pipistrellus:
fen-94:
yourmotherisafragginaardvark:
pipistrellus:
pipistrellus:
“suppose someone pushes you into a river,” the therapist said to me slowly, smiling, smiling smiling, “just because it’s not your fault that you’re in the water,” she said, “doesn’t mean it isn’t your responsibility to climb back out. just because someone pushed you into the water doesn’t mean it’s okay to just sit in the water and sulk.”
“i’m not sitting in the water,” i said, “i’m drowning. i’m drowning and everyone is screaming at me to stop being so lazy and just grow gills already”
she smiled at me, smiled smiled smiled, and shook her head. because i didn’t understand. because i was making excuses.
it’s exceptionally convenient for all the people who go around shoving vulnerable mentally ill people into rivers that they bear no responsibility for helping us climb back out.
Omfg I wish I had the spoons to go to school and become a therapist. We need kind autistic therapists. We need neurodivergent therapists who actually understand, and aren’t just book smart about this stuff.
Hey okay her phrasing and attitude sounds awful but if she sits there and commiserates with you about drowning it won’t help either…in fact most things in this metaphor translate to shouting encouragement to you as you’re drowning (what she was doing, badly), or shouting swimming instructions (coping techniques) or throwing you swimming bands (medication).
What can people do that is most helpful to a *drowning* person? Just do the above stuff nicely, or what? I would like to know and I work in mental health but I started my interest from tumblr and I know that ableism sucks, this is me genuinely looking for better alternatives.
Heyo, OP here. I’m real tired but I do wanna answer you but before I do I want to address something else real quick, which is: you’re very careful to assure me that you’re asking an earnest question, and that you know ableism sucks, but you’re also very very resistant to the idea that treatment providers can and do actively contribute to ableism and the suffering of disabled people. I think that is something that’s important to reflect on if you are a person who works in mental health.
The second thing I want to say before I answer your main question is that this response for you was you reblogging a post that came across your dash asking a question. For me it was someone reblogging a post I made about a painful experience I had, demanding that I do the work of explaining my views on therapy generally and how to be an effective mental health worker.
I have experienced a lot of medical abuse in my long & illustrious career as a disabled person. I have been in treatment for 20 years.
There is no way for you to know this, but in a way that’s the point: I am a stranger to you. You don’t know me and I don’t know you, all you have is this post, out of context, to draw conclusions from (and you definitely drew some that are not only incorrect, but really uh… hurt my feelings is not the phrase I want to use but it’s close).
This isn’t me saying that it’s bad for you to wonder those things or ask those questions. “How can I effectively help disabled mentally ill people who are suffering” and “how can I try to do that WITHOUT harming them further” are good questions to think about if you work in mental health. This is just me trying to explain why I think asking me this, on this personal post, was thoughtless.
Because this was the post you chose to ask these questions on, when I answer this I’m going to be talking about me and my specific circumstances and the specific therapist who I wrote about in my original post. There are elements of this anecdote that you could not possibly have known about when you reblogged my post and I want to be clear I am not including them as some kind of “gotcha” but as an expansion of the story I told in my original post, and because this is the story you chose to ask these questions about.
Firstly I want to emphasize that “her word choice and attitude sound awful, but” is a misrepresentation of what went on. If a therapist’s word choice and attitude are awful and what they’re saying is victim-blaming and harmful, they’re not just screwing up on an idea that has its basis in something reasonable. They’re being a bad therapist.
In this particular situation, I was seeing someone who I had not seen very much and who knew really only the bare bones basics about my life from a couple of conversations with me and my father. At this time in my life, I had dropped out of college twice due to the inability and unwillingness of the schools to accommodate my disabilities, and I was very scared and worried about what was going to happen to me, because I was also too sick to work. My father had contacted this therapist partly because he wanted someone for me to talk to about trying to apply for disability. She not only repeatedly denied that I was disabled at all, but constantly told me things like “if you think of yourself as disabled it’s just an excuse to give up and stop trying” and “if you go on disability it would be taking money away from REAL disabled people” and “maybe your REAL disability is a bad attitude”.
To contrast this with some things about one of the only therapists I ever had who was actually good at her job, here’s my answer to “what could she have done”. Here’s some things my good therapist actually fucking DID instead of crouching on the riverbank throwing rocks at my head:
She acknowledged that the things I had gone through were hard and unfair and that my situation was a shitty one and she let me express these things in whatever ways I needed to without pathologizing them (lying on the floor, bringing a lot of fidget toys, sorting things, crying, screaming, etc) instead of acting like any “weird” ways I expressed those things was childish and unnecessary.
She indicated that she cared about me as a person and that she wanted for things in my life to be less bad. This sounds basic but most therapists I have had either expressed condescending fondness towards me like I was a misbehaving dog, or outright contempt.
She would suggest concrete solutions to many of the things I struggled with re: getting out of the house and keeping a schedule. She contacted people for me when I could not do it myself. She asked my permission for these things. She would get my permission to reach out to people about volunteering opportunities or group meetings she thought I might find helpful and then instead of just giving me a phone number she would arrange things on my behalf, because she knew I could not do it myself.
She let me contact her in ways I was able to e.g. she let me email her instead of insisting I call her office every time I wanted to change an appointment or anything.
She brainstormed with me about genuinely actual things I could do, as someone who was unable to do a lot of normal things. She worked really hard to try to connect me back to society and she went out of her way to find contacts for me for other kinds of doctors to address my other health problems. When I moved away, she went out of her way to try to find contact info for therapists in the area I was moving to who I could contact so I wouldn’t be adrift and not have any support.
I’m tired and I don’t have the energy to get into this any more but I want to emphasize that I believe you. I believe you want to help people. I believe you’re anxious about feeling helpless in the face of the suffering your clients/patients are going through and that you are anxious not to add to that suffering yourself. I think those are important things to work towards.
But “what not to do” in this situation also includes your reblog of my post.
In reblogging my post, a post made by a disabled person about mistreatment by psych professionals, you, a psych professional, and saying “okay so that wasn’t GREAT but like what do you WANT people to do??” you’re setting up a dynamic between us that replicates dynamics between psych professionals and disabled people where I am responsible for telling you how not to hurt me.
This has happened to me a lot. It has happened to a lot of vulnerable/mentally ill/traumatized/disabled people a lot. It is not a good dynamic to replicate. I would advise you to avoid it in the future.