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2:18am
August 4, 2015
it is hard to express…
just how much you can break someone…
…if what you think you’re doing..
..is making them into someone who might someday become a real person worthy of respect…
I had a psychologist once who openly told me that his goal was to kill the person I was, and replace that person, inside me, with a person who was more functional and better adapted to living in the world and less psychotic.
Note that ‘psychotic’, for him, encompassed ‘autistic’. (He was part of a team who had diagnosed me, among other things, as having been ‘psychotic since infancy’. Which can only ever mean autism, because there’s no way to diagnose actual psychosis in an infant. They were taking their ideas straight out of Frances Tustin’s books from the seventies, that differentiated some forms of autism from others, and called some of it autism and some of it childhood schizophrenia or childhood psychosis. I was supposedly psychotic since infancy and schizophrenic since adolescence, although what the difference was, I was never exactly told.)
He did not succeed.
But he did succeed in doing some incredibly scary stuff to the inside of my head. I was unable to defend myself against the things he did, because I was heavily drugged and he was an accomplished manipulator.
I have been told since – by strangers online who know nothing about my life, mind you – that I should’ve known it was impossible for someone to kill who you are and make you into someone else. That if I actually believed him that it was possible, then there was something clearly wrong with me that needed to be fixed, possibly by the very guy who was abusing me in this fashion.
Of all of the abuse I encountered in the psychiatric system, this man’s abuse was the longest-lasting and most damaging in terms of consequences for my mind. I remember going into appointments with him and feeling like I was an entirely different person. Like I’d walk in the door myself, immediately turn into someone else the moment I saw him, and leave the door someone else again. Often I wouldn’t be able to remember our sessions later.
He once let it slip that he’d been trained by a certain school of hypnotherapy. Then he refused to name it again when I and my family asked about it, and got evasive whenever we brought up the subject. I eventually found some stuff by the person, and it was someone who was considered highly unethical by a lot of hypnotherapists, because he believed in lying to patients if he thought lying would bring them around to healing in some manner, and he also believed in involuntary trance induction. When I read about the ‘confusion induction’, it was exactly what this therapist did sometimes.
And being on a very high dose of antipsychotics made it impossible for me to psychologically defend myself. Antipsychotics can have an effect where they basically shatter your cognitive abilities, including your defenses against having your mind invaded. By which I don’t mean like sci-fi telepathy sort of mind invasion, but more like extremely skilled manipulation. If you can’t think straight, you can’t defend yourself well against people who are hell-bent on manipulating you.
But he was incredibly up front about the idea that he was going to kill the person I was inside, and replace that person. He said also that he was going to get inside my mind and never leave. And that if I ever had an original thought, I should bring it to him, because I would probably die if I ever thought for myself for very long.
I remember when a friend first taught me to repeat “I am allowed to think for myself.” She said I needed to repeat it to myself over and over until I really believed it, and that it was very important that I do so. I thought she was trying to kill me. And at first, even beginning to try to repeat it to myself, resulted in this torrent of confusing brain noise that felt like I was drowning. It was like he’d set booby traps all over my mind.
People don’t think this kind of thing is possible.
People are wrong.
I was first able to begin resisting this stuff when I found a book about cults, by a person who had been a cult member and had indoctrinated other people, and he talked in depth about how indoctrination works and how to resist it and remove it from yourself. I had never been in a religious cult, or even in any of the other types of cults in the book, but the residential facility I lived at when all this went down, had a power structure that resembled a cult enough that the book was very useful for me.
I actually confronted him about it once, after I started reading about cults. He told me that anything he did was warranted because if it wasn’t for him I’d have been in a state institution for at minimum the rest of my childhood. Mind you, when given a choice between the residential facility and the state institution, I chose the state institution. I was overruled both because people didn’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the choice I made, and because there were no beds open in the state institution.
But having now talked to people who’ve been in similar residential facilities and in the exact state institution I almost ended up in, I have been told that the state institution was definitely better. Not good, not good by a long shot. In fact, terrible. But better. State institutions don’t usually have the money to throw around for intensive one-on-one 24/7 brainwashing. Which is why many actual patients prefer them to private institutions. Not all patients, and not all institutions, but it’s a preference that occurs often enough, and goes against what most people consider common sense, that it’s been explicitly noted a lot in the psychiatric ex-patient movement. Unfortunately, that preference (and, in general, preferences for places seen as “worse” from the outside for reasons that are largely aesthetic) is often seen as evidence that we lack sanity and should not have control over our lives.
Of course, most of us would prefer no institutions, but when given a choice between different types of institutions, we’ll often choose ones considered “more restrictive” or “worse”. Because our definition of what makes a place worse – as patients, who understand certain things instinctively that other people don’t understand – is often very different from what staff or family members consider worse.
So this idea that he was keeping me out of a state institution doesn’t hold water to me at all.
The idea that he did this for any reason other than his own amusement and power tripping, doesn’t hold water to me at all. He was someone who got off on power and control. Not someone who inadvertently misused power, but someone who craved power and misused it to do harm to people, and often enjoyed doing so.
He also told me that he really enjoyed being able to treat me, because normally people like me were stuck in state institutions and out of his reach, so he didn’t normally get to “work on” anyone like me.
Which was a creepy-ass thing to say.
I learned later that even in psychotherapy that is not deliberately sadistic, there’s a frequent idea that you have to destroy who someone is and replace them with someone more functional.
So I was not imagining that he said this, and the fact that I believed him capable of doing something he kept threatening to do (when he controlled every aspect of my life, too, which can undermine anyone’s sense of reality), does not mean that I “had to have been crazy” and therefore that what he did was somehow okay. (Why is it okay to do that to crazy people but not to sane people, anyway? It shouldn’t be. And why is it okay to imply that I’m crazy – and therefore apparently not worth listening to – because I was horribly abused by a psychologist on a power trip?)
TL;DR: I had a psychologist once who told me that he wanted to kill the person I was and replace me with someone who could function better in the world and generally be a happier and better person or something along those lines. He told me this, explicitly, many times. His abuse did more damage to my mind than the rest of the psychiatric system combined. And the one time I confronted him about the matter, he told me that it was all okay because he was doing it to keep me out of a state institution. Except he was actually doing it because he got off on power and control. Everything else was just an excuse. It was horrible in ways I can’t even describe.
133 notes
2:46am
November 28, 2014
Staff using disabled people in their power plays.
I used to have what in the DD world they refer to as behavior problems. Which basically means a hair-trigger temper that I took out on the objects and people around me, and on myself, in equal measure.
There was a power struggle going on between my staff person, I’ll call her Dolores, and my case managers, I had two, I’ll call them John and Marie. Both lacked any apparent heart or conscience. To them it was all about power, gaining it and maintaining it, and treating staff and disabled clients as their very own living dollhouse to do with as they pleased.
If they got reports that a staff person was abusing power, they’d promote them. If they knew a client and staff got along great, they’d do their best to separate them. These were the ones who used an illiterate man’s emails to accuse his favorite staff (Dolores) of abuse while pretending to take dictation from him about something totally different. Well now they were trying to get in between me and Dolores.
So they set up a meeting. Dolores came to all my meetings to help as a cognitive interpreter, my right under the law. They said they’d show up at noon. They showed up at 11 to get me alone and outnumbered. They knew I never did two on one conversations so of course John had someone with him. They came in and talked about stuff I don’t remember which is one reason I needed Dolores. When she came at noon they tried to leave but I wouldn’t let them. He claimed the meeting was over at noon. Dolores said “no you said noon thirty”.
