2:18am August 4, 2015

madeofpatterns:

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

10:41pm April 29, 2015

How (un)ethical is it for a 35 year old psychologist and musician to use his teenage child patient’s poetry as song lyrics for his professional band?

One of my shrinks was a professional musician.  And he was always interested in my poetry.  Most of it, he said, was crap, but occasionally I’d come out with something amazing.  This pretty much agreed with my self-assessment.

But then he found this one poem he really liked.  I was still a minor when all this happened, but he wanted to use it for lyrics in his band.  So he had me sign some rights over to him.

But it just occurred to me, isn’t there some huge ethical boundary being crossed when you’re a roughly 35-year-old psychotherapist and musician, using material from your teenage child patient?

I mean, at the time I was a little flattered.  “Wow, a professional musician thinks my writing’s good enough to use in his band.  That means my writing is actually good, someone besides my parents like it (since parents mostly like anything their child does, because it’s not about skill it’s about connecting with their child).“

But now I’m kind of squicked. Is what he did even legal? I was a minor. Yuck.

35 notes

12:41am October 31, 2014

Opals and Oyster Shells

A stranger handed her a necklace on the street
He said “I know what you are, and I know you’ll be angry with me.
But meet us in the library tomorrow at half past three
And you’ll get the answers you know in your heart you seek.”

And then he turned and walked away, abruptly as he came
And she was left so shaken she couldn’t remember her own name
For the necklace was a pendant made of opals and oyster shells
And she dared for just one moment to believe it could get her out of hell

Because hell was this world, that as a child she had just called More
Because it was More than she imagined could have existed before
Before, you didn’t imagine, you didn’t hope, you didn’t plan
You just swam in the colors and wallered in the iridescent land

And Before was so easy
And More was so hard
But there was no going back
Once they bombarded her cranium with words
She could never throw them back
So she learned to adapt
She learned to accept
That her rescuers were praised
They’d pulled her out of heaven
And into hell
But everyone was amazed
They’d taught her to speak
To read and to write
To get along with other kids
And that was all that mattered
She was just an object in their personal dramas
So she learned to live how they wanted her to live

But now she was grown
Standing in the street
Necklace in hand
And every hair on her body stood up
And she turned
And she ran

On automatic pilot she ran to the sea
She knelt down in the sand
She opened up her hand
And saw opals and oyster shells
She put the necklace on
And she cried burning tears
Of rage and desire and self-pity and shame
But most of all they were tears of loss

It had been twenty years
Since her forced exile
From the only place she’d ever felt at home
She’d tried every way she knew to get back
But the damage was already done
Once they’d given her
More words
More thoughts
More contemplation
More More
There was no going back to Before

Oh she was a success for them
She went to a mainstream school
Nobody knew of her past
Though the kids treated her like a fool
But being odd was no problem –
For the ones who rescued her
It was enough that she could talk and read

So she grew up
Got a job
Dated men
Lived on her own
Surely it didn’t matter much
If her heart turned to stone

So she stared at the oyster shell
And remembered that world like a dream
Where you didn’t need to know you existed
You just floated from scene to scene
And the colors in the opal
Brought back memories of light
Of dancing and swimming and wallering
In rainbows cast by sunlight
The oyster shell reminded her
Of the underwater ocean feel of Before
And the smooth pearly light
She had felt such delight
Until the outsiders dragged her into More

In her mind anyone seeing the necklace
Would see right through her
And the lies and broken promises of More
So she wore it under her shirt so nobody would see
But she also showed up at the library
Next day at half past three

The first person she saw
Was a wisp of a woman all in grey
Tiny and slender with black curly hair
Body dancing to a rhythm
That made her look not all there
But she recognized the rhythm
And almost bolted out the door
For the rhythms this woman danced to
Were familiar from Before,

Instead of running she stood in the doorway
Shaking from head to toe
The man from yesterday took her hand
And whispered in her ear “I know.
Some of us are still mostly Before
Some of us are mostly More
And some of us go back and forth
Like a revolving door.
It’s scary at first to see people
From your own private world
But most of us have similar stories
And it’s not so private anymore.”

