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2:18am
August 4, 2015
it is hard to express…
just how much you can break someone…
…if what you think you’re doing..
..is making them into someone who might someday become a real person worthy of respect…
I had a psychologist once who openly told me that his goal was to kill the person I was, and replace that person, inside me, with a person who was more functional and better adapted to living in the world and less psychotic.
Note that ‘psychotic’, for him, encompassed ‘autistic’. (He was part of a team who had diagnosed me, among other things, as having been ‘psychotic since infancy’. Which can only ever mean autism, because there’s no way to diagnose actual psychosis in an infant. They were taking their ideas straight out of Frances Tustin’s books from the seventies, that differentiated some forms of autism from others, and called some of it autism and some of it childhood schizophrenia or childhood psychosis. I was supposedly psychotic since infancy and schizophrenic since adolescence, although what the difference was, I was never exactly told.)
He did not succeed.
But he did succeed in doing some incredibly scary stuff to the inside of my head. I was unable to defend myself against the things he did, because I was heavily drugged and he was an accomplished manipulator.
I have been told since – by strangers online who know nothing about my life, mind you – that I should’ve known it was impossible for someone to kill who you are and make you into someone else. That if I actually believed him that it was possible, then there was something clearly wrong with me that needed to be fixed, possibly by the very guy who was abusing me in this fashion.
Of all of the abuse I encountered in the psychiatric system, this man’s abuse was the longest-lasting and most damaging in terms of consequences for my mind. I remember going into appointments with him and feeling like I was an entirely different person. Like I’d walk in the door myself, immediately turn into someone else the moment I saw him, and leave the door someone else again. Often I wouldn’t be able to remember our sessions later.
He once let it slip that he’d been trained by a certain school of hypnotherapy. Then he refused to name it again when I and my family asked about it, and got evasive whenever we brought up the subject. I eventually found some stuff by the person, and it was someone who was considered highly unethical by a lot of hypnotherapists, because he believed in lying to patients if he thought lying would bring them around to healing in some manner, and he also believed in involuntary trance induction. When I read about the ‘confusion induction’, it was exactly what this therapist did sometimes.
And being on a very high dose of antipsychotics made it impossible for me to psychologically defend myself. Antipsychotics can have an effect where they basically shatter your cognitive abilities, including your defenses against having your mind invaded. By which I don’t mean like sci-fi telepathy sort of mind invasion, but more like extremely skilled manipulation. If you can’t think straight, you can’t defend yourself well against people who are hell-bent on manipulating you.
But he was incredibly up front about the idea that he was going to kill the person I was inside, and replace that person. He said also that he was going to get inside my mind and never leave. And that if I ever had an original thought, I should bring it to him, because I would probably die if I ever thought for myself for very long.
I remember when a friend first taught me to repeat “I am allowed to think for myself.” She said I needed to repeat it to myself over and over until I really believed it, and that it was very important that I do so. I thought she was trying to kill me. And at first, even beginning to try to repeat it to myself, resulted in this torrent of confusing brain noise that felt like I was drowning. It was like he’d set booby traps all over my mind.
People don’t think this kind of thing is possible.
People are wrong.
I was first able to begin resisting this stuff when I found a book about cults, by a person who had been a cult member and had indoctrinated other people, and he talked in depth about how indoctrination works and how to resist it and remove it from yourself. I had never been in a religious cult, or even in any of the other types of cults in the book, but the residential facility I lived at when all this went down, had a power structure that resembled a cult enough that the book was very useful for me.
I actually confronted him about it once, after I started reading about cults. He told me that anything he did was warranted because if it wasn’t for him I’d have been in a state institution for at minimum the rest of my childhood. Mind you, when given a choice between the residential facility and the state institution, I chose the state institution. I was overruled both because people didn’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the choice I made, and because there were no beds open in the state institution.