I very angrily typed what they’d done to manipulate me. John said to Dolores, “she was just fine till you got here.” Dolores tried to say it was because I was scared, but before she could get a word out, I threw my trackball at John, missed and hit my laptop screen. Screamed in his face. Then ran into the bathroom before I could do real damage.
I came out after I cooled down. John was smiling a chilling smile. I apologized to him. He said “It’s okay, I understand, it wasn’t your fault anyway. You’re not in any trouble at all.”
I asked Dolores about that comment later. She said that the moment he set off my meltdown, he sat back, relaxed, and smiled directly at Dolores the whole time. When I left the room, he said “See what you made her do?” He had deliberately set up all the conditions that normally resulted in meltdowns. The visit read like the section of my IPP (Individual Program Plan) on what not to do in meetings with me. I read it later and they had done every single thing it said not to do. No coincidence here: They were literally using my IPP as a guide for figuring out how to fuck up my ability to communicate and understand, and as a guide to inducing meltdowns.
And they used my meltdown to get between me and Dolores. They set up the situation, they used known triggers, and waited for me to go off, then got Dolores in trouble for my behavior. This is an extremely common ploy used by staff to get each other in trouble, using disabled people as weapons. Always be aware, in situations like this, you could be being set up on purpose, in order for people who don’t even see you as human to use you against each other. Another way staff will use clients against each other is one-upmanship games where each staff scores points for “understanding a client better than other staff do”. They have all kinds of power games they play against each other, the common feature being that we are not people to them, we are chips on a game board, we are objects to be owned, we are things. Never ever forget that some staff and case managers will use you this way.
7:48am
November 15, 2014
Watch out for this, really closely, in your own life and your friends’ lives. It may save someone a lot of heartache.
I knew someone. I’m not going to give his name, or any other identifying informatioin, because that’s not important and I don’t want to embarrass him publicly. But I will call him Zeke for the time being. This happened a long time ago.
He was very emotionally stable. I mean, he had his problems, some of which may have even been clinically diagnosable as as a mental illness. But he was never suicidal. Events in his life had led him to value life so much that regardless of how depressed he got – and it was severe at times – he never thought of killing himself. Ever.
Then he started dating this woman. I will call her Lucy, after the Peanuts character with the uncredentialed psychiatry booth that she charged money for. I knew her, and she was highly manipulative. If she couldn’t find drama that already existed, she’d create drama. Even if it meant lying or manipulating people to do sol As such, not a lot of people trusted her.. But this guy was new to her, and had no idea what she was capable of.
She was one of those psych majors who runs around diagnosing their friends. Worse, she was one of those psych majors who tried to practice therapy on her friends without a license. She also loved the martyr role, the role of the long-suffering caregiver to a hopelessly mentally ill person.
So she took this guy who was rock-solid stable than most people I’ve met. So much so that even in severe depression he never wanted to kill himself. And he wasn’t even always depressed, by a long shot. The period this takes place in was a stresful period in his life, for sure. But… yeah, the things Lucy described do not match up with anything I know of Zeke, and I was extremely close to him for much longer than Lucy had even known him.
So Lucy and Zeke started dating. Lucy’s first move was to create mistrust between Zeke and his family. She took concerns he had about his pareints, and amplified them by making up stories that seemed to support them. She even involved his siblings, none of whom were aware how dangerous she could be. Then they moved far away from the family, so at that point Lucy was the only person Zeke had much contact with.
And then the letters started coming back, posted on her blog and the like. They were all about how she had to spend every waking hour watching Zeke so he wouldn’t try and kill himself. That already struck me as false or exaggerated, because Zeke and I had had long discussions about suicide. I was the one who gave in too easily to suicidal urges. Zeke was the one who tried to persuade me that life was an amazing thing that you didn’t want to just give up, and that if I’d been through what he’d been through, I’d never think of killing myself no matter how bad it got, I’d value life too much. And I believe him. I won’t post the circumstances (they are too identifying), but they are absolutely compelling.
So first off she acted like she spent every waking moment keeping him on suicide watch (yet never called a mental institution to have him committed, even though she had no problem with mental institutions… my guess is the reason she didn’t do that is because there was no actual case for him being a danger to himself). Second off, she started trying to recover abuse memories from him, which became incapacitating. I could totally believe the memories were real, but in situations like that, you don’t just go playing with someone’s head.
I’ve seen way too many situations that all look stunningly similar: A friend or significant other or therapist (yes, being professional doesn’t make it better) “helps” a person by recovering memories of abuse. Then they systematically teach them the proper ways to respond to that abuse. By which I don’t mean they provide solutions to the abuse memories. I mean they teach them to become totally incapacitated by them, to find triggers everywhere, and to go into flashbacks at the drop of a hat All of this works whether the memories are true or false.
So you’ll get someone who a month ago was more or less functional. And now they’re incapacitated. Now they curl up in a ball and cry every time anyone so much as mentions a word that could be remotely tied to the abuse. Now they also curl up in a ball and cry at random moments, at which point their “caregiver” rushes over to them and asks them “Are you having a memory?” and they say “yes” and then the “caregiver” coaches them through deep breathing while trying to get as much detail out of the person as they can.
In the case of Zeke, I’d known him almost my whole life, we grew up on the same street, and I knew something was going badly wrong. I didn’t know how badly wrong until he got out of that relationship for good and started telling horror stories about Lucy.
But if you, or someone you know, gets into a relationship with someone – friend, significant other, therapist – and they start trying to give you psychiatric help, with or without a license, and you seem to be getting worse and worse rather than better and better, then run, run far away, and never speak to this person again. Anything you say will probably be repeated anyway. Lucy liked to describe her S.O.’s sexual practices online without their knowledge or consent. People who cross boundaries in one way are likely to cross them in others. But people who exploit your emotions in the name of helping you are not your friends no matter what they call themselves. And while there are sometimes where you have to feel a little worse before you get better, it shouldn’t become an ongoing thing that creates more and more dependency on the person who is making you feel this way.
This is a form of abuse, I don’t know if it has a name, but it’s a definite, specific form of abuse and I have seen it turn very ugly on more than one occasion. I’ve had it done to me as well. (Beware of anyone who deliberately triggers you until you start crying, and then is right there to “comfort” you and tell you “it’s okay you’re safe now” and stuff. Then claims to have made an emotional breakthrough where they have connected with you over these experiences. No, just no.)
2:35am
October 9, 2014
I didn’t think to say explicitly earlier, but the fact that there really are people trying to cope with repressed memories of abuse is one of the things that makes me angrier about that therapeutic fad of the late ’80s-’90s.
I mean, not only were a lot of people who had legitimate troubles there no doubt also treated in the same ways, the history of unethical and outright abusive “therapeutic” approaches would get their legitimate problems taken even less seriously.
Some of the ways I got done would no doubt be more distressing and harmful if you really did have a history of the kinds of trauma they were focusing on. And I have seen some examples of “skeptical” running way too far in the opposite direction, and deciding “there were a lot of abuses; therefore this was never even a real thing for anyone.” Supremely unhelpful.
Similarly, a lot of people have decided that there’s no such thing as being plural because of the “DID fad” that went along with the “repressed memory fad” and resulted in a lot of people misdiagnosed with DID (including some plural and median systems who never would’ve identified with DID in the first place, and I suspect a lot of people with temporal lobe epilepsy got misdiagnosed with DID). Note that plurality has been known to exist, outside the DID/psychiatric paradigm, for centuries. DID is only one form of plurality and only the kind recognized by (some) psychiatrists. Plural people who don’t act like “classic DID” aren’t faking anything and have been documented for literally centuries. Just wanted to add that in since so many people think they know what they’re talking about without having done any research into the history of the phenomenon of many selves one body.