She allowed him to lead her to a seat
Still shaking like a leaf
The whole floor shook, she shook so hard
And she couldn’t quite believe
But each one had something –
Their eyes
Their hands
Their movements
That gave them away
And that made her feel
Cautiously welcomed
So she came back every day

She learned that most of them
Had been pulled out from Before to More
Though a few – it seemed the happier ones –
Had simply outgrown Before
A smaller number had never really left
And kept one foot firmly in Before

She bitterly envied the last ones
She’d spent so long trying to get back
They made it look effortless
She could only feel her own lack
And yet it was they
Who welcomed her most
Who wanted to find her way home

It was one of them who made the necklace
Of opals and oyster shells
Sensing that it would best remind her
Of where she’d been

It was one of them who listened all night
To her tales of being pulled into More
Of the terrifying moment
When language appeared and locked the door

The opals and oyster shells
Felt like a bridge to Before
Not a bridge she could fully cross
But she could stand on it
And swim in an ocean of sensation, without thought
And now that there were others like her
She could see how lucky she’d got
To feel the currents of Before overtake her
For the briefest moment’s glance
It made her feel that
Maybe
She had a chance

[This is a true story. It’s not my story. But it’s the story of too many people I’ve known. It was written in response to a writing prompt from fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton: the words opals and oyster shells. It is also posted at my main poetry blog, which has a comments section.]

24 notes

12:15pm September 14, 2014

realsocialskills:

Anonymous said:

how do you tell the difference between when someone is gaslighting you and when you’re doing the distorted thinking thing from anxiety/depression? (for example you KNOW they’re judging you because they’re your parent and you’ve learned what that LOOK means but now they say they’re not judging you which means you can’t trust your own perceptions)

realsocialskills said:

  

One thing that’s important here is that distorted thinking and gaslighting are not mutually exclusive. When you know that you have distorted thinking, gaslighting abusers sometimes exploit that to get you to doubt your perceptions. Even when you are having an episode of actively distorted thinking, that doesn’t mean that the things someone else wants you to believe are necessarily true.

  

I think there are a couple of things that can help to sort out what’s really going on and what’s distorted thinking: outside perspective, and paying attention to your perceptions over time.

 

Regarding paying attention to your perceptions over time: Even if you have depression, you’re not always going to be equally depressed. Even if you have anxiety, you’re not always going to be equally anxious. If you still don’t like what someone is doing to you even when you’re not actively anxious or depressed, it’s probably not distorted thinking.

  

Also, if every time you object to something someone does, they consistently convince you that it’s distorted thinking, something is probably wrong for real. Nobody is perfect, and sometimes you’re both depressed *and* reasonably objecting to something. If someone consistently uses your mental illness to try to make conflicts go away, that’s gaslighting and wrong even if your perspective actually is distorted.

   

 (That said, if you’re actively anxious or depressed, it can be hard to tell in the moment whether or not something is a pattern. It’s possible to feel like it is a pattern when it isn’t, due to distorted thinking. That’s a reason why it can be really helpful to pay attention to how you feel over time.)

   

One way to keep track of how you feel over time is to write a journal. If you write a journal, you can pay attention to how you felt yesterday and whether you still feel that way today. Writing down your perspective is a more reliable way to track things over time than relying on memory. It’s hard to have accurate memories of how you’ve felt over time, and it’s particularly difficult to have accurate memories of what you thought when your thinking was distorted. (That said, journaling does not work for everyone, and if you can’t do it, that doesn’t mean you can’t figure things out.)

  

Outside perspective can also help a lot. That’s one reason that therapy is very helpful to a lot of people who struggle with distorted thinking. If you can find a therapist who you can trust to have a good sense of when you’re probably getting something right and when it’s probably depression/anxiety-related distorted thinking. This backfires horribly if your therapist *isn’t* trustworthy. I don’t really have any advice about how to find a good therapist (I wish I did, and if I ever figure it out, I’ll post about it), but I know that for many people it is both possible and important to find a good therapist. 

