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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
8:18am
February 24, 2015
Mouth Magazine on Help and Power, and what disabled people know that do-gooders never seem to grasp.
The pictures are GIFs, but they’re from a time when GIF was just an image format like JPG or PNG, it didn’t mean they had to be animated. These ones are not animated. Everything beyond here is an excerpt from Who’s In Charge? from Mouth Magazine. If you’re interested, this is just the end of a lengthier article. And this is only one page from their website, which has some pretty amazing stuff.
Here is one picture of helping.
Here is another.
Pictures of helping deserve a second look. The photo at right, from a cancer camp, shows a helper offering her hand.
Should the boy accept this offer, on the trajectory indicated, he will lose his wheels and dangle, helpless.
He can see it coming. She cannot.
He will, all his life, be the real expert on what help he wants or doesn’t.
That is exactly not what is taught to students at helping schools.
He will learn: (a) that not all help is helpful, (b) that he must find graceful ways to decline even ill-conceived help, and © that gratitude is required in any event.
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.
12:50pm
September 15, 2014
“If somebody is investing time, resources, and energy into convincing you of your own worthlessness, that same somebody has revealed to you that they have a lot to lose if you don’t believe them. They’re protecting their own loss of power. Which means they perceive you as somebody who can take that power away. If somebody is putting in the work to knock you down, it’s because they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up.”
—Harriet J., “On Interpersonal Badness (You Are Worthless, Let’s Be Friends)” (x)
Reblogging this just to say… the bits about “they’re protecting their own loss of power” and “they’ve got something to fear about you if you’re standing up” really resonate with me.
And to go off on a bit of my own tangent with it.
I remember some years ago when I was involved in certain feminist communities both online and off but especially online. People had this very weird idea about power and what it was, where they saw only the social dynamics that people abuse. I remember one person even had a tattoo that read “Where love is, there power is not. Where power is, there love is not.”
And that always struck me as weird and wrong but I could never place my finger on why. If “power structures” are things like racist imperialism and patriarchy, then of course “power” is bad.
Except that… leaving out the part of power that has to do with you “standing up,” with the fact that finding your own voice and your own strength gives cruel or manipulative people “something to fear” is… leaving yourself defenseless.
If you believe power is just this creepy byproduct of social dynamics, you get as far as wanting people (patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.) off your back. You get as far as “That boot on my neck? I need it to not be there.”
But you never quite account for what it means to be standing.
And honestly, as I go through life and watch people, over and over, use noble-sounding ideologies with truly admirable goals in cruel and twisted ways…
…I become more and more convinced that most ideologies don’t want you to learn what it means to stand.
Want you to believe there’s always something more in the way of your standing. Always some step you have to do first, some shackle you have to break, and who knows? This time you might make it from your back to your knees.
But standing?
That’s always in the far-distant future.
They want “power” to be untouchable and inherently corrupting because if it isn’t, you might step out of line.
And individuals who step out of line are the most dangerous things to any ideology, however virtuous its original aim.
(via fierceawakening)
Wow what a great quote, and great commentary too. I really needed to hear it just now, as well, with that bully I just encountered who basically mocked me for being highly sensing, mocked me for trying to warn other highly sensing people so they wouldn’t get hurt in the ways I’ve seen other people get hurt. What does that tell me about what that bully wants?
They don’t want me standing up and taking my own power as a sensing person, as someone in whom sensing is my dominant way of perceiving the world, as someone who gets a lot of beauty and meaning and value out of that, including being able to perceive certain danger signals before other people do, and being able to warn people of certain dangers. They don’t want me to be okay with who I am, as I am. They don’t want me to stand up and say “This is who I am and there is nothing wrong with it” or “There is nothing inferior about the way my brain works, just because it doesn’t work like yours.”
They’d rather shame me into silence by telling me I just want to be special.