(I’m not plural, but I was persuaded to act like I was, in the nineties. But I have a disproportionate number of plural friends, some of whom identify with DID and some of whom don’t, and I can assure you they are very real and were not made up by therapists, some of them have never even seen a therapist, many started asking to be called many different names by the age of five.)
2:20pm
August 2, 2014
"As a last resort"
Content warning: This is a graphic post about brutality towards people with disabilities. ABA and justifications for abuse are discussed. Proceed with caution.
People do a lot of brutal things to people with disabilities, including children.
Some examples: pinning them to the floor, punishing them with electric shocks, medicating them into immobility, putting them in 10-40 hours a week of repetitive behavioral therapy, taking away everything they care about and making them earn it by complying with therapy, taking away their food, and confining them in small places.
These things are now somewhat politically unpopular. We identify, as a culture, as having got past that point. We think of this kind of brutality as something that happened in the past, even though it is still common.
What this means in practice is that whenever people do brutal things to someone with a disability, it will be called the last resort. People doing the brutal things will claim that they minimize them, that there are protections in place, and that they only do them when necessary.
For example, this is an excerpt from the (as of this post) current ethical standards for BCBAs (certified ABA experts):
“4.05 Reinforcement/Punishment.
The behavior analyst recommends reinforcement rather than punishment whenever possible. If punishment procedures are necessary, the behavior analyst always includes reinforcement procedures for alternative behavior in the program.
4.06 Avoiding Harmful Reinforcers. RBT
The behavior analyst minimizes the use of items as potential reinforcers that maybe harmful to the long-term health of the client or participant (e.g., cigarettes, sugar or fat-laden food), or that may require undesirably marked deprivation procedures as motivating operations.”
In other words, the current standards of ethics for ABA practices explicitly allow punishment, harmful reinforcers, and “undesirably marked deprivation procedures”. But, they claim to “minimize” it, and only do it when they consider it necessary in some way.
This is an empty claim. Everyone who has ever used harmful reinforcers and brutal punishments has claimed that they are only used when they are necessary. Even the people who deprived children of food and made them live and study on electrified floors (graphic link, proceed with caution.) Even the electric shocks and food deprivation used by the Judge Rotenburg Center do not violate the BCBA ethical guidelines, because they claim that they are necessary and only used in extreme cases (even though they shock people for things like standing up from chairs without permission.)
Whenever any of this is done to someone, it will be justified as “a last resort”. Even if it’s an explicit part of their plan. Even if it’s done regularly with no attempt to transition to another approach. Even if nothing else has ever been tried. Someone who is treated brutally will be assumed to have deserved it.
People call things last resorts to justify doing them. They choose to do brutal things to a vulnerable person, but they think of it as inevitable because it is “the last resort”. Calling something “the last resort” means “it’s that person’s fault I’m doing this; I could not possibly do otherwise.”
Treating someone in your care brutally and then blaming them for your choices is inexcusable.
To those treated brutally and told it was a last resort: I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m even more sorry if it’s still happening. It’s not your fault. It’s not because of anything you did, and it’s not because there’s anything wrong with your mind. You were abused because others chose to abuse you.
Everything that was ever done to me at a particular residential facility that was abusive beyond belief – from giving me twice the toxic dose of Clozaril, to giving me a diagnosis they knew was inaccurate in order to get me onto said Clozaril, to beating me up in order to get me to make eye contact, to making me walk back and forth from the barn to the house until I walked "normally” enough to deserve to eat, to telling me that he was going to get into my head and never leave and kill the person I was and replace me with himself as well as someone more functional than the real me, to what we strongly suspect was involuntary trance induction…
…I wrote to the psychologist about it and he told me that given “the alternative” was life in an institution, he felt justified with everything they’d done to me. He also said some weird stuff about “I don’t usually get to work with people like you at all because you’re normally on back wards of state institutions, and they won’t let you near me” like I was some kind of collector’s item. And he basically told me that if it weren’t for him I’d be in an institution forever, and that he’d saved me and that I should be grateful.
6-9 months of my life at that place, mind you. The rest of my life trying to recover from the damage. Talk about CPTSD.
3:43pm
July 18, 2014
Nonviolent Communication can hurt people
People who struggle interpersonally, who seem unhappy, or who get into a lot of conflicts are often advised to adopt the approach of Nonviolent Communication.
This is often not a good idea. Nonviolent Communication is an approach based on refraining from seeming to judge others, and instead expressing everything in terms of your own feelings. For instance, instead of “Don’t be such an inconsiderate jerk about leaving your clothes around”, you’d say “When you leave your clothing around, I feel disrespected.”. That approach is useful in situations in which people basically want to treat each other well but have trouble doing so because they don’t understand one another’s needs and feelings. In every other type of situation, the ideology and methodology of Nonviolent Communication can make things much worse.
Nonviolent Communication can be particularly harmful to marginalized people or abuse survivors. It can also teach powerful people to abuse their power more than they had previously, and to feel good about doing so. Non-Violent Communication has strategies that can be helpful in some situations, but it also teaches a lot of anti-skills that can undermine the ability to survive and fight injustice and abuse.
For marginalized or abused people, being judgmental is a necessary survival skill. Sometimes it’s not enough to say “when you call me slurs, I feel humiliated” - particularly if the other person doesn’t care about hurting you or actually wants to hurt you. Sometimes you have to say “The word you called me is a slur. It’s not ok to call me slurs. Stop.” Or “If you call me that again, I’m leaving.” Sometimes you have to say to yourself “I’m ok, they’re mean.” All of those things are judgments, and it’s important to be judgmental in those ways.
You can’t protect yourself from people who mean you harm without judging them. Nonviolent Communication works when people are hurting each other by accident; it only works when everyone means well. It doesn’t have responses that work when people are hurting others on purpose or without caring about damage they do. Which, if you’re marginalized or abused, happens several times a day. NVC does not have a framework for acknowledging this or responding to it.
In order to protect yourself from people who mean you harm, you have to see yourself as having the right to judge that someone is hurting you. You also have to be able to unilaterally set boundaries, even when your boundaries are upsetting to other people. Nonviolent Communication culture can teach you that whenever others are upset with you, you’re doing something wrong and should change what you do in order to meet the needs of others better. That’s a major anti-skill. People need to be able to decide things for themselves even when others are upset.
Further, NVC places a dangerous degree of emphasis on using a very specific kind of language and tone. NVC culture often judges people less on the content of what they’re saying than how they are saying it. Abusers and cluelessly powerful people are usually much better at using NVC language than people who are actively being hurt. When you’re just messing with someone’s head or protecting your own right to mess with their head, it’s easy to phrase things correctly. When someone is abusing you and you’re trying to explain what’s wrong, and you’re actively terrified, it’s much, much harder to phrase things in I-statements that take an acceptable tone.