  

Personal blogging can also help as a way to track your perceptions over time and get feedback, but be careful about that. Personal blogging attracts two kinds of people who can create problems for those who struggle with distorted thinking: mean people who try to make you feel awful about yourself, and people who unconditionally offer you validation no matter what you say or do. Neither of those kinds of perspectives are helpful for sorting things out. In some ways, unconditional validation is particularly dangerous, *especially* if there’s a possibility that you’re abusing someone.

  

Friends and relatives can also sometimes be really helpful, particularly if they know the people involved or observe things.

 

If you have a sibling you can trust (not everyone does, but some people do), you might be able to have this kind of conversation:

• You: Sarah, when Mom made that face, was she judging me or was I imagining it?
• Sarah: Yeah, that’s definitely her judgey face. 
• or, depending on what she thinks:
• Sarah: Actually, I think she probably didn’t mean it that way this time. She just talked to me about her obnoxious boss and I think it was her pissed at my boss face.

Similarly, friends sometimes have a really good sense of what’s going on. 

   

The caution about blogging goes for consulting friends/family and other forms of peer support. Be careful about people who offer unconditional validation of all of your thoughts and feelings no matter what. That can end up reinforcing distorted thinking, which is not going to help you learn how to improve your perspectives and trust yourself when your perceptions are accurate.

  

People who are offering you useful perspective will sometimes tell you that they think your perceptions are off base, and they will not be jerks about it when they are critical. They will also not try to coerce you into adopting their perspective. Sometimes they will be wrong. Sometimes you will disagree with them and be right. You are allowed to think for yourself, even if your thinking is sometimes distorted. No one else can think for you, even if you go to them for perspective and help sorting things out.

tl;dr: Gaslighting and distorted thinking are not mutually exclusive. It’s common to experience both, even simultaneously. If you have distorted thinking, people inclined to gaslight you tend to exploit it. Tracking your perceptions over time, and getting outside perspective, make it much easier to sort out what’s actually going on. Sometimes therapy is helpful. Sometimes blogging is helpful. Sometimes friends and family are helpful. Be careful about trusting people who are mean to you or who offer unconditional validation. 

 

What do y’all think? How do you protect yourself from gaslighting when you struggle with distorted thinking?

I have very specific people that I will go to, to ask whether my thinking is distorted or not.  People I would trust with my life.  People who would never in a million years gaslight me.  And different ones have different specialties in terms of being able to see when I’m doing something distorted.

Laura is one of them, she was the first person I could do this with and trust.  Anne is another, although with Anne I have to be careful because she and I have the same brain almost, so we can have the same thought distortions – if I think that’s going on, I check with a third party.  You’re actually another person I trust that way, like I’m not always going to believe you’ve got things right (because we haven’t known each other that long) but I trust your motivations enough to listen to you when you tell me something is off.  The Amorpha& system have been wonderful to me at times for things like this.  And all of you are good at noticing slightly different things, so I feel really lucky.

One thing that made it very hard for me to start doing this, is that I had a doctor once who literally told me never to think my own thoughts, that my thoughts could never be trusted, and that he was the only person who could tell me whether my thoughts were accurate.  He told me he would climb into my head and replace me with a copy of himself, so that I would always carry him with me so he could tell me what to think.

And so for a long time I had a PTSD-type reaction to the idea of checking with people to make sure my thoughts were accurate.  And I had a tendency to check at the wrong times, not to trust myself enough.  So I had to unlearn a lot before I could do any of this.  This psychologist had basically convinced me that I was psychotic, and that psychotic people can never be trusted to be introspective or to have our own thoughts.  He called it “reality-testing” to check with him whenever I had a thought, any thought at all.  It was really messed up.

313 notes

3:37am August 25, 2014

FFS

madeofpatterns:

justanaverageday:

madeofpatterns:

justanaverageday:

fuckyeahwomenprotesting:

2ndversesameasthe1st:

madeofpatterns:

People who dislike therapy aren’t all basing their opinions on stereotypes in the media.

I have never had a helpful therapy experience. And I’ve had a lot of therapy experiences.

I’ve had several positive therapy experience but also several bad ones.

I say this as a future therapist: A LOT OF PSYCHOLOGY MAJORS ARE THE WORST AND DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY ARE DOING.

Except I’m not just talking about psych majors.

