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2:30am August 12, 2014

So when I was a teenager, I went to this recreational day program thing.

It was mostly for developmentally disabled people.  This wasn’t like a sign they posted on the wall or something.  They just said it was for people with disabilities.  But pretty much everyone there had autism, an intellectual disability, or both.  It encompassed a really wide range of abilities, too.   Anyway, I felt like I fit in pretty well, all things considered.

I had this shrink… he was the same shrink who later tried to tell me that I wasn’t actually an adult.  If you want to read about that entire mess, read my post On (Not) Having A Guardian.  

But anyway, there was one day that we were making some sort of holiday food.  It was one of those things where you use icing as glue to sculpt gingerbread house type things together.  I don’t remember the details.  I do remember that one guy there kept eating the icing to the point he eventually threw up.

And anyway, I told my shrink about it, and his response was, “You deserve better than having to be around people who eat sugar until they spit up.”  Or something along those lines.  He was always saying things like that to me, and I was always very angry with him for it.  But I could never put into words why he made me so angry when he said things like that.

This was a group of people I’d gotten to know pretty well.  We didn’t just sit in that room and color and play games.  We also went out to the mall together, endured being stared at together, and did a lot of things together in public.  And he was basically saying, “You’re too good for them.”

I didn’t feel too good for them.  I didn’t feel different from them.  I didn’t feel like there was a “them” that I wasn’t part of.  I have never felt that in groups of DD people.  But there have always been people who have assumed that I can, and should, feel separate from other DD people.  Possibly because I’m exgifted (but somehow I doubt it, it’s not like gifted status or lack thereof is incompatible with DD).  Possibly for other reasons.  

Whatever it is, I find it insulting.  I find it insulting to me as a person, and as a DD person.  I find it insulting to other DD people and especially ID people.  And the way he was always reducing it to “people who drool” (guess what, I drool too, you asshole), or “people who spit up their food” or other things like that, as if that was an entire type of person that I was too good to hang around with.

It wasn’t just in DD settings that he said this stuff, too.  He was just as likely to make these remarks about people in the psychiatric system.  It was like he was always trying to keep me from making connections with other people.  Always trying to make me see myself as magically separated from whatever kind of people I was spending time with.  So that I wouldn’t want to spend time with them.

He was always saying stuff to the effect that I was too good for something, though.  I remember showing him a picture of myself in a rocking chair that they’d bought me at a group home so that I could rock in a “socially acceptable” manner.  And he totally missed the point of the whole explanation of the origin of the chair.  And he started going on and on about the picture itself.  And how “There were all these people who saw that as the best possible outcome for you, to be out rocking in the yard of a group home, and I knew you could be more than that.”  As if sitting in a rocking chair meant something more than just sitting in a rocking chair??

He was the one, by the way, who had made the prediction that in a best-case scenario, by my early twenties I’d be living totally independently in the Santa Cruz mountains with a bunch of cats, writing books for a living.  He never understood why I was so hostile to that projection of my future.  He never understood why I didn’t think that future was even possible, let alone likely or desirable.  And it was his idea of what was desirable for me.  It was his idea that I could, and should, just become the town eccentric somewhere and somehow stop losing skills and stop being who I was, and become someone totally different, someone he could handle.

I still get angry with him when I think about the way he manipulated me, the way he treated me as if I was better than other crazy people, better than other DD people, somehow above all that despite the fact that there was nothing at all separating me from the “people who drool” and all that.  And he also constantly equated physical side-effects of medications with craziness.  I remember once he talked about how he “found me in a psych ward clutching my jaw and screaming” as if this was evidence of how far I’d sunk in life, that I was so crazy I would clutch my jaw and scream.  Except I knew, and he knew, that I was having a bad reaction to Haldol, and that the first part of the reaction was for my jaw to clench shut so tightly that my teeth ground each other to bits.  So like other patients in the same unit, I’d stick my fingers in between my teeth and scream.  It was excruciatingly painful.

So he’d take an excruciatingly painful medication side-effect and turn it into “Look how crazy you were, haha.”  This is why I found it so hard not to hate him sometimes.  And there’s some connection there.  There’s a connection between “Look how crazy you were, you were clutching your jaw and screaming” and “You don’t belong with people who drool”.  Because to him, clutching your jaw and screaming, and drooling, were both evidence of being a type of person, either a crazy person or an intellectually disabled person depending on how he used it that day.

I can’t explain why I loathe this so much.

And by this I mean his entire outlook on the world.

His feeling that he had the authority to tell me what kind of person I was, and what kind of person I ought to hang out with.

His feeling that he had the authority to determine anything about my life at all – remember, this is the same guy who told me that by virtue of being in the system I was not an adult, would never become an adult, and would have to do whatever he said for the rest of my life, because I was not an adult.  And then set impossible goals for me to “prove my maturity” – like overcoming a circadian rhythm sleep disorder.  (He insisted that my irregular sleep-wake pattern was a sign of immaturity and that real adults can control their circadian rhythms on cue.)  More on that in the post I linked to above.

But what on earth gave him the right to tell me what kind of people I should hang out with?  Or rather, what gave him the feeling that he had that right?  What gave him the feeling that he knew, where other people didn’t know, what sort of people were “good enough” for me, and what ones weren’t?  What made him think that I was better?  Even though he knew I rocked, he knew I drooled, he knew I threw up more than that one guy ever had.

It just pisses me off that he ever thought he could make these declarations about who I was and who other people were.  It still pisses me off when I hear people saying things like this – whether about me, or about other people.  Because I hear it a lot.  I hear people in the DD system being compared to each other.  And it’s used as a tool of control.  It’s used to make one person feel special, or another person feel bad, or both.  It disgusts me.  I wish I could make it go away.

All I can say is: this is ableism. Holy crap is it ableism.  But I can’t explain the whys and wherefores.  I can only say it’s wrong, it’s manipulative, it’s hurtful, and nobody should do this to anyone else for any reason whatsoever.  Why do people do this?  Why do therapists do this?  This was a particular therapist who was very prone to doing this.  I can’t believe I once thought him “one of the better ones”.