As far as specialness goes, I think everyone is special and I think nobody is special. Everyone is special because each person has a unique place in the universe just for them, right where they fit, right where their niche is, right where they can do the most good at any given point in time, and I think it’s part of our life’s work to find that place in the world and occupy it to the best of our possible abilities. And nobody is special because nobody is totally unique, nobody is someone who stands above the others and is better than them. Two different uses of the word special, obviously. When words have more than one meaning, it can be a confusing conversation.
And I know, for a fact, that part of my place in the world involves sensing, because as everything in my life was falling apart, as I lost everything else, I never lost sensing. It was the one thing in my brain that I could always count on. Even when I was delirious, and my mind felt shattered to pieces in the most painful possible way, I still had sensing. Distorted sensing, but sensing. Which is more than I can say for the amount of rational thought I had at the time. Sensing is my fall-back position, it’s my strength, it’s a big part of who I am. That doesn’t make me special. Everyone has some mode of thinking that is easier for them than other modes of thinking. Mine happens to be an unusual one, but it still doesn’t make me special. There are lots of other autistic people and cognitively disabled people who rely on sensing as much or more than I do. There are autistic people who raise it to a high art form.
But anyway, these things are part of me, and clearly there are bullies who don’t want me standing up and taking my own power, the power that’s actually due to me as any human being is due a certain amount of power, and saying “This is me and there is nothing wrong with that.” And all of this is exactly what I needed to hear. Not just because the bullying I just encountered, but because of stuff I’ve seen going down in the echo chambers lately.
1:13pm
August 18, 2014
Disability and power
A group of people with disabilities is not always a group in which everyone has equal power.
Some examples (by no means an exhaustive list, and not all of these examples apply all the time):
People who are better at asserting power can have more power.
People who speak more easily can have more power.
People who think more quickly can have more power.
People with the most common disability in the group can have more power.
People used to being ok with their disability can have more power.
Power dynamics in a group always need to be monitored and taken seriously.
Restricting the group membership to people with disabilities can be part of the solution, (because it can eliminate the part of the problem involving nondisabled allies and parents taking over), but it can never be the whole solution. Power dynamics exist in all groups, even with members of the same marginalized group.
9:19pm
July 17, 2014
“There was a small yellow rope tied from wrist to wrist, connecting them. Two, who I now realized were staff, loosened the rope from around the wrist of one man. I assumed they were going to take him into the washroom. I was wrong. They tied him to the water fountain and thus secured not only him but the five others attached to him…. Other than realizing that change happens slowly, I didn’t get it. I didn’t wake up.”
— Dave Hingsburger
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.
11:56pm
July 12, 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.
4:10pm
July 7, 2014
You don’t owe anyone a platform
Two basic facts about the internet:
- Unmoderated comment forums are terrible. They get overrun with trolls, low quality content, and off topic remarks.
- If you moderate a comment forum, angry people will argue with you and accuse you of censorship
Moderating isn’t censorship. Moderating is…
shakesvillekoolaid said:
On the flip side, excessive moderating can become suffocating and abusive.
realsocialskills said:
That is absolutely true. It’s possible to be bad at moderating, and to over-moderate in ways that hurt people.
The thing is, if you moderate at all, ever, you will be accused of harmful over-moderating, whether or not it is true.
It’s important to continually think through how you are using your moderating powers, whether they are serving your objectives, and whether they are creating a good platform.
Part of the process of thinking through that has to be understanding that it is literally impossible to please everyone and that you will always be criticized no matter what you do.
Part of moderating means deciding which criticisms to pay attention to and which criticisms to ignore.
5:00pm
July 6, 2014
You can’t tell who the most powerful person in the room is by consulting a privilege checklist.
You can’t tell who the most dangerous person in the room is by consulting a privilege checklist.
True this. But also it doesn’t mean that there aren’t overall trends.
Oh, yes, definitely.
I think the danger here lies in applying overall trends to particular instances, without thinking out whether or not the trend applies to that instance.
I was just thinking about this as a problem earlier today, but I can’t remember the context. Which is aggravating because it would’ve made a perfect illustration of this situation.
Unfortunately, I can’t even remember a scrap of information about it. :-/
But I do know it’s extremely dangerous to assume that a particular situation will follow an overall trend, without really looking into the situation and checking it over and being careful about it.
