably mean to everyone else.

She’d also find excuses to blow up at people.  Like anyone who brushed past her on the elevator was deliberately abusing her by beating her up for being in a wheelchair.  She told me I only didn’t get treated like that because I was bedridden and didn’t use the elevators, and that all wheelchair users in the building were treated like this in the elevators, that people deliberately hit us and stuff.  I talked to other chair users, and eventually began using the elevators myself, and none of us had this problem.

She also thought that yelling “You motherfucking hunchbacked retard!” was totally justified (“I know those words hurt, that’s why I used them, because she’s a bitch and I wanted to hurt her!”) when someone followed building rules by not letting her indoors when they didn’t recognize her as a resident.  And that any way the target of her verbal abuse responded was, of course, victimizing her.

She put my life in danger a few times.  I finally confronted her about a long list of shit she’d been pulling on me and others.  The final straw had been when, knowing that my eyesight/visual processing isn’t good enough to know whether I’m in the street or on the sidewalk, she led me into the street, and down the middle of the street, for blocks and blocks, on a busy street, before my brain caught up to my eyes and realized where we were.  This was after several people had told her to stop riding her wheelchair in the middle of the street because it was a hazard not only to her but to drivers, and could result in something tragic happening.  She had started claiming that it wasn’t her, it was a middle-aged guy who had borrowed her wheelchair and that we were just seeing her wheelchair, not her.  (She could not possibly be mistaken for a middle-aged man, only someone profoundly faceblind could tell that particular lie.)

Anyway, I confronted her about all of it.  Including the “middle aged man borrowed my wheelchair” lie.  I didn’t confront her about lying about her IQ.  Which, when she tried to get it down, was in the high fifties (normally it was in the borderline range, like mine), but she was telling people it was in the thirties and that she had the mind of a five-year-old and shouldn’t be left alone unsupervised.  

I didn’t confront her about lying about her daily living capabilities (she took care of herself for an entire year with very little support, had an immaculate house, stayed clean herself, ate pretty well, etc. – she needed help because these things were tiring, not because she couldn’t do them… but she’d tell people she needed “total care” and that people were doing all those things for her… people who were incapable of ever doing those things, mind you, and we all got together and found out she’d been telling each of us that others of us were helping her).  

I didn’t confront her about the fact that when she found out exactly how much more severely disabled I was than her in the area of daily living skills, she made a really pathetic attempt to make her room look messy (by dumping her laundry basket on the floor and letting her trash pile up a bit more than usual in the wastebasket) and started saying stuff like “You have better daily living skills than me, but then… that’s not hard.”  Which, by the way, made me feel almost violently enraged towards her.  Because by that point she’d spent a year on her own and her only problems were emotional problems (loneliness, stress, a strong and repeatedly expressed desire to be taken care of like a child because she “really was a child inside”) and maybe a bit of exhaustion.  By the time I’d spent a week on my own I was starving and living in filth beyond anything she could conjure up by dumping her laundry neatly on the floor.  I’d made the mistake of explaining this to her.  At first, she’d done the “I’m so much more autistic than you that I need it to be neat and tidy in order to function” bullshit she usually pulled, and then when I explained “I need to be neat and tidy in order to function too but I am incapable of making it neat and tidy because I have autistic catatonia and severe executive function problems and sensory issues” that’s when she started dumping her laundry on the floor.  

According to other disabled people we knew, she did things like this every time she figured out someone was more severely disabled than her in some area.  She couldn’t accept that people could be more severely disabled than her.  So she would either downplay their disabilities, or play up her own disabilities, or both – whichever she felt would be the most effective. 

And I didn’t call her out on asking for all the wrong services.  As in, what she actually needed was a little bit of help around the house to avoid the exhaustion and mild burnout that doing these things caused her.  And then she needed a lot of help with social skills.  By which I mean, being able to go out in public without getting banned from half the places she showed up, for belligerent and hostile behavior.  Not to mention her habit of stalking and harassing people and behaving abusively if they didn’t give her what she wanted.  But no, what she asked for was “total care” (I couldn’t believe she asked for that with a straight face) and to eventually be adopted by a couple who would treat her like a child for the rest of her life.  She had a video that she would show people to explain what kind of care she wanted, and it was the kind of care needed by someone with a profound developmental disability and no communication system.  There was no possible way that kind of care could be fit into her life and her abilities.  And no possible way to justify the funding.  But it appealed to her because the entire point of the care was to spend all of the caregivers’ time figuring out exactly what he wanted, at all times, and giving it to him, no matter what it was.  That appealed to her a lot.

I didn’t call her out on the way she treated actual people with severe or profound developmental disabilities.  First off, she had decided that I was profoundly autistic after seeing me on television.  But then when she got to know me, and found that she couldn’t manipulate me the way she wanted to be able to, she started saying that I was “so much higher functioning than her” (ha!) and that I just had a lot of other disabilities besides autism.  Her reasoning?  When she is around people who “really are” “severe/profound”, she can read their minds and they never contradict her about what she says about them.  Of course they don’t, most of them have no communication system to do it with.  But when we were able to contradict her, then we must not be severe/profound, because anyone severe/profound was someone she was “good with” just like she was “good with” animals (she abused animals).  When I was too shut down to communicate, she was more than happy to tell other people what I was supposedly thinking and how they should respond to me.  She did the same to anyone without a formal communication system.  While at the same time insisting that she was “just like” us in various ways that she… wasn’t.