I’m also talking about established, respected professionals.

The psychiatric survivor movement, for example, is really *not* about the fact that psych majors are often clueless.

Okay I get that, and I hope I didn’t derail. I guess what I was trying to say, but didn’t say in a very productive way, is that as a psych major, I hear psych majors, who are going to be therapists, say awful awful things. They often go uncorrected by the professors and I can’t call them out every time. When I do call the out, suddenly I’m the bad student and the teacher reinforces the awful student because “everyone is entitled to an opinion.”

I’m not saying they’re clueless, I’m saying they’re downright harmful and will continue to be so because no one stops them.

I don’t think they’ll grow out of it. 

I guess I was trying to say, I hear you and I believe you about your awful experiences because I see the people who are training to be therapists, and they’re awful.

Ah, ok. Thank you for explaining.

Yes, I know what you mean.

I’ve known psych majors who went on to be therapists who were some of the most awful people I’ve ever known.  At least one of them surely relishes the power she has over patients.  And even as a psych major she had this tendency to believe highly in her own abilities.  Like when I was in isolation rooms, my dad said that she would bang on the doors outside trying to get psych ward staff to let her in and then she’d say things like “I’m a psych student, I know all about how to get her to calm down, so let me in!”  And the psych nurses were like “REALLY!?!?  Seriously!!?  You’re a psych major, so you know all about this!?”  But she was that full of herself.  Still is from what I’ve heard.

103 notes

2:47am July 30, 2014

I really, still, don’t like the idea of people “losing their childhood” or “not getting to be a child”.

I think because it feels very privileged and culture-bound.

There’s this idea that childhood is a time when people shouldn’t have any major responsibilities, where they should be free to just play and learn some stuff but mostly not have to do anything serious, or not have anything major riding on whether they do something or not.  And that only as they grow up, should real responsibilities be added, in a carefully controlled fashion of course, ending with adulthood (or, at most, mid to late adolescence), where real responsibilities begin.

And that’s true for like… middle and upper class Western kids in very recent history.

It’s not true in all cultures and all classes, and it’s not even universal in the group of people I just described.

I had a caregiver with fibromyalgia who was worried that her kids “didn’t get to be kids” because they were 6 and 8 years old and already cooking their own breakfasts so she would be able to lie down for a bit in the morning.

And just… no, it’s not going to scar anyone for life to make their own breakfast, and if it does, they’ve got problems beyond breakfast-making.  Although honestly, I think her kids are going to be messed up, not because of her fibromyalgia, but because she’s an asshole who’s abused at least one of her other clients (who lived in the house with her, but who she banned from touching the fridge and banned from the house at certain hours and wouldn’t even let come back to the house when she shit herself at work and needed a change of pants).  She also believes herself incapable of abusing power because she’s “not that kind of person” – even after what happened, and even after her lying to APS about it and being believed so that she could get away with it and the client could get more of a bad reputation (even though there were witnesses… our state has one of the shittiest APS departments in the country, apparently).

Anyway, back to the main topic…

I know that there are things that children shouldn’t be forced to do, and often are, in a lot of places.

But I also know that this weird idea about childhood being a thing where you just sort of float around doing what you want except for maybe homework, is recent and confined to certain parts of certain cultures.  And the world has gotten on without it fine, for a very long time.  This idea that this is just what children should “naturally” be doing, and that anything else will result in irreparable damage, just pisses me off.

So when people say “He didn’t get to be a child…” or “I didn’t get to have a childhood…” I just think “a childhood according to who?”  

And I just can’t make myself be very sympathetic to that.  My childhood wasn’t like that.  At all.  I had a lot of problems that most children don’t have.  In fact my childhood was downright miserable.

And I think there are things about my childhood that could have been different, should have been different.  I never should’ve been molested.  I never should’ve been abused.  I never should’ve seen the inside of an institution, or been threatened with lifelong institutionalization.  I never should’ve been bullied.  I never should’ve had bullies pretend to be my friends.  I could go on, and on, and on, about things that should’ve been different.  Really should’ve been different.