Further, there is *always* a way to take issue with the way someone phrased something. It’s really easy to make something that’s really about shutting someone up look like a concern about the way they’re using language, or advice on how to communicate better. Every group I’ve seen that valued this type of language highly ended up nitpicking the language of the least popular person in the group as a way of shutting them up.
tl;dr Be careful with Nonviolent Communication. It has some merits, but it is not the complete solution to conflict or communication that it presents itself as. If you have certain common problems, NVC is dangerous.
agent-hardass said:
((I bolded my favorite parts))
This reminds me of a time when a person I care about wasn’t treating me great and I tried using I-statements with them and they said:
“I’m not invalidating your feelings” (and went on to say a bunch of really invalidating things and INSISTING they were not invalidating).
It was really funny.
holdstillslick said:
This hits on a lot of the problem I have with “conflict resolution” seminars. In addition to metaphorically exposing you’re belly, you’re also allowing the other person not to take responsibility for their actions. When you say “I feel [thing] when you do [thing],” you are taking the responsibility for your own feelings. And while this can be productive in a healthy space, it’s enabling to abusers who want you to believe that you’re CHOOSING to be hurt rather than that they are actively hurting you.
realsocialskills said:
Yes. It gives them more information about how to hurt you, and new ways to feel justified in doing so.
Also it gives people ways to be incredibly passive-aggressive. I don’t know how to describe it, but they can turn I-statements and “When you… I feel…” etc. into some of the most aggressive back-stabbing bullshit I’ve ever seen in my life, all with a sweet little smile on their faces. I’ve actually learned to be very wary of people who are evangelical about NVC because so many of them actually like it because it gives them a way to be passive-aggressive as all fuck without anyone having any means to stop them without stepping outside the ‘rules’.
One thing I really dislike about such interactions is that somehow I come off looking rough and crude and they come off looking polished and professional, and it really harms me. And I can’t help but see massive amounts of classism at work here.
3:20pm
July 17, 2014
NVC, cognitive ableism, and abuse
Nonviolent Communication can hurt people
People who struggle interpersonally, who seem unhappy, or who get into a lot of conflicts are often advised to adopt the approach of Nonviolent Communication.
This is…
ischemgeek said:
This. Other issues is that NVC can be used by abusers to abuse… “nonviolently.” Especially if you’re standing up for yourself to them.
Like by using their I-statements to redirect from the issue to them. Like, if I’m saying, “Please don’t [x] because [y],” then the abusive NVC user responds with an I-statement about how hurt they feel about what I just said. Suddenly I’m the bad guy for telling them not to [touch me, interrupt me, roughhouse, etc].
Or using their I-statements to gaslight. I say, “Please don’t [x] because [y],” and they respond with an I-statement about how they feel attacked when I “yell” even though I wasn’t yelling. And then the conversation is suddenly about whether or not I was yelling at them, not about the thing I’m trying to get them to stop doing. And again, I’m the bad guy for establishing a boundary.
Or using their I-statements to engage in ableism and tone policing. “I don’t like being spoken to in such a harsh tone.” when I can’t word something any differently because I’m trying to hold off a meltdown. And then convo is redirected to whether or not I’m being “too harsh” and away from “I need to get out of this situation yesterday,” however I phrased it.
And ableism in that they don’t accept that sometimes it’s hard to impossible to phrase stuff in a NVC-acceptable way. On a bad word day, something like 70% of my conversational brainpower is focused on getting the mouth to make the word-sounds in the order, volume, cadence and smoothness that makes the gist of what I need to communicate understood. The remainder of my conversational brainpower is about evenly split between understanding what the other person is saying and trying to figure out how to phrase something so that I can get it out of my uncooperative mouth. NVC phrasing is almost always wordier, more oblique, and therefore harder to conceptualize and say than direct/blunt phrasing. On a bad words day I don’t have any brainpower left over to figure out how to phrase things tactfully/gently. If I stumble onto it because it’s in a preexisting script that I think I can say, great. If not, communication > etiquette. I will point and say “Shut it” about a fume hood sash at work, even if it’s blunt to the point of rudeness, if it’s what I can say at the time. Because the alternative is dangerous at my work. NVC does not as a philosophy allow for this being a situation that might happen.
It’s also harder to parse what the other person is actually wanting from me in the conversation when they choose to hint and talk around it with NVC (e.g., “I’m sensing anger” can mean “Did I upset you?” or “Are you angry?” or “Why are you angry?” or “Is something bothering you?” or “am I misreading your body language?” or “I don’t like your tone of voice.”). When I’m in a high-stress time, I’m unable to correctly parse body language and subtext. I will misread what the other person is hinting at, and then they get annoyed when I don’t follow their lead in the social dance. When I’m stressed, I’m either oblivious to or I’m hearing only part of the metaphorical music, and therefore I can’t follow the subtleties and intricacies of what they want me to do. NVC also does not as a philosophy allow for this being a situation that might happen - I need direct, explicit, and downright blunt-to-the-point-of-rude communication at times. NVC practitioners (for want of a better word) have a tendency to assume I’m being purposefully obtuse at such times, when in reality I’m just not understanding what they’re trying to get at.
Lastly: I’m a survivor of various forms of abuse. Learning how to judge my abusers for their abuse was a necessary part of the healing process. NVC takes the assumption that it “takes two” to have a blow-up about something. And in some cases, it does. But in other cases, NVC is a philosophy of victim-blaming.
It did not take two when I was being sexually harassed by a kid over twice my age on the school bus. It took him. Choosing someone to victimize. It did not take two when someone held me by the throat as they put a hole through the wall beside my head. It took that person, choosing to victimize me. It did not take two when I had kids slam my head in the locker and beat me while I lay on the ground stunned and counting stars out of the blue, for no reason other than that they thought it would be funny. It took my bullies choosing to victimize me. Judging their actions as wrong and harmful and just plain mean let me learn to stop blaming myself when it was done to me. And that, in turn, opened me to taking more radical action, which I eventually did upon graduating high school.
Judgement is a necessary skill when you’re in an abusive situation. Full stop. You need to judge others so that you can stop victim-blaming yourself and stop believing that if you’re just perfect enough - if you fit in enough, if your hair and clothes are good enough, if you’re well behaved enough, if your marks are good enough, if you practice physical coordination enough, if you never even sneeze wrong or breathe funny - you won’t be abused anymore. That won’t happen. You will never be perfect enough for them. I could walk on water, and they would call me a r***** for not knowing how to swim. And it’s not my fault. It’s theirs, for choosing to victimize.
Learning how to judge, and that judgement is okay in some situations, even necessary in some situations, allowed me to leave those abusive situations. Expressing my judgement of their actions allowed me to establish boundaries in a way that was unmistakable by bystanders. And it got others to acknowledge and more importantly learn from my experiences. A school-aged relative of mine did not have a bullying situation in school go unchecked because I expressed my judgement of how my parents handled my bullying situation in school. My parents were hurt by my words, I’m sure. But that relative was saved years of torment. I tried with I-statements, I really did. And they didn’t work. And I tried talking about the scientific studies on the harms of bullying. And that didn’t work. What worked was sitting down with the kid’s parents and telling them in so many words (I rehearsed it a lot so I’d be able to get it out right the first time), “Your child will hate you in ten years if you don’t do something about this now. Not in a month or two in case it gets better. It’s been going on for months. It won’t get better. It will just get worse if you don’t do something, and in a month it might be too little too late. Trust me on this. You need to do something now. I was in [kid]’s shoes when I was that age, and by the time I was a teenager, I hated my parents with a passion for not doing anything about it when I was a kid. Don’t ignore it and pretend it’ll go away. Do something. Even if it doesn’t work, [kid] will know you’re there and trying, and that means something. “
NVC is a good tool for certain situations. But it is not and should not be the only tool. If it doesn’t work, you need to have something else to turn to. To use a metaphor: If all you have is a hammer, you’ll wreck your damn plumbing when you try to tighten a nut. Likewise, if all you have is NVC, you’ll make the situation worse when forceful verbal action is required.