And I’ve seen a lot of situations where a person manages to skillfully manipulate a situation by using people’s assumptions against them: By wielding power, and being dangerous, but not seeming to have a lot of privilege, and swearing up and down that someone else is more dangerous and powerful simply because they have more privilege. And I’ve seen that do a lot of damage, especially damage to vulnerable people without a lot of privilege, when done purposefully for manipulative reasons. And I’ve seen people brag about pulling this sort of thing off.
7:56pm
June 10, 2014
Destroy the idea that “for science” is some benign force for good and progress which is unaffected by power, ideology, politics, capitalism, imperialism, and neoliberalism.
3:56am
June 5, 2014
“
I don’t really believe that most people realize that:
A) they have power
B) they routinely abuse that power
C) their behaviour is invisible onto to themselves
D) their responsibility isn’t diminished because they “didn’t mean to…”
A black woman activist, her name lost to history, writing in the United States over a century ago, said “All power seems natural to those who hold it.” This is an astounding observation. This means that once you have power in your grasp it seems so natural, so normal, so “the way it should be” that you don’t even realize it’s there.
” — Dave Hingsburger, Power Tools, p. 4
2:31pm
June 1, 2014
when complying with the prompting is graceful, and resisting is immediately humiliating, rude, out of line
When they make it so that you’re doing a dance. And the dance looks beautiful to all the onlookers.
And when you resist, it’s as if you dropped a glass of champagne on their foot and it shatters and you spilled food down their shirt and accidentally kneed them in the groin, all at once, everything that is embarrassing and clumsy.
And worse, besides, but I know the pattern, and it is despicable.
and when they fight at all costs to make you return to ~appropriate behavior~ and they sound kind and compassionate in the words they use and you feel more and more awful and can’t figure out why
2:02pm
June 1, 2014
So I have this thing called autistic catatonia.
Catatonia is a complex movement disorder. Most people think of someone sitting unmoving and unresponsive, presumably unaware of everything around them. And that can be part of it, but it’s actually a complicated web of difficulties that rivals autism itself in its sheer complexity. The day I remember, I was having problems with catatonic excitement.
Catatonic excitement is basically where you run around in a frenzy, and you can’t stop running, you can’t stop moving. It’s a danger to your health because people have beenknown to keep running until their body is physically unable to run anymore. This can lead to collapse, hyperthermia, asthma attacks, and worse.
I was running in circles around my apartment, jumping up onto the furniture, bouncing off the walls, and my mouth was making strange whooping noises now and then. Every time I passed my staff person in the kitchen, I would yell. I was trying to get her attention so that she could help me slow down. The best thing for me at moments like that is for someone to guide me to the couch and lay heavy blankets on me so I can’t get up easily.
Instead… it sort of happened how it was supposed to, but mostly it didn’t.
The staff person came up to me, grinning the grin she always had at times when I wasn’t able to communicate in words. It’s the grin an adult uses with a small child.
She stood in front of me and put her hands up in front of her. Knowing that, with my echopraxia, I would mirror her hands. I mirrored her hands.
Then she told me to run towards her. I ran towards her. I was running in place. She giggled. I giggled.
Nothing was funny. I was in what I call Cute Client Mode. I may feel like shit inside, but something about me turns on and performs cuteness for the sake of staff.
She thought she was making an important connection with me.
So I ran in place, towards her hands, and she walked me backwards towards the couch, and got me onto the couch, and covered me in weighted blankets and other heavy stuff, and I stopped running around.
Mission accomplished, right?
I could just see us in a training video, in my mind’s eye, as doing the perfect thing. Her doing the perfect thing. Her being the hero who saved the day, maybe even saved my life (catatonic excitement can be lethal).
But here’s the thing:
She was controlling my movements.
When she pushed, I pushed back, when she pulled I pulled back. So she learned exactly how to push and pull on me, so that I went where she needed me to go. I felt completely empty. She laughed, I laughed. I was trapped somewhere deep inside myself. I had no connection to my body and its responses. No connection to my apparent emotional responses. I was a robot. I was a cute, giggling robot.