But none of those things mean I didn’t get a childhood.  I got a childhood.  It was no less of a childhood for not being carefree and idyllic.  It was a fairly common type of childhood for people like me.  And it sucked in many ways, but the problem wasn’t that it “wasn’t a childhood”.

And as an adult, I don’t have to somehow make up for losing my childhood, because I didn’t lose one, I had one.  But if I went into therapy they’d probably try to convince me that I never had a childhood and that I had to do various things to make up for the childhood I never had.  They’d probably especially focus on the adolescent part of my childhood, but the earlier part was pretty shitty too.  I remember actually thinking, when I couldn’t have been older than 8, that the idea of childhood as idyllic was a lie and that I would always for the rest of my life remember what childhood is really like.

Anyway, I don’t feel robbed of my childhood, and I don’t think encouraging people to feel robbed of their childhoods is a helpful thing to do.  Same with the idea of being robbed of any other life phase.

Especially since the idea of being robbed of a particular life phase seems to often come back to disability.  Either you were robbed of your childhood because you were disabled, or because your parents were disabled.  (Double points if you supposedly “had to become the parent” just because you had to do some more chores around the house to make up for the fact that your disabled parent couldn’t do them very well.)  Someone once told me they were being robbed of their young adulthood by having to be my primary caretaker.  They said something like “At my age, I’m supposed to be finding myself and goofing off and doing a bunch of things without a lot of responsibility on my shoulders, not taking care of you.”  Which, yeah, the situation we were in was shitty and I regretted it as much as they did, but that was a crappy way to put it.  And a false way.  They could only get away with that view of young adulthood from being an upper-middle-class white American university student.

Anyway… it all leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I didn’t miss a childhood.  I had a childhood.  And it wasn’t that different than the childhoods a lot of people have.  I don’t think idealizing childhood, and then comparing non-ideal childhoods to that ideal, helps anyone.  And even though my childhood often sucked, I don’t draw the conclusions from that about my current life, that a lot of people would.

But I seem to be in an extreme minority there.  And I think this is probably something that originated in therapy culture, to take a wild guess.  It’s certainly repeated in therapy and therapy-inspired settings often enough.

28 notes

4:41pm July 29, 2014

Heh, wow.

When I wrote that post about River Tam reminding me of me as a teenager, someone who actually knew me as a teenager wrote me privately to say basically, “yep, she reminds me of you too.”  

I found her really painful in some ways to watch, because she reminds me so much of some really bad times in my life, and myself at my most confused and disoriented.  And yet I also found her beautiful to watch, because she had this potential in her that I couldn’t see in myself at the time, but I can see in my past self now.

Oh and in response to the person who talked about the way abuse survivors are pressured to always recover, and recover quickly, I definitely don’t intend to add to that pressure in any way.  I don’t think anyone totally recovers from abuse, and if they think they have, then they’re probably not very self-aware.  But I do think it’s possible to not be constantly tormented by it – for some people anyway.  

Long rambling post follows.

Keep reading

16 notes

2:10pm July 10, 2014

Don’t teach kids that their body is wrong

realsocialskills:

Something that can happen in therapy for disabled kids is:

People hold out hope that the kid won’t be disabled anymore, when they grow up.

So they push the kid as hard as possible in childhood, and tell them (often without saying this explicitly) that if they just work hard, their body won’t be wrong anymore.

This doesn’t work.

People who are disabled as children are usually still disabled as adults. Even if the therapy helped them. Even if they gained new physical abilities. Even if they learned things from it they wouldn’t have learned without it.

Even if they learn to walk. Even if they learn to talk. No matter what other skills they acquire. Their body is probably going to stay very different from most other people’s bodies, and far from the cultural norm.

And… part of living well as a person with a disability is accepting the body and the brain that you have, and working with it rather than against it. 

Because you can’t live in an imaginary body; you can’t live in an abstraction. You have to live your own life, as you actually are. And sometimes that involves medical treatment, sometimes it involves equipment, sometimes it involved therapy - but always, it involves reality. You can’t willpower yourself into being someone else. 

Disabled kids tend to get taught the opposite message, because childhood therapy is usually cure-oriented even for conditions that aren’t anywhere close to curable. It’s about normalization, much more than functioning well.