But having now talked to people who’ve been in similar residential facilities and in the exact state institution I almost ended up in, I have been told that the state institution was definitely better. Not good, not good by a long shot. In fact, terrible. But better. State institutions don’t usually have the money to throw around for intensive one-on-one 24/7 brainwashing. Which is why many actual patients prefer them to private institutions. Not all patients, and not all institutions, but it’s a preference that occurs often enough, and goes against what most people consider common sense, that it’s been explicitly noted a lot in the psychiatric ex-patient movement. Unfortunately, that preference (and, in general, preferences for places seen as “worse” from the outside for reasons that are largely aesthetic) is often seen as evidence that we lack sanity and should not have control over our lives.
Of course, most of us would prefer no institutions, but when given a choice between different types of institutions, we’ll often choose ones considered “more restrictive” or “worse”. Because our definition of what makes a place worse – as patients, who understand certain things instinctively that other people don’t understand – is often very different from what staff or family members consider worse.
So this idea that he was keeping me out of a state institution doesn’t hold water to me at all.
The idea that he did this for any reason other than his own amusement and power tripping, doesn’t hold water to me at all. He was someone who got off on power and control. Not someone who inadvertently misused power, but someone who craved power and misused it to do harm to people, and often enjoyed doing so.
He also told me that he really enjoyed being able to treat me, because normally people like me were stuck in state institutions and out of his reach, so he didn’t normally get to “work on” anyone like me.
Which was a creepy-ass thing to say.
I learned later that even in psychotherapy that is not deliberately sadistic, there’s a frequent idea that you have to destroy who someone is and replace them with someone more functional.
So I was not imagining that he said this, and the fact that I believed him capable of doing something he kept threatening to do (when he controlled every aspect of my life, too, which can undermine anyone’s sense of reality), does not mean that I “had to have been crazy” and therefore that what he did was somehow okay. (Why is it okay to do that to crazy people but not to sane people, anyway? It shouldn’t be. And why is it okay to imply that I’m crazy – and therefore apparently not worth listening to – because I was horribly abused by a psychologist on a power trip?)
TL;DR: I had a psychologist once who told me that he wanted to kill the person I was and replace me with someone who could function better in the world and generally be a happier and better person or something along those lines. He told me this, explicitly, many times. His abuse did more damage to my mind than the rest of the psychiatric system combined. And the one time I confronted him about the matter, he told me that it was all okay because he was doing it to keep me out of a state institution. Except he was actually doing it because he got off on power and control. Everything else was just an excuse. It was horrible in ways I can’t even describe.
133 notes
2:46am
November 28, 2014
Staff using disabled people in their power plays.
I used to have what in the DD world they refer to as behavior problems. Which basically means a hair-trigger temper that I took out on the objects and people around me, and on myself, in equal measure.
There was a power struggle going on between my staff person, I’ll call her Dolores, and my case managers, I had two, I’ll call them John and Marie. Both lacked any apparent heart or conscience. To them it was all about power, gaining it and maintaining it, and treating staff and disabled clients as their very own living dollhouse to do with as they pleased.
If they got reports that a staff person was abusing power, they’d promote them. If they knew a client and staff got along great, they’d do their best to separate them. These were the ones who used an illiterate man’s emails to accuse his favorite staff (Dolores) of abuse while pretending to take dictation from him about something totally different. Well now they were trying to get in between me and Dolores.
So they set up a meeting. Dolores came to all my meetings to help as a cognitive interpreter, my right under the law. They said they’d show up at noon. They showed up at 11 to get me alone and outnumbered. They knew I never did two on one conversations so of course John had someone with him. They came in and talked about stuff I don’t remember which is one reason I needed Dolores. When she came at noon they tried to leave but I wouldn’t let them. He claimed the meeting was over at noon. Dolores said “no you said noon thirty”.
I very angrily typed what they’d done to manipulate me. John said to Dolores, “she was just fine till you got here.” Dolores tried to say it was because I was scared, but before she could get a word out, I threw my trackball at John, missed and hit my laptop screen. Screamed in his face. Then ran into the bathroom before I could do real damage.