And any onlooker would have seen this scene as cute, or beautiful, maybe even amazing for her ‘handling’ of a difficult situation. She did it without resorting to violence or physical restraint. What people couldn’t see was the ropes tying me to her, because the ropes were invisible. And she could pull on those ropes whenever she wanted.
She was particularly good at that. Over the time she was my staff person, there were so many times that she was able to control my actions. Sometimes while touching me, sometimes from across a room. People don’t understand how this is even possible.
With autistic catatonia, you have trouble crossing certain boundary lines. Even lines on the floor, doorways, the invisible line between being in bed and standing up, all of these are boundary lines that take a lot of energy and effort to cross. It is always easier to follow a line than it is to cross a line. The same is true for many autistic people who don’t specifically have autistic catatonia, because it’s all on a continuum, and autism and catatonia are intimately related. If you think of some of the stranger limitations encountered by the people in “Awakenings”, you’ll understand a lot of what autistic people go through on a different scale.
There are people who come with their own boundary lines. These boundary lines are invisible, and they go out from the person and fill the entire room. I have no explanation for this, but I know for a fact that I am not the only autistic person who experiences them this way.
There are people who can walk into a room and render me incapable of communicating. Or if I do communicate around them, my communication looks jagged, angry, and ungraceful. This is because the effort it takes to break through the barrier, is so intense that it almost takes something like frustration or anger to fuel it. So I am either quiet and demure-looking, or else I am typing and angry-looking. They can use either of those to control me and label me.
If someone walks into the room who tips the balance and allows me to communicate what was going on, they can play that game of “See, she was behaving just fine until you came in.” When what really happened, is they were suppressing my communication, and only after someone familiar walked in and opened up the lines of communication could I say anything or even have body language that showed how I really felt.
Many staff are given brownie points for being “good with people with developmental disabilities” when they are actually merely good at controlling us.
I also had a really terrible experience with this one woman. She was disabled, or at least claimed to be, and while I have reason to disbelieve the specifics (she lied about her IQ), I have no reason to doubt that she was disabled in some way. She had a lot of ego tied up in being “good with” people with “severe/profound” developmental disabilities. She claimed that she was “actually really severe/profound” even though her IQ was in the borderline range usually and the very mildly intellectually disabled range at most. She’d claim to have an IQ of 30. Anyway, she tried to surround herself with people with severe communication impairments so that she could be seen as “having a way with them”. (How sinister this was, became apparent in that she also claimed to “have a way with” animals, and needed an animal taken away from her for severe neglect. She loved to say things like “your cat will let me pet her, and she lets NOBODY pet her” and things like that.)
Anyway, so at one point I shut down in front of her, and it was the worst experience ever. She basically took over immediately. She began telling everyone what I was supposedly thinking. Correcting people in the way they interacted with me. The moment I became unable to communicate was the moment that her control over me started, and she was absolutely blissful about it, the same way I saw her blissful around other people who couldn’t speak or type. She always talked about how I was “the real me” when she could control me, and “not really me” other times.
Anyway, the lines of control work just like boundary lines on the floor. The only difference is that they are invisible and emanating from human beings. They control what behavior you can do, and what behavior you can’t do. They don’t have to be touching you, although touching you makes it worse. All they have to do is be in the same room with you.
I don’t trust anyone who can do that.
I see a lot of people like that who work in the disability field. Worse, I see a lot of people like that who work in the field of augmentative communication or even facilitated communication. FC is a scenario where you need people to be exerting as little control as possible over the person doing the communicating. It makes me extremely uneasy to be in the presence of facilitators who can control my communication from across a room, and watch them touching someone who is trying to communicate on their own. They are supposed to be learning not to influence their clients, but so often they are the type who can influence anybody who is vulnerable in certain ways.
And there are people like that.
There are people who can control where, when, and how I get up and move and walk around.
There are people who can control my outward displays of emotion, regardless of what I feel inside.