Then they go through all manner of hell unlearning this once they’re old enough that everyone gives up on pretending that a cure is going to happen.

If you’re responsible to or for kids with disabilities, do what you can to protect them from this. Make sure they aren’t being pushed to hang their self-worth on accomplishing things that are physically impossible or implausible. Help them to understand hat their bodies aren’t wrong. Teach them that they already have lives worth living.

I was taught that either I’d be cured and 100% “independent”, or I’d be institutionalized forever.  The only two options.  This really fucked up my life in a huge way for a long time.

2,667 notes

7:49am June 18, 2014

slashmarks:

like, there’s a level of ‘hurting each other’ that can actually be helped by relationship or family therapy, and a level where it can’t be, and I tend to define abuse as on the ‘can’t be’ line because abuse is usually intentional and involves heavy power imbalances and manipulation, for instance.

slashmarks:

like, there’s a level of ‘hurting each other’ that can actually be helped by relationship or family therapy, and a level where it can’t be, and I tend to define abuse as on the ‘can’t be’ line because abuse is usually intentional and involves heavy power imbalances and manipulation, for instance.

I think it depends on the context of the abuse.  Sometimes abuse happens because someone has a problem controlling their temper, even though they don’t actually want to be abusive.  Sometimes someone realizes that they’ve been doing something utterly horrible and wants to stop.  Sometimes someone is motivated to stop by other means.

Like when I was molested, my molester successfully went through therapy, and then we went through therapy together to reunite us, and we now have a decent relationship with each other even though it’s not what it used to be.  And that goes against every rule that supposedly says child molesters never change and can’t be helped and should be locked up and thrown away, but it worked for us.  But he had to want to stop badly enough, and he did, for a variety of reasons (some of which were conscience-related, some of which may have been fear of being turned in).

I don’t think you can really make generalizations about abuse or abusers.  Or therapy, for that matter.

14 notes

12:41pm May 26, 2014

➸ Everything I Need To Know In Life I Learned From My Behavioral Therapist (Camille)

Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do and how to be, I learned from my behavioral therapist before I was 5 years old.

These are the things I learned:

Life isn’t fair.

Sometimes you get punished when you don’t understand what you did wrong.

Sometimes you get punished for not trying when you were doing the best that you can.

Sometimes the people in control think you are stupid and that they are smart, but if they were really smart they’d know you weren’t stupid.

Grown ups don’t share and never say they are sorry.

The teacher doesn’t care about what’s important to you.

Feelings don’t matter, only doing matters.

Do exactly as you are told and you get a cookie.

Don’t question why you are being told to do something, just do it, and quickly.

Being autistic is a bad thing.

Don’t stare out the window in rapt amazement at the fluttering of leaves on a tree or at the formation of a cloud. It’s not allowed.

What is allowed is learning to put a lid on a box, 90 times a day, until you get it “right”.

Life is repetetive and boring.

Always hug when told to hug. Always kiss when told to kiss.

Act like a dog, but never say you are a dog.

Act like a robot, but never say you are a robot.

Only say what other people want to hear.

Don’t cry when you are in pain, unless they expect you to cry because they expect that you should be in pain.

The only important things you learn are learned from someone holding a clipboard and stop watch.

Thinking independently is a mistake.

It doesn’t matter that normal kids don’t get treated this way.

To the teacher: eye contact is more important than your pain.

Life is: stimulus - response … stimulus - response.

Don’t try to imagine someone elses thoughts, it’s a waste of time.

Saying strings of oral nonsense in response to strings of auditory nonsense is communication. Connecting words to your thoughts and then saying the words is not communication and will get you in trouble.

If other people hit you, it’s because you’re a bad person or you did something wrong. If you hit back or try to defend yourself… then you’re a bad person and you’re doing something wrong.

—

By Millford Spiltwater - 6 yrs old (not really)

by Camille (mostly)

A note from the author: Some of the best lessons in this were inspired by the experience of my friend oraboris. Thanks oraboris. Feel free to distribute this if you like. Leave it mostly intact, but add to it if you think you can improve it. If you post it somewhere only do so if you want to promote the ethical treatment of autistics and others subjected to thoughtless behavioral therapy.