Oh gods the first fourth-grade teacher I ever had (I repeated the grade)… he always said “it takes two to tango” or “it takes two to tangle” or something. I didn’t have the language skills to parse out what that meant, but it always consisted of this girl beating me up or otherwise bullying me and then him forcing us to “talk it over” while she cried sweet little crocodile tears about getting caught and the teacher would tell me “Look at her, she’s CRYING,” as if that meant any damn thing at all.
3:13pm
July 17, 2014
Strong Glial Character: youneedacat: Social skills for autonomous people:…
stripesweatersandwaterbottles:
lexsplosion said:
“In general, if you are convinced that you know better than the person that you’re talking to what their own thoughts, feelings, and motivations must really be—and keep insisting that they’re just too sick or don’t have the insight to understand what their REAL thoughts, feelings and motivations are—you need to go away and stop hurting people who are already having a rough enough time.”
This this this this this. Also pretty terrified the person who abused me wants to be a therapist. :(
realsocialskills said:
It scares me too. I wish this was the first time I’d heard about an abuser wanting to become a therapist.
Therapy is so important for so many vulnerable people. And there are abusers who take advantage of that. It’s terrifying.
One of my long-term abusers, someone who has not seen me since 1996 but has participated in cyberstalking extremely recently to this day? Became a therapist. She was working on her psych degree when I first met her, and even then already believed she had the right to fuck with people’s lives, act like she knew them better than they knew themselves, etc. But it wasn’t even as benign as that. She enjoyed inciting drama and friction and tension between people. If there was not a problem she would create a problem because she got off on people having problems. She would even lie to create problems – she has lied multiple times, blatantly, not misremembered but outright lied, in the course of her cyberstalking and defamation campaign against me. And I’m far from the only person she’s targeted. She’s also set up situations where she’s deliberately triggered people who were fairly psychologically stable to begin with, and induced symptoms of mental illness so that she could take on a long-suffering martyr caretaker role (that is the only explanation I can imagine for some things I’ve seen her do). And she’s a therapist, and that scares me to death. I am afraid for her patients.
12:56pm
July 17, 2014
Nonviolent Communication can be emotionally violent
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) culture facilitates abuse in part because NVC culture has very little regard for consent. (I said a little bit about this in my other post on ways NVC hurts people.) They call it nonviolent, but it is often a coercive and emotional violent kind of interaction.
NVC has very different boundaries than are typical in mainstream interactions. Things that would normally be considered boundary violations are an expected and routine part of NVC dialoging.
That can be a good thing, in some contexts. There are settings where it can be very important to have different emotional boundaries than the default. To have intense engagement with people’s emotions. To hear out their emotions and state yours and try to refrain from judgement and just hear each other, and then talk together about what would meet your mutual needs.
In a NVC interaction, you have to regard your needs and the other person’s needs as equally important, no matter what they are. You have to regard their feelings and emotional reactions as equally valid and worth hearing as yours, no matter what they are. That is a good thing in some contexts, but it’s dangerous and deeply destructive in others.
That kind of interaction can be a good thing. I understand the value. But here’s the problem:
One way NVC can be abusive is that it supports coerced emotional intimacy, and coerced consideration of someone’s feelings even when their expressed feelings are abusive. This isn’t actually a good thing even when someone’s feelings are not problematic in and of themselves. Coerced emotional intimacy is a violation in and of itself, and it’s a violation that leaves people very vulnerable to greater violations.
I recently challenged an NVC advocate to answer this question:
Consider this situation:An abuser has an emotional need for respect. He experiences it as deeply hurtful when his partner has conversations with other men. When she talks to other men anyway, he feels betrayed. He says “When you talk to other men, I feel hurt because I need mutual respect.”Using NVC principles, how do you say that what he is doing is wrong?This was their answer:“You’ve described him as "an abuser”. Abusing people is wrong because a person with abusive behaviour doesn’t or can’t hold with equal care the needs of others.Is he doing something wrong? Or is he being honest that he feels hurt when his partners talks to other men? His partner can become his ex-partner if she doesn’t agree to what he’s asking for.”That, in a nutshell, is the problem with NVC philosophy. This abusive partner’s honest expression of his feelings is actually part of how he is abusing his partner. NVC has no way of recognizing the ways in which expression of genuinely felt emotions can be abusive. It also has no recognized way for someone to legitimately say “no, this is not a conversation I want to engage in” or “no, I don’t consider that feeling something I need to respond to or take into consideration.”
Part of what it would take for NVC to stop being an abusive culture it to recognize that NVC-style dialogue and emotional intimacy require consent every single time people interact that way. Like sexual intercourse, this kind of emotional intercourse requires consent, every single time. Having a close relationship is not consent to NVC. Having a conflict is not consent. Anger is not consent. Having found NVC helpful in the past is not consent, either. Consent means that both parties agree to have this kind of interaction *in this specific instance*.
NVC can’t be the only kind of interaction allowed, even between people who are very close to one another. And it’s not ok to coerce people into it.
And yet, NVC culture is not careful about consent at all. NVC tactics are routinely used on people whether or not they agree to have that kind of interaction. (Some NVC advocates may say otherwise, particularly in response to criticism. But actions speak louder than words, and NVC proponents do not act in practice as though consent is important. They are case in point for When Your Right to Say No is Entirely Hypothetical) This is wrong. Emotional intimacy requires consent.
NVC practitioners express deeply felt emotions and needs to non-consenting others. They do this with the implied expectation that the other person experience their expressed feelings as very very important. They also expect that person to respond by expressing their feelings and needs in the same pattern. They also expect that person to refrain from judging the NVC proponent’s expressed feelings and needs. It is not ok to force this pattern on someone. Doing so is an act of emotional violence.
It’s not ok to force someone to be emotionally intimate with you. It is not ok to dump your deep feelings on someone with the expectation that they reciprocate. Other people get to decide what they want to share with you.
An example: White NVC proponents sometimes express feelings about their racist attitudes towards people of color, to people of color who have not consented to listening to this. They do so with the expectation that the person of color will listen non-judgmentally, appreciate the honesty, and share their intimate feelings about their experiences with racism as a person of color. This is a horrible thing to do to someone. It is an act of racist emotional violence.
NVC people also use empathy to violate boundaries. They imagine what someone must be feeling, name that feeling, and express empathy with it. Then they either insert a loaded pause in the conversation, or ask you to confirm or deny the feeling and discuss your actual reactions in detail. These are not really questions. They are demands. They do not take “I don’t want to discuss that” as an ok answer. They keep pushing, and imply that you lack emotional insight and are uninterested in honest communication if you don’t want to share intimate information about your feelings. That is coerced intimacy, and it’s not ok.
For instance, an NVC advocate with power over someone might say in response to a conflict with that person: I can see that this interaction is very difficult for you. I’m sensing a lot of anger. I’m saddened that your experiences with authority figures have been so negative. (Expectant pause). I think you are experiencing a lot of anger right now, is that right?
That is not ok. When you have power over someone, it is abusive to pressure them to discuss their intimate feelings rather than the thing they object to in your behavior towards them. Emotional intimacy requires consent; it is not ok to force it on someone as a way of deflecting conflict. And when you have a lot of power over someone and they aren’t in a position to assert a boundary unilaterally, you have a much greater obligation to be careful about consent.