I didn’t call her out on the way that she basked any time she was the center of attention, like a lizard soaking in sunlight.  Or the way that as long as she was the center of attention and all focus was on her, every trace of overload disappeared.  She only got overloaded by groups of people when she wasn’t the center of attention.  And paying attention to her was draining as fuck.  I once spent three days sleeping off an hour-long conversation with her.  All interactions with her, group or single, left her completely energized and everyone else in the room bone-weary.  Naturally, she couldn’t handle being alone for any length of time and literally put someone in the hospital on multiple occasions just from draining her when she was already sick – and then got angry with her for being in the hospital and continued to try to drain her while she was in there.  (This is when I learned that, while it’s vastly overused in ways that are quite damaging, the concept of “emotional vampirism” isn’t just a myth.)

But I did call her out on almost getting me killed a few times.  And on the circumstances surrounding that, including the frequent, blatant lying (like the kind of lying that can’t be anything other than lying because it’s that frigging blatant).  The first thing she did was whip her head to the side as if I’d slapped her, and put on an “I’m a puppy dog who just got kicked in the face for no reason” expression on her face or body or somewhere.  Like if anyone had walked into the room right then and saw the way she looked, they’d think I had just done something horrible to her.

Then she proceeded to unload the most blatant and awful lies on me that I had ever seen her do.  This was where the “middle-aged guy borrows my chair, you just saw the chair and thought it was me” thing came out.  And then after I got home, I got a letter from her that basically went, “I thought we were friends, I can’t believe you’ve attacked me like this, how can you do such a thing to me?”  Combined with the crumpling up and needing to be comforted thing.  In fact, I think this was when she decided that since her main source of emotional energy (or whatever you want to call it) was setting boundaries with her, then I needed to be her new substitute source, because something dire would happen to her if (in addition to all the extensive services we’d gotten her, many of which she didn’t need) if she didn’t talk to someone on the phone multiple times a day.

Which was about when I told her “You just almost got me killed.  Multiple times.  If you cared at all about me, and not just yourself, your response to me telling you about this would be a heartfelt apology, not lashing out at me and making further demands on me and accusing me of attacking you.  And if you hadn’t known what you were doing, your response would be "OMG I had no idea I’m so sorry”, not “How dare you attack me I thought I was your friend.”“  And then told her I wanted no further contact with her until and unless I said I was ready to have contact.

Of course, she did try to contact me, frequently, and I had to delete a lot of emails begging to be let back into her life and bragging about how now she had people to help her handle social situations (trust me it was bragging – for her, any help she got was proof she was extra-special-disabled) so therefore she couldn’t possibly do any damage to me anymore.  (Except yes she could, because no amount of staff could keep her from that soul-sucking thing she did so well.  And already being bedridden from adrenal insufficiency, and watching what had happened to other disabled people around her who also had low spoons already, I knew she was an actual danger on many levels.)

BTW, please nobody take this woman as typical of anything.  I’ve known hundreds of disabled people.  She’s the rarest of rare exceptions.  Unfortunately she’s also a handy stereotype – the disabled person who gets off on being disabled and exaggerates their disability to get more than they need from others.  Such people exist.  They’re also very, very rare.  It’s important to know that they do exist, so that you can avoid them when you run into them.  It’s important to know that they’re very, very rare, because most of the time when you think you’re seeing someone like this, you’re actually seeing someone who isn’t doing anything wrong and there’s a much more innocent explanation.  Don’t ever assume this sort of thing about a person unless you have truly phenomenal amounts of proof.  Which I have, about this person, because I knew her very closely, in person, for over a year, and so did other people I trusted, and we eventually figured out she was telling different sets of lies to each of us according to what she wanted us to believe so she could get what she wanted out of us.

This, by the way, is why I say I know what it’s like to be around someone who’s faking or exaggerating and who does a lot of damage in the process.  Most people who fake or exaggerate don’t do any damage much at all.  I still say I’d rather let someone like her slip by, than accuse someone real of faking or exaggerating.  Because the false accusation is far more devastating to both individuals and communities, than the real actual thing is.  And I know exactly how devastating the real actual thing can be, because of rare examples like this woman.  It destroys trust, it costs people lots of money (she was always finding ways to get people to give her huge sums of money, and she was always paying for things she shouldn’t have been able to afford), it does actual physical damage to people who don’t have the energy to deal with things like this.  And worst of all, it takes people’s best human impulses, uses them against them, and makes them doubt whether they should act on those impulses in the future.  (The answer to that question is, yes they should, people should use caution but abandoning those impulses is abandoning your humanity and abandoning other human beings who desperately need the help.)  But despite all that damage, it’s still less damage than is done when people start doubting every non-standard disabled person who walks in the door.  Because disabled people die when people don’t believe we’re for real.

Sorry that turned into a long tangent, but an important one, I think.

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