53 notes

8:21pm April 6, 2014

➸ Radical Neurodivergence Speaking: Conditioned eye contact.

clatterbane:

sherlocksflataffect:

I do talk about the things they did to children in the late 80s to force eye contact, tw for restraint and other abusive practices

I only got this in school sometimes, with one teacher in particular who kept grabbing my face. And I feel lucky again to be coming from a culture with different eye contact patterns, where mine never really even stood out.

Feeling aggressive or trying to come on to someone? Then you can stare into people’s eyes. Otherwise it’s really rude, and somebody might just assume you are challenging them in some way. Obviously that is not how everybody does things. (It also doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lying or must have abysmal self esteem. Really.)

This is another thing I’m really sorry that anybody decided to focus on to this extent, to the point that treating kids abusively is not just OK but required. It’s not like a different pattern of eye contact is even hurting anyone. Priorities. :(

(But seriously, if I am making sustained eye contact and grinning in a way that shows my teeth…that’s highly unlikely to be a friendly response. Plenty of miscommunication that way, yep. :-|)

In 1996 I had a therapist who, if I did not look him in the eye, he’d do kind of a karate chop type motion with his hand onto my knee in a really painful spot, and do it over and over and over until I looked at him, and then he’d stop.  So just to verify that this stuff went on past the eighties, and is undoubtedly still going on.  I was not able to physically fight back against this guy because he knew martial arts and could pin me really painfully with one hand.

60 notes

8:18am January 10, 2014

➸ SIGH.....The Heartbreak of Finding a Black Therapist Who Works With Black Rape Survivors........

ablackwomansurvivingrape:

For me personally I think the hardest thing about therapy is finding a black therapist who works with rape survivors. I have been searching for over 10 years now. I have had numerous therapist who I’ve spent most of my time trying to explain what its like to be a…

71 notes

10:00pm July 28, 2013

➸ Social skills for autonomous people: stripesweatersandwaterbottles: realsocialskills: aura218: nichtigen:...

stripesweatersandwaterbottles:

realsocialskills:

aura218:

nichtigen:

aura218:

actuallyrlysrs:

aura218:

realsocialskills:

aura218:

realsocialskills:

stripesweatersandwaterbottles:

youneedacat:

Social skills for autonomous…

I was in therapy of some kind for most of the time from the ages of seven to nineteen.

I’m not just talking about one asshole I ran into.

I believe my posts have gone into three different people, who were my primary therapists for six years.
One of them was probably actually sadistic.

Another was actually the best shrink I ever had. He was also woefully unaware of the way he used power.

The other was somewhere in between. He was a jerk, but he may have thought he was helping me. But still a jerk.

All of my other therapists were in the in between zone.

None of them understood power or boundaries.

All of them rewrote my life to match their own ideas and agendas.

I have not even gotten into what some of them did to my family members.

I’m trying to think. There was the therapist I saw in elementary school. And a school counselor in elementary school. And a counselor at an academic summer camp. And the counselor in high school. And the psychologist from ages thirteen to nineteen. And the psychiatrist from ages fourteen too he retired in my twenties. And the psychiatrist for a week, age thirteen. Assorted psychiatrists and counselors that were purely impatient. The team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors at the residential facility when I was fifteen and sixteen.  The woman I saw when my brother molested me. The school counselor in special ed. The counselor from the county mental health. The ones from that weird day program thing. The one who told me my problem was a snake in my spine.

I can’t even count the number I’ve seen.

Boundary violations were the norm, not the exception. They were built into the culture of what therapy was about for them. It was their JOB to violate my boundaries.

I’m not making shit up to scare people. I’m not picking out the exceptions. For every therapist I’ve seen for any length of time at all, there are plenty of stories.

If you think the existence of professional ethics boards and stuff prevents this, you don’t know what’s actually happening to lots of people.

And honestly I don’t care who I “scare away from getting help”. People can make their own decisions.  I’m not going to shut up about abuse just because it makes people uncomfortable.

And “getting help” doesn’t == “seeing a therapist” anyway. I mean that’s how some people get help. Other people can’t do it that way.