NVC advocates may tell you that they are just trying to have an honest conversation, with the implication that if you want ordinary emotional boundaries, you are being dishonest and refusing to communicate. They are not right about this.
You do not have to be emotionally intimate with someone to listen to them, or to have an honest conversation. It is ok to have boundaries. It is ok to have boundaries that the person you’re talking with doesn’t want you to have. Not all interactions have to or should involve the level of intimacy that NVC demands. It is never ok for anyone to coerce you into emotional intimacy. Using NVC-style dialogue tactics on someone who does not consent is an act of emotional violence.
4:13am
March 14, 2014
just a friendly reminder
if you do a favour for someone or give them a present without it being requested, you may not later use that as ammunition to get them to do something for you, that is emotionally manipulative
it’s using emotional attrition to make someone feel obligated to do something that they otherwise might not, on the premise that your provided unrequested service necessitates payment
that’s coercive and terrible in every way
that is all thanks
I used to know someone who did this all the time. She’d bring me all these little presents, and she’d do things for me, and she’d insist that I needed to be her friend to repay her. And she’d also try to get me to give her large sums of money I didn’t even have – when she always seemed to have thousands of dollars to throw around and I was living on disability payments. Anyway, I grew to dread any time she did anything for me, because it always had strings attached. I was glad when I finally got her to stay the hell away from me, it was completely good riddance by that point. But she managed to make a lot of people feel obligated to her, by doing little things for them or buying them unsolicited gifts, and then making demands in exchange. And she wasn’t even subtle about it. It was “I’m doing this for you so now you need to do something for me.”
6:27am
December 21, 2013
What I think when I see twenty bazillion posts about the JRC on my dash.
Close the Judge Rotenberg Center. For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center. Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes.
But.
You won’t be done.
You’ll just have eliminated the most obvious of a huge number of places that torture and abuse their patients in the name of treatment.
Skin shock is showy and scary and it makes a good story and it makes it easy to see what is hurting people.
But people can be hurt just as bad or worse without it.
People can be hurt just as bad or worse by places that don’t brag about the torture they inflict on their patients.
People can be hurt just as bad or worse in the institutions everyone loves to love because they’re so beautiful, they have such wonderful grounds, they seem so loving.
You can’t understand, maybe, why this is true.
You think, maybe, that abuse, trauma, PTSD, CPTSD, can be measured in volts.
It can’t.
You think, maybe, that the destruction of lives is proportional to the visible destruction heaped on the body.
It isn’t.
It’s so much more complicated.
I have a friend who gets really upset every time some over-the-top institutional horror story makes the news. So do I, for that matter.
One part of it is because, obviously, it’s horrible, and we’ve both lived through horrible things. She’s been to both state and private institutions (and found private ones worse, by the way, so much for stereotypes). I’ve been to private institutions and private residential treatment facilities and what I like to call ‘community institutionalization’… too hard o explain in such a short space.
I spent most of my teen years in the psych system (and to some degree was exposed before that) and sometimes in mixed psych/DD settings, and pretty much all of my adulthood in the DD system. I have physical disabilities that could easily put me in a nursing home, and developmental disabilities that qualify me for admission to an ICF/MR. Staying free takes up more of my energy than I’d like.
I’ve been abused and tortured and traumatized and almost-killed in all kinds of settings, inpatient and outpatient.
At one time in my life, with severe self-injury, I’d have made an ideal candidate for the Judge Rotenberg Center. I am not somehow different from people who go there. You’d be surprised at the people who go there and how not-different they are from many people you’d imagine would never go there.
(That’s true of all institutions. The people who live inside them, and outside of them, are identical in every way. The only difference is how the support takes place. When it’s support at all and not just hell on earth.)
Anyway.
What I want to say is.
One reason that my friend and I get upset by these stories is because we’ve lived through some horror stories of our own.
Another reason that we get upset by these stories is this fear we have, that we don’t think is irrational at all.
We fear that when people focus on the outrageous, the flamboyantly awful, then they won’t see the way the outright ordinary, even the seemingly wonderful, can do the same degree of harm, or worse.
The worst harm in institutions is, by the testimony of many, many inmates, not just the physical torture that takes place in some places – sometimes above-board, sometimes secretly. Often it’s things you can’t even name. Those things are happening in the JRC too. Those things hurt people there as much as the torture does. Nobody is doing a huge campaign to shut down those things.
Many people, if the JRC is closed, will simply be sent to other institutions.
They will then be told that they are lucky and that those other institutions are better.
They may come to believe those other institutions are better.
Those other institutions may actually be better. But they may not be. It may just be that the badness has seeped down deep into some underground place where you can’t count it, can’t name it, can’t even describe it, and therefore it…. isn’t there.
And they will continue to get hurt by that. They may not realize they’re getting hurt by that. They may attribute the hurt to themselves, to their mental illness, to anything but the environment that is causing or contributing to it.
And that hurt may be harder to recover from than the JRC.
How do I know this? Because while I was not in the JRC, I was in mental institutions that physically tortured me (not with skin-shock), and was then moved to a 'better’ place that tortured me in harder-to-explain ways, and hurt me in deeper places, and I learned to say and believe how 'better’ they were while living how worse they were deep down. I still live with how worse they were.
And I know many other people who have the same story to tell.
And I know that unlike me, many people who live at the JRC won’t be able to escape the institutional system the way I was. My situation was unique to me. I didn’t get out because I was better off disability-wise than others, I got out because I was in a particular, unique set of circumstances. The difference between people on the inside and people on the outside is not their disability.
But once you’re in a long-term institution, it’s harder to get out. I was lucky, I was usually in a string of short-term institutions (even if I spent longer time periods in them than other people there), then when I was in a longer-term one, my residential facility closed and it became useful to them to decide I was recovered enough to leave, and to “transition” me to a “less restrictive environment”. Which was still a hellish environment, mind you, but more chance of freedom, there, too. And I had people around me savvy enough to advise me how to take the chances I had.
And most of the people in the JRC won’t be leaving to freedom, if it gets closed. They’ll go to other institutions. And however grateful they are to be out of the JRC, they will get hurt in those new places. Because that’s what institutions do. Invariably. You don’t have to know you’re hurt to get hurt there. You don’t have to understand how deep the hurt goes, to get hurt there. You just have to be there. And you’re often the last person to know how deep it goes, right down to the level of your self and identity and everything important to you. You can get turned inside out without anyone laying a finger on you.
Nobody will ever be able to pinpoint the institution that inflicts the worst of this sort of damage on its inmates, because this sort of damage is, by its very nature, secretive, even from the person it’s being inflicted upon. And because nobody will be able to pinpoint the worst of it, there will never be a massive, targeted, decades-long campaign to close the worst of these institutions. Anonymous will never catch on and take part. The world will not be outraged by the damage inflicted, no matter how devastating.
And if the people damaged by these institutions show that they are grievously psychologically injured by these institutions, people won’t connect it to the institutions. They’ll connect it to the nebulous concept of 'mental illness’, and quite possibly try to construct more of the exact same kind of institutions to deal with it. Nobody will notice that the 'increased mental illness’ is correlated with the institutions themselves. Nobody ever does notice.
Nobody catalogues this kind of damage. Few people study it. Few people understand it. Few people can see when and where it is happening. Few people can understand the damage in the first place. Most people who describe the damage won’t be believed.