There are people who can control whether I can communicate, and what subjects I can communicate about.
And to break through their control makes me look rough and uncultured and them look graceful and beautiful. And to go along with their control makes it look like we exist in a beautiful, graceful dance, in which I am well loved and they are the people who make my care possible, and everything is picture perfect.
It’s like being under the Imperius curse. You feel this smoothness inside, this feeling like if you just do what you’re supposed to do, then everything will be fine. Your thoughts are wiped out, your feelings are flattened, and it almost feels good.
And if you do resist, it will look bad for you. And they will swoop in and 'take care of you’ and 'make things better’.
Disabled people are not immune from being this dangerous type of staff. I have seen autistic people walk into a situation and believe that their autism makes them immune to harming their autistic or otherwise disabled clients. Or that it means they have special insight – which sometimes they do, but it’s not always as extensive as they believe.
Donna Williams wrote an entire scene in Somebody Somewhere in which she basically got inside the head of this autistic girl at a swimming pool. She thought she knew what was best for this girl, and she thought she knew what the problem was. In the text of the book, she writes as if she’s aware of everything going on inside the girl’s head.
And she does this thing where she pulls the girl back and forth. The girl pulls away, Donna pulls back. They get into a rhythm. And this makes the girl finally “free to choose” what to do. I know that push-pull rhythm very well, and what it leaves you is free to do what the other person expects that you want to do. That scene left me feeling profoundly uncomfortable, because I’ve been on the wrong end of push-pull tactics before and they do not leave any room for freedom. I believe the goal in this whole thing was to break the girl out of her own world (where she was stimming on the surface colors of the swimming pool water) and stop her war against joining the world by helping her get into the pool and swim (which eventually, she did… she might have actually vomited from fear at one point before getting there, though, or I might be remembering a different book).
Anyway, things like that stick with me.
Memories of being controlled.
Memories of the people who watched and thought they were seeing something beautiful.
Memories of that horrible feeling. Like there was this white fog pressing on me from all sides, making me feel a false happiness, a false contentedness, like nothing could go wrong.
Memories of being pushed and pulled, rhythmically, back and forth, until my own motions were only a mirror of the rhythm.
Memories of being trapped in a way that nondisabled people assume is all about my disability, but that really is all about my caregivers. And they assume the caregivers are helping, when they’re the ones doing the trapping.
At this point in my life, I don’t have a single caregiver who would do this to me. I have not always been as lucky as I am now, able to evaluate, train, hire, and fire my own support staff. Right now I have about five different people who work with me regularly, and every single one of them is excellent at what they do.
But I have a history with some really bad ones.
And I also have a history with some people who were never my support staff to begin with, but who controlled me in that same way.
And it was horrible.
And it’s important for people to know that this can happen.
People can be controlled without anyone saying a word, without anyone slapping someone in restraints, without any obvious signs of control. Because those lines of power are invisible. I don’t know how they work, but they are very real and they affect lots of disabled people, not just me.
Always be on the lookout for this. Never assume that control isn’t there, just because you can’t see it, or just because the people involved appear happy. Appearing happy can be part of the problem. Particularly a very giggly sort of surface-level cheeriness.
And this can even extend to communication. As in, what you can say. What you can’t say. What you do say. What topics are able to be talked about, what topics can never be talked about. This can happen with spoken as well as typed communication, and many autistic people are far more vulnerable to having our spoken communication hijacked in this way than our typing. (Yet everyone is constantly worried about what will happen if someone hijacks our typing.)
And all of these things, all of them, can take place without physical contact ever happening. They can take place just because someone is in the room. They can happen in the course of a conversation. They can occur through subtle body language, and all kinds of other ways of communicating.
The people who are most vulnerable to this have a specific pattern to us, but it’s not one that aligns itself well with the categories most people are used to. It’s not autistic versus nonautistic. It’s not verbal versus nonverbal. It’s specific people with a wide variety of cognitive disabilities, and that’s about as specific as I can get. We might have labels of autism, intellectual disability, dementia, or schizophrenia, but we’re experiencing the same thing here. And it’s a way of controlling people without leaving any trace to show that you’ve been controlling, so it’s both dangerous and popular. And not everyone doing it even knows that they’re doing it, many believe they just have a knack for working with people like us.