These things that happened to me are not some kind of coincidence. People who want power over people are attracted to that job. People who genuinely want to help people are systematically taught that abusing their power in certain ways is how to help people. Every person who notices these patterns is told they ran into a few bad apples. That’s inaccurate.

Many people have these experiences with therapists and don’t even know there’s anything wrong with them. So they don’t report bad experiences even if they’re having them.

Anyway I won’t be quiet about what happened to me. I won’t submit to the idea that regulations will prevent this. I won’t tell people is the exception or that I ran into some bad apples.

If people are going to choose to enter therapy to begin with, they damn well better know how to identify abuse.

My stories about therapy saved a very close friend of mine, before she was my friend. She was in therapy and my stories helped her recognize a bad situation before it got any worse.

So don’t tell me I’m just needlessly scaring people.  I’m telling people useful information. They can use it to avoid therapy. They can use it to go into therapy, eyes open. They can ignore me altogether.

But I will not be quiet. I will not temper my descriptions with disclaimers about how regulations make things all better and not all of them are like this. I will describe what I’ve seen and experienced. Take it or leave it.

And I haven’t told a tenth of the stories I could tell about s tenth of these people, because that would fill a book.

333 notes

2:00pm July 28, 2013

➸ Social skills for autonomous people: Anonymous asked realsocialskills: I used to cry (I mean weep, sob,...

realsocialskills:

Anonymous asked realsocialskills:

I used to cry (I mean weep, sob, have tears in eyes) sometimes when someone said something that made me feel understood. I used to often cry in therapy sessions. I liked crying in these cases; I felt I was working through things. I can see how…

Wow it seems like every red flag is something I’ve experienced.

I once had this staff person who THOUGHT she was my therapist. And she would basically emotionally manipulate me until I cried and then hug me and tell me we were “working through issues” and “making progress”.

Also there was this awful woman who used to hang around the autistic community. She actually wrote a book on how to communicate with autistic people. And she got a lot of ego out of believing she had a special gift with us.

In reality she could not communicate with an autistic person even the slightest. Like… she was on the phone with my friend. My friend said “I have no more money for this call, I have to go,  NOW."  And this woman, who saw hidden meanings in every possible word you said, kept trying to talk to her, thinking she meant something else. My friend had to hang up on her.

The hidden meanings thing meant she was so NONAUTISTIC that she was more in her own little world than any autism stereotype I’ve ever seen. She went through life interacting with imaginary people and thinking it was us. One time I tried to tell her "your writing about my friend’s life is inaccurate”. My friend had spent a few months in institutions here and there, gotten out a long long time ago, and later figured out she was autistic. Then got professionally diagnosed. This woman wrote that my friend spent her shot life in institutions and got out because a psychiatrist diagnosed her with autism and saved her.

So I told her this wasn’t true. She then told me I was jealous of my friend. I told her no WTF I’m just trying to correct an inaccuracy. She proceeded to have a fight with nth about my supposed jealousy (on the contrary I felt bad for my friend being misrepresented in such a way). Then she corrected it…. to say my friend had spent her entire life homeless until she was rescued by a shrink who diagnosed her with autism. I felt like slamming my head on a wall.

My friend also said something offhand about her desire for accuracy, and this woman treated it like it was an amazing insight into the mysterious and strange souls of autistic people.

Anyway. One time I described this woman in the vaguest terms. As “so nonautistic that she lives in her own world”. And autistic people immediately knew exactly who I meant and told me more stories about their interactions with her.

And basically, she had a habit if manipulating autistic people if she met them in person. She’d basically manipulate them into meltdowns. Including people who never ordinarily have meltdowns.

And then she would hug them and cry with them and tell them I’d do wonderful that they were “getting somewhere” and “making progress revealing their true emotions” and all sorts of other bullshit.

And she could manipulate autistic people into agreeing that this was progress. Only once they got away from her would they stop saying things like “she sees into my soul…”

Anyway she was notorious for awhile among autistic people as this horribly overloading person who was impossible to communicate with. And yet… she believes to this day that she had a special gift in communicating with us.

Horrible.

42 notes