Worse than merely not being believed:
When we describe the damage inflicted upon us, we are invariably described as ungrateful for the advantages that we had in not being in “a place like the Judge Rotenberg Center”, or not being in “a state institution”, or not being in a place that the world universally recognizes as horrible. Because some of the worst damage is inflicted on us in places that other people see as wonderful.
They will ignore the abundant testimonials by ex-patients who have experienced a wide variety of institutions. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both state and private institutions and found the private ones immeasurably more damaging, because the extra funding means extra ability for staff to mess with the heads of the inmates. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both state institutions and group homes and found the group homes immeasurably worse. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both locked private traditional-institutions, and unlocked residential facilities and group homes, and found the residential facilities and group homes immeasurably worse. There are tons and tons of people who have been physically tortured at one institution, moved to another institution where no apparent physical torture was present and found the second institution immeasurably worse. There are people who have been moved from 'bad’ institutions everyone loves to hate, to wonderful paradise-like 'intentional communities’ where they had, in the eyes of others, everything they could possibly want, and described how much more horrible the intentional communities were, the ones formed with the best intentions of parents and staff.
People ignore this.
People ignore this completely.
No, worse.
People ignore this and they utterly disparage any current or former inmate who says these things. They say we don’t understand what we’re talking about. They say we have no vision. They say we have no comprehension. They say we don’t understand how good we have it.
And it’s even worse for people who have only been to the 'better’ (in the eyes of the public) institutions, and complain about how awful they are. They’re told that they don’t understand how good they have it, only much worse. And they are told they should be grateful for what they had, that they wouldn’t last a day in a 'real institution’.
Hell, i’ve been told I haven’t been in a 'real institution’ just because I was in locked, private, short-stay institutions a lot of the time. (And one private long-stay institution that was on a ranch in the country so it didn’t count as an institution, somehow.) Never mind that, at the time, I was referred to as institutionalized by everyone in the system, including people in these institutions… apparently it’s not an institution until it’s a big-campus state institution.
So people who’ve only been in much fancier, much 'better’ institutions than I’ve ever set foot in, are told this only ten times worse than anything I’ve ever gotten for talking about my experiences. Especially if they’ve been in the pseudo-utopian farm communities, or the 'intentional communities’, or things like Camphill, which are all billed as not institutional somehow even though they totally are. You can’t change an institution by changing the shape of the building and slapping on a new coat of paint.
Anyway.
People who have been through the worst kinds of hell that institutions can provide are not believed, because the worst kinds of hell that institutions can provide are not things that people outside of institutions can understand in any way. People outside of institutions want the blood and gore and skin shocks to prove a place is horrible. They don’t want to understand that there are things more horrible than any of that. They don’t want to understand. They just don’t want to understand.
And people in institutions often don’t want to understand either. I didn’t want to understand what was happening to me. I wanted to believe that now that I wasn’t being tied down and tortured on a daily basis, then I was free. I wanted to believe that really badly. You have a vested interest in believing you’re someplace better now, that things will get better. Sometimes believing things are better is your only defense against how awful things are.
But once I really got out, and I had to deal with the intense emotional and psychological injury I’d been done by all of these places, the truth gradually began to dawn on me. It’s easier to heal from physical wounds than it is from psychological and emotional wounds. It’s easier to heal from the obvious horrors than the hidden horrors that lurk behind the scenes, turning you inside out and upside down, piece by piece, one bit at a time. You can heal, but I can tell you that it’s not being tied down, not physical or sexual assault, not even the horrifying restraint practices I sometimes endured, not the physical pain, that continues to haunt me. I mean, it does, to some degree. Things like that always do. But there are things that have damaged me deeper, in ways I can’t even articulate.
And my friends and I, when we see coverage like this, we’re so afraid.
We’re afraid of the 'better’ institutions.
We’re afraid of the public’s idea of what a 'really bad institution’ is.
We’re afraid of some of the disability community’s idea of what a 'really bad institution’ is.
The JRC is a really bad institution. It’s doing that horrible kind of damage at the same time that it’s doing the physical damage. I can see that. Because it’s got enough funding, it can really fuck with people’s heads.
But you could force the JRC to remove every piece of physical punishment it owns, even restraints. And it would still be horrible. It could even become worse. Because when places can’t focus on hurting your body, they have more time to focus on hurting your mind. And hurting your mind does the most lasting damage there is.
The JRC needs to be shut down, period.
But there are places just as bad that will never be shut down if we use the JRC as the model of what the worst kinds of institution look like.
And there are places even worse that will never be shut down either.
And the worst places in the world, generally, are the same ones that will get propped up by the shutting down of the places the public has the most visceral unpleasant reactions to.
There’s problems in the disability community, too, and until they’re exposed for what they are, there will be a lot of difficulty changing things.
There’s… a lot of disabled people out there who engage in the completely unproductive practice of competing to talk about who stayed in the worst institutions, who had the worst treatment.
Understand that when I’m talking about the worst institutions above, I’m not talking about the worst institutions in any kind of competitive sense. I’m talking about, the worst in terms of the overall amount and kinds of damage done.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who had worse experiences in state institutions than private ones, or that there aren’t people who had worse experiences in traditional institutions than in pseudo-utopian farm communities. I’m not trying to negate any one person’s personal experience. I’m just trying to explain… things are not what they seem, what everyone believes to be true is not necessarily the truth.
But I’ve seen disabled people who compete with each other about things like this. They say that they, unlike so-and-so, had experience with REAL institutions. Or they, unlike so-and-so, had REAL bad experiences. Or they, unlike so-and-so, were REALLY traumatized by what happened to them. That because they stayed for months rather than days, or years rather than months, their experiences were automatically worse and more deserving of recognition. And there’s… absolutely nothing productive that happens there. That’s ego-driven bullshit. It’s not activism, it’s not helping anyone at all. It’s a competition in self-pity.
So understand, again… when I’m comparing things, I’m doing so not with the aim of undermining any given person’s experiences in their own life. I’m doing so with the aim of showing people things they don’t want to see. I’m saying that what most people says is best, in terms of institutions, is often the worst of all. That often, the most damage is done where it can be seen the least. People have to understand this if they’re going to have any hope of actually reducing damage.
So close the JRC, close it over and over and over again until it’s really damn closed.
But… don’t focus on it to the exclusion of places just as bad or worse that don’t necessarily look as bad on paper.
Understand that your visceral reaction to the idea of skin shocks doesn’t make it the worst possible punishment that can be devised. It’s a pretty diabolical physical punishment. But sometimes – no, more like often or usually – people are damaged worse by things that don’t touch them physically at all.
Your instincts here are not necessarily a good guide to what is truly awful.
And I worry so so much about what will happen to people after it closes.
And I worry so so much about people enduring unspeakable damage, sometimes far worse than skin shock would hurt the same people, in institutions considered progressive and even utopian.
(Trust me, behind just about every utopian institution lies a dystopia beyond imagining. And I worry about the “He loved Big Brother” effect obscuring people’s views of what actually goes on in those places.)
My worst nightmare. And when I say my worst nightmare, I mean, these are actually real actual dreams I have that are worse than any other nightmares I’ve ever had. They vary in content, but they go something like this:
I’m living in a place with lots of other people with disabilities. There are staff there. The staff try to give us every freedom they possibly can, at least as visible from the outside. In one of these nightmares, I’m climbing a tree, outdoors, and totally allowed to do so. But there is someone following along behind me to make sure I don’t get hurt. I feel like a child.