I came out after I cooled down. John was smiling a chilling smile. I apologized to him. He said “It’s okay, I understand, it wasn’t your fault anyway. You’re not in any trouble at all.”
I asked Dolores about that comment later. She said that the moment he set off my meltdown, he sat back, relaxed, and smiled directly at Dolores the whole time. When I left the room, he said “See what you made her do?” He had deliberately set up all the conditions that normally resulted in meltdowns. The visit read like the section of my IPP (Individual Program Plan) on what not to do in meetings with me. I read it later and they had done every single thing it said not to do. No coincidence here: They were literally using my IPP as a guide for figuring out how to fuck up my ability to communicate and understand, and as a guide to inducing meltdowns.
And they used my meltdown to get between me and Dolores. They set up the situation, they used known triggers, and waited for me to go off, then got Dolores in trouble for my behavior. This is an extremely common ploy used by staff to get each other in trouble, using disabled people as weapons. Always be aware, in situations like this, you could be being set up on purpose, in order for people who don’t even see you as human to use you against each other. Another way staff will use clients against each other is one-upmanship games where each staff scores points for “understanding a client better than other staff do”. They have all kinds of power games they play against each other, the common feature being that we are not people to them, we are chips on a game board, we are objects to be owned, we are things. Never ever forget that some staff and case managers will use you this way.
2:20pm
August 2, 2014
"As a last resort"
Content warning: This is a graphic post about brutality towards people with disabilities. ABA and justifications for abuse are discussed. Proceed with caution.
People do a lot of brutal things to people with disabilities, including children.
Some examples: pinning them to the floor, punishing them with electric shocks, medicating them into immobility, putting them in 10-40 hours a week of repetitive behavioral therapy, taking away everything they care about and making them earn it by complying with therapy, taking away their food, and confining them in small places.
These things are now somewhat politically unpopular. We identify, as a culture, as having got past that point. We think of this kind of brutality as something that happened in the past, even though it is still common.
What this means in practice is that whenever people do brutal things to someone with a disability, it will be called the last resort. People doing the brutal things will claim that they minimize them, that there are protections in place, and that they only do them when necessary.
For example, this is an excerpt from the (as of this post) current ethical standards for BCBAs (certified ABA experts):
“4.05 Reinforcement/Punishment.
The behavior analyst recommends reinforcement rather than punishment whenever possible. If punishment procedures are necessary, the behavior analyst always includes reinforcement procedures for alternative behavior in the program.
4.06 Avoiding Harmful Reinforcers. RBT
The behavior analyst minimizes the use of items as potential reinforcers that maybe harmful to the long-term health of the client or participant (e.g., cigarettes, sugar or fat-laden food), or that may require undesirably marked deprivation procedures as motivating operations.”
In other words, the current standards of ethics for ABA practices explicitly allow punishment, harmful reinforcers, and “undesirably marked deprivation procedures”. But, they claim to “minimize” it, and only do it when they consider it necessary in some way.
This is an empty claim. Everyone who has ever used harmful reinforcers and brutal punishments has claimed that they are only used when they are necessary. Even the people who deprived children of food and made them live and study on electrified floors (graphic link, proceed with caution.) Even the electric shocks and food deprivation used by the Judge Rotenburg Center do not violate the BCBA ethical guidelines, because they claim that they are necessary and only used in extreme cases (even though they shock people for things like standing up from chairs without permission.)
Whenever any of this is done to someone, it will be justified as “a last resort”. Even if it’s an explicit part of their plan. Even if it’s done regularly with no attempt to transition to another approach. Even if nothing else has ever been tried. Someone who is treated brutally will be assumed to have deserved it.
People call things last resorts to justify doing them. They choose to do brutal things to a vulnerable person, but they think of it as inevitable because it is “the last resort”. Calling something “the last resort” means “it’s that person’s fault I’m doing this; I could not possibly do otherwise.”
Treating someone in your care brutally and then blaming them for your choices is inexcusable.