8:30pm
April 25, 2014
So I was talking to a friend about power.
And she referred to certain people as being extremely powerful within certain small communities.
And my first reaction was “But they’re not powerful, they’re not in positions of leadership, etc.”
And what she told me was this amazing lesson in what power is, or at least what power can be.
Because she said “If you want to see who is powerful, don’t just look at who’s in the official leadership positions. Look for who is controlling – directly or indirectly – what you’re allowed to say, and what is forbidden to say. People can do that even from positions that don’t seem very powerful at all.”
And that changed everything for me.
Because…
There’s a lot of people who swear up and down that they don’t have any power at all. Because they’re marginalized in the mainstream world, and really don’t have much power there. Because even in communities committed to ending marginalization, they may be at least somewhat marginalized there, as well.
But if you see people, even just in those small communities, walking on eggshells to avoid saying the wrong words, to use only the right, perfectly designed, words for things?
Then whoever is controlling which words are “right” and which words are “wrong" has actual power.
They may not believe they have power. They may not know they have power. They may deny they have power.
But if large numbers of people – even if only in these small communities – are bending over backwards to use the "proper” language, to avoid using the “improper” language, and things like that? Then whoever is making the decisions about which language is which has power. Period. Whether that’s personal power or power in some kind of combined form between a group of people.
After knowing that… I’m getting even more sick of the denials than I used to be. The ones where people say that their marginalized status means they have no power at all, even as they are wielding power. The ones who say “Being oppressed doesn’t get me anything good at all”, even though communities working to end oppression often have an unwritten rule system where whoever is the most oppressed is considered (by many, at least) to be the most worth listening to. The ones who insist they have no power at all, all the while exercising power.
Mind you, the power they have doesn’t mean everyone does what they want. It doesn’t mean they can snap their fingers and end oppression. It doesn’t mean they aren’t subject to horrible oppression. It doesn’t mean most people will even listen to what they have to say.
But it does mean that among some groups of people, people are not only listening to what they have to say, but elevating it above what others have to say, and making entire elaborate rules for conduct based on that. And the fact that these are small groups and not representative of the entire world, does not mean they don’t have power within these groups.
Ask any autistic person who sincerely wants a cure, how they feel coming into the mainstream online autistic community and announcing that fact. Do they feel like they can even be part of that community? Do they feel like they have to hide their views to avoid being subject to ridicule at best and ostracism at worst? This is because, in these communities, those who don’t want a cure have the most power, and not only that, but some of us who don’t want a cure have created a community norm where being anti-cure is expected of all autistic people. Many people who do want a cure are made to feel unwelcome the moment they arrive, are asked if they're really autistic, are told they’re stupid or brainwashed, etc. Most quickly leave, or never come to these communities in the first place. Some develop a very bitter attitude towards other autistic people because of their experiences.
In most of the world, autistic people have little to no power, and autistic people who don’t want a cure have even less. This doesn’t change the fact that in certain corners of the world we do have a ton of power. And cure isn’t the only issues where autistic people exert this kind of power. There’s also a long list of approved words and unapproved words that’s so complicated that most autistic people will never manage to learn it. There’s opinions that everyone is supposed to agree with, on a wide variety of issues. And there are social sanctions for people who don’t follow the rules, written or unwritten.
Anyone with the power to impose such social sanctions, has power. It doesn’t matter if that power is limited to certain communities. It doesn’t even matter if the person is a member of groups that are currently or historically marginalized even within those communities. If that person is in any way intimidating people such that they feel they can say some things and not others, then that person has power within that community. And claiming not to have power, while all the while exercising that power, is a very common thing that only makes the power harder to uncover and deal with.
Not all power is bad, mind you. But it is power. And it doesn’t go away just because you stick your fingers in your ears and say “I don’t hear you.”