I feel like I’m suffocating. I feel like I’m suffocating in cotton candy. But I can’t point to anything particular that’s wrong. There’s this fog that lurks over the entire place. It’s white, maybe slightly yellow or pinkish white, but mostly white. And it obscures the ability to see anything. And it smells like sweetness. And it feels like death, in the worst possible sense. But you can’t tell where it’s coming from. It’s everywhere and nowhere at once. You can’t see it except in your head, and only out of the corner of your mind’s eye.
Staff are nice to us, in the same way that people are nice to young children. They giggle at us as if we’re cute. They hug us a lot.
They also make us do what they want us to do. It’s not possible to know how they do it. They don’t use physical torture or restraints. They don’t even always use drugging or anything like that. We just… somehow always end up moving in the direction that they want us to move in, so to speak.
When I wake up, I feel an intense longing for the place I just woke up from, just for a minute or two. And then I realize what’s going on, and I want to vomit over and over and over again until the experience is gone from my head forever.
This isn’t the best description, because the problems of these places can’t be described. I once spent six days in a place very much like that, though, and the sickly-sweet-death-fog clung to me for years before I could get it to dissipate.
Nobody will ever get the kind of backing to close a place like that, that they will to close a place like the JRC. Even though a place like that could potentially do more damage than the JRC, after a person is moved from the JRC to a place like that. And if we close the JRC, it’s quite possible idealistic people will be building places like that to take its place.
I can’t explain why it’s as bad as, ,or potentially even worse than the JRC or a place like it.
I can’t.
But it is.
Please trust me on that.
Please understand what I’m trying to say here, because it’s incredibly important, and not enough people are saying it. (And no, it’s not “don’t close the JRC” or “the JRC is good”. Somehow, people are really fond of reducing important, complex things I say to simplistic bullshit like that.)
I’m trying to say this, for the sake of all the people who won’t be helped if we focus only on closing the JRC.
Now I’m going to try to get some sleep again. I hope I don’t have nightmares.
ETA: Before anyone tells me, as they always tell me when I say this, that the Judge Rotenberg Center will call attention to the issue and everything will follow from there and the public will be interested in closing all the other institutions then, later, once we get to the JRC first, that’s not at all how I’ve ever seen it work, not with Willowbrook, not with anything. (And a friend of mine worked in a “good institution” that killed a former Willowbrook client, mind you. She got fired for trying to stop them from killing her. So she survived Willowbrook only to get killed by staff in a 'supported apartment’ group home setting. So… that’s a very specific example for a very specific reason.) The public doesn’t want to close all institutions when they hear of things like this. They want to make good institutions and then forget about the matter. And the good institutions can be worse than the old ones in many ways.
12:17am
December 15, 2013
people are allowed to do things that might hurt them, or that definitely hurt them, and it isn’t always a bad choice
therapists, unfortunately, are taught that they know better than their clients about when they’re making right or wrong choices, and may get to force their clients to apply
for instance, I was in partial program as a teenager. they often would drug us very heavily. I’m not talking about prescribing medication that’s needed for relief from symptoms with consent; I’m talking about trying two SSRIs for depression and then next putting a pre-pubertal preteen on a heavy adult dose of an atypical anti-psychotic and lying to their face about what drug they’re taking.
anti-psychotics have some side effects that can be very serious and very permanent, even fatal. is it worth taking them if you need them? yes, frequently. however, that is a decision that people have to make themselves, and it’s kind of hard to do that if not only have they not been aware that they’re risking anything, but they’ve been outright given false information about the level of risk.
that didn’t matter to the therapists, though. they weren’t concerned about the client’s opinion of the risk they were taking, they had decided for themselves it was fine.
another client in the same program liked piercings. she was apprenticing as a piercing shop, actually, learning to do them safely and under sterile conditions. she had done a number of her own prior to being in the program. at some point, she stated her intent to do another that week. the therapists told her she would be sent to the inpatient ward for self harm if she was planning on it.
piercings are not really dangerous. the worst that can happen is an infection or scarring. she was doing hers under sterile conditions with a professional’s guidance, which made a serious infection or complications fantastically unlikely.
they didn’t care about that. they weren’t concerned about her opinion of the risk. they had control over her body and they didn’t like what she wanted to do with it.
this is sort of about madeofpatterns’s post on politics, and at the same time sort of not. the point is, making your own judgement that you’re hurting yourself, or having someone tell you you’re hurting yourself and need to stop and think, is fantastically different from having someone with legal power over you tell you you aren’t allowed to make that decision because you might hurt yourself.
both of those decisions were choices that would be good under some circumstances and bad under others (if you have a condition that requires anti-psychotics and want them, they’re great. if you’re being bullied into taking them when it’s not really safe, not so much. getting piercings in certain areas or in unsanitary conditions is almost certain to result in complications. most of the time, it’s safe and results in some pretty jewelry). the point is that it’s the person making them’s right to decide that, no one else’s.
Or even saying “Yes, I’m hurting myself, but it’s at a bearable level and I see no reasonable way of avoiding it at present”/
None of the following is about the main point, it’s just stuff dredged up by this post.
I remember nurses and psych techs at one of the mental institutions I was at, having a very hard-line stance on what meant hurting yourself.
I was accused of self-harm for picking my chapped lips.
They said that people who wrote on their bodies (with pens and the like) were ‘showing disrespect to their bodies’.
Which, by the way… writing on your body is one thing people do to avoid actual self-harm. But they even said it about people writing phone numbers on their hands, or doodling on themselves.
They said the same about tattoos and piercings other than single holes in earlobes on people they assumed were girls.
Pretty much anything you did to your body was 'disrespecting your body’ and therefore not allowed. And I was actually put in six-point restraints for things like picking my lips, which they insisted was a form of self-injury. I’m sure they picked their lips themselves sometimes, and didn’t think a thing about it.
I know this isn’t the main point, but reading this really brought back a lot of memories.
They were so damn judgmental in general.
And a lot of their judgements (including many of the above) weren’t just ableist, but also sexist, classist, and racist.
I still remember how they treated a Latina girl who was in a gang. I remember one nurse suddenly screaming at her, “I REMEMBER HOW YOU CAME IN HERE, your whole body was COVERED IN HICKIES, I sure hope they didn’t PASS YOU AROUND!” I can hear it like it was yesterday. And they treated her with total scorn and contempt and refused to even try to see her point of view about anything at all. They just saw her as “a girl who has no self-respect”.
They said that a lot, about self-respect, to all of us. Their idea of self-respect was extremely rigid. Again, if you even wrote on yourself you had no self-respect. They kept talking about “respect for your body” in a way that seemed to mean “looking totally normal white middle-class mainstream etc.” And “respect” and “dignity” meant doing what they wanted you to do.
And when we wanted to change, when we wanted to do better, when we wanted to do the right thing but couldn’t figure out how, they had nothing but scorn for us. Because if we wanted to do the right thing, we would just do it, we wouldn’t sit around whining about why we didn’t know why we did things or we didn’t know how to do the right thing or etc.
Ugh, bad memories.
12:13pm
July 26, 2013
“
Ray isn’t really your friend. She’s only nice to you because she’s stuck with you, not many people live here. But you don’t have the social skills to be friends with someone like her. She’d never take you out dancing. You’d embarrass her. So don’t believe for a minute that she’d be nice to you if she wasn’t stuck at this residential facility with you.
” —An asshole therapist I spend most of my time trying to forget. I’ve had false friends, mostly bullies pretending to be friends. Ray was not one of them. We weren’t close, but her kindness was genuine.