To those treated brutally and told it was a last resort: I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m even more sorry if it’s still happening. It’s not your fault. It’s not because of anything you did, and it’s not because there’s anything wrong with your mind. You were abused because others chose to abuse you.
Everything that was ever done to me at a particular residential facility that was abusive beyond belief – from giving me twice the toxic dose of Clozaril, to giving me a diagnosis they knew was inaccurate in order to get me onto said Clozaril, to beating me up in order to get me to make eye contact, to making me walk back and forth from the barn to the house until I walked "normally” enough to deserve to eat, to telling me that he was going to get into my head and never leave and kill the person I was and replace me with himself as well as someone more functional than the real me, to what we strongly suspect was involuntary trance induction…
…I wrote to the psychologist about it and he told me that given “the alternative” was life in an institution, he felt justified with everything they’d done to me. He also said some weird stuff about “I don’t usually get to work with people like you at all because you’re normally on back wards of state institutions, and they won’t let you near me” like I was some kind of collector’s item. And he basically told me that if it weren’t for him I’d be in an institution forever, and that he’d saved me and that I should be grateful.
6-9 months of my life at that place, mind you. The rest of my life trying to recover from the damage. Talk about CPTSD.
3:13pm
July 17, 2014
Strong Glial Character: youneedacat: Social skills for autonomous people:…
stripesweatersandwaterbottles:
lexsplosion said:
“In general, if you are convinced that you know better than the person that you’re talking to what their own thoughts, feelings, and motivations must really be—and keep insisting that they’re just too sick or don’t have the insight to understand what their REAL thoughts, feelings and motivations are—you need to go away and stop hurting people who are already having a rough enough time.”
This this this this this. Also pretty terrified the person who abused me wants to be a therapist. :(
realsocialskills said:
It scares me too. I wish this was the first time I’d heard about an abuser wanting to become a therapist.
Therapy is so important for so many vulnerable people. And there are abusers who take advantage of that. It’s terrifying.
One of my long-term abusers, someone who has not seen me since 1996 but has participated in cyberstalking extremely recently to this day? Became a therapist. She was working on her psych degree when I first met her, and even then already believed she had the right to fuck with people’s lives, act like she knew them better than they knew themselves, etc. But it wasn’t even as benign as that. She enjoyed inciting drama and friction and tension between people. If there was not a problem she would create a problem because she got off on people having problems. She would even lie to create problems – she has lied multiple times, blatantly, not misremembered but outright lied, in the course of her cyberstalking and defamation campaign against me. And I’m far from the only person she’s targeted. She’s also set up situations where she’s deliberately triggered people who were fairly psychologically stable to begin with, and induced symptoms of mental illness so that she could take on a long-suffering martyr caretaker role (that is the only explanation I can imagine for some things I’ve seen her do). And she’s a therapist, and that scares me to death. I am afraid for her patients.
6:28pm
October 31, 2013
Disability “allies” who care more what authority figures say about us than what we say for ourselves (ie anti self-diagnosers)
Disability “allies” who think our peer support is disastrously preventing us from “getting the help we need”.
Disability “allies” who don’t allow actual disabled people to lead self advocacy events and trainings.
And/or who tell other self advocates not to listen to the self advocates who are actually talking about improving services and making sure our rights are respected and stuff.
Omg I went to this horrible “self-advocacy” meeting once where I basically got *WRITTEN UP* for engaging in actual self-advocacy and telling off the “facilitator” for controlling the voices of other disabled people.
Written up. As in. I went “AWOL” even though I was an adult allowed to go wherever I wanted, with or without leave, so I was written up as going AWOL. She wrote me up as hitting her when I didn’t hit her or even actually touch her (I did brush by her sleeve near her wrist at one point but everyone else present agreed I did not “hit her really hard on the upper arm” or anything remotely close that could even faintly be mistaken for that, and she could not produce any evidence that I had). And she wrote me up for “trespassing” because I couldn’t stop walking (movement disorder) and walked into a fence before I could stop, after leaving the room. Which was not, legally, actually trespassing, in any sense of the word.
I complained to the guy who was supposed to be the disabled guy who sits in on the meetings to make sure that everything is happening fairly. He was a friend of mine. I hoped he’d listen.
He said he’d never noticed her controlling anyone.
I told him that she controlled people primarily with body language and visual cues, things that she was deliberately doing because the guy watching her was blind and couldn’t see them.
He got very uncomfortable at that point.
He told me she was his boss. She was his boss and he was the one who was supposed to make sure she behaved ethically. No conflict of interest set up by the agency there.
Then he said:
“You have to understand… I really like my job. I like my job a lot. I’ve never had a job that pays this well. I’m going to have to ask you never to bring this up with me again, it’s too upsetting.”
So… yeah, the guy who was supposed to be making sure they were ethical, was too afraid of losing his job, to actually do his job.
I could tell he believed me, he just didn’t want to. And the guy was really terrified of conflict in just about all forms. He was also unaware of some aspects of having a cognitive disability, because his disability was entirely physical. I don’t have an intellectual disability but I do have cognitive disabilities in common with many people with intellectual disabilities so I was more able to see the ways that she controlled people, because people have used those same tactics on me. She also told me that my communication method took too long. And wrote me up (how can you write a person up for this) as “having a huge sense of entitlement” for, you know, wanting to be treated like a human being and wanting to see everyone around me treated like a human being.
She also told me that I was destroying the trust she had built up carefully with all these people.
And a lot of other terrible stuff.
My staff person was also written up, for defending me as she screamed at me about what a horrible person I was. She did this after most people had left so the only real witnesses were me and my “renegade staff”.
Renegade staff is what she referred to my staff person as.
Renegade. Staff.
For defending me.
Against obvious horribleness that any decent staff person would be defending their client from.
And she did her best to make sure I could not participate in local self-advocacy activities and that the agency she worked for (who controlled all DD services in the area) saw me as automatically bad and horrible.
She was a total asshole, mind you.
I saw her using looks to control people.
I saw her cutting off people with slow speech.
I saw her controlling what people could and couldn’t say.
I saw her telling people what and what not to say.
And she had this horrible condescension to her that just oozed off her.
And she controlled me. She did it by neglecting everything she told me I “had to understand” about everyone else there. "You have to understand they process information differently than most people do.“ No shit Sherlock, I understand that better than you do. But she basically deliberately used my information-processing difficulties against me, both by simultaneously denying they existed, and making it impossible for me to react or respond to her because she was using them to manipulate me into being unable to respond. I’m not being very articulate there but I expect anyone who’s had their information processing difficulties manipulated in that way knows exactly what I mean – it’s done by simultaneously manipulating those difficulties and denying their existence, either overtly or covertly.
I wrote this about the experience when it happened about eight years ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051030145559/http://www.autistics.org/library/understand.html
It’s still fairly traumatic to think about and read about it all over again. It was a terrible experience, I felt like she was crushing people with one hand, crushing me with the other, and keeping her hands pushed apart to keep us from connecting with each other. I know she saw me as a threat because of the bullshit writeup I got in my behavioral file or whatever. I still have trouble believing she had the audacity to claim to be for self-advocacy and then write up a 25-year-old adult as "AWOL” because I left a room without her fucking permission, and to make up a bullshit assault story. (I did walk towards her angrily but then I turned away and my hand brushed her sleeve, not even making contact with her body even through the clothing. But even in the heat of the moment there’s no possible way you could legitimately confuse that with being “hit hard on the upper arm”. I remember asking “Um… did she show you any injury that would be consistent with being hit that hard?” They said “Um…. no.”)
Anyway… horrible experience for me, but worse experience for the self-advocates who couldn’t walk away from her. It was clear that in that room, the only agendas that mattered were the ones that were agency-approved. And that is NOT self-advocacy, that’s a farce.