Just had to think again, after finding myself ranting about things that happened when I was in high school all these years later. And realizing again just how messed up some of my mother’s behavior and expectations really were sometimes.

Gee, maybe one contributing factor might be that I couldn’t talk about things that were bothering me at the time? Or really even safely express that things did bother me? So come back decades later, and some of this stuff still feels fresh whenever it’s brought to mind again.

And yes, that would be with too many years of the kind of forced/coerced therapy aimed at fixing you where you’re not really the client. (Some more earlier discussion of conflicts of interest there.) Making the whole thing at least 20x worse.

No damned wonder I had a lot of spectacular meltdowns for a while there, until I learned to turn them into shutdowns for my own protection. (Including to avoid getting locked up some more. That looked pretty crazy on its own, but at least being quieter about it is less likely to get you locked up IME. Definitely dealing with my mother.)

But yeah, this is another of those things where I’m not even primarily pissed off on my own behalf. Even though keeping dealing with delayed fallout isn’t much fun.

That basic situation is unfortunately far from unusual for people growing up. Especially ND/disabled people. And nobody should be placed in that sort of position. It’s very disturbing how often this does seem to happen.

My therapist says I should put a band on my wrist and snap it every time I start to rock to help break the habit. Thoughts? This doesn’t sound like good advice, but I don’t have a lot of therapist options. And I don’t know… 😐

gingerautie:

candidlyautistic:

First you need to ask you if you actually want to stop. If you don’t want to, just tell her it is something you don’t want to work on that at the moment.

If you do, well, the rubber band thing is a pretty common suggestion for modifying behaviors, but it is essentially out of the ABA playbook that pretends to be cognitive behavioral therapy.

You can do the exact same thing without the rubber band, and just use actual cognitive behavioral therapy.

Essentially the way it works is that you recognize a thought or action, you process the thought or action, you change the thought or action.

The great thing about this is that it doesn’t matter if you succeed or fail – the more you do it, the more you will notice the rocking so the more you interrupt it, so the more you recognize it, so on and so forth.

So it might work like this

You are rocking.

You notice / recognize you are rocking.

You you think to yourself “I would like to stop rocking”.

You stop rocking.

One of the really important things about this is that whether you use CBT or the rubber band it does not matter how long you interrupt the rocking for. It is not a failure if you only stop rocking for half a second or a second or two or five minutes or five hours.

All that matters is that you stopped.

In any event, you can also replace the rubber band with literally any action. You draw a circle with your on your knee with your finger, you can boop your nose, you can hum, you stand on your head.

If you are okay with ABA tactics and using them on yourself, instead of you using an aversive system like the rubber band you can use CBT and follow it with a reward.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using that sort of conditioning on yourself as long as you know what ABA is, know the ethical issues, and are doing it by your choice for yourself.

Finally, you can also tell your therapist that you like the idea of interrupting the rocking, but not the rubber band and ask her if she has any suggestions that don’t use incentives or aversives, that you would like suggestions for a neutral action to help interrupt the rocking without associating it with anything good or bad. Your therapist will know you better than me, so they may have some ideas I’ve not thought about.

I personally prefer CBT, though sometimes I will use a physical action like tapping my knee with my finger with a long three count because it requires me to stop doing the action or thought I want to change, and replace it with with a thought and an action.

At first, it only interrupts my thought or action while I am tapping and counting. But it does get you there in the end, and it isn’t any slower than outright ABA in my opinion.

I know that is along read, but I hope it helps you get some

This is horrifying. The rubber band snapping thing is a good substitute for self-harm, because it doesn’t actually injure.

but telling you that you should hurt yourself when you do something you don’t want to do is awful. Do they recommend this for people in therapy who have negative thoughts they’re trying to get rid of?

Would they tell someone to hurt themselves as punishment for having self-defeating thoughts or something?

Your therapist is telling you to hurt yourself. Even it’s just a minor pain, that’s what they’re telling you to do. They’re telling you to hurt yourself for behaviours that aren’t harmful. That’s horrifying.

Substituting eg. banging your head against a wall or cutting for snapping a rubber band is a good idea – you’re switching a serious harm for minor pain. Substituting harmless behaviours for hurting yourself is an awful idea.

Your therapist is telling you to self-harm. They are not a good therapist, and are telling you to behave in harmful ways.

clatterbane:

But yeah, reminded with the great parenting example? My mother actually found James Woods’ performance in The Boost extremely triggering when she watched it, with some way too familiar character behavior. Speaking of running with some salesman stereotypes. That was also when she really started wondering if coke might have been a factor earlier.

Combined with the fact that he was basically working for the Sopranos for a while.

(And, I would add in terms of ethics, happy enough to flog equipment to the destructive mining industry on their behalf for years if the pay was good enough. With all the money flowing around the mining industry, it’s hardly surprising there at least used to be a lot of not so secret Mob involvement. I don’t know about anymore, but it’s not like the money has dried up there.)

Again, I don’t know if the details even really matter as to why he did crash pretty spectacularly and his behavior got way more erratic.

But yeah, I am still kind of conflicted about having had no contact with him (by his choice) since like 1986. It’s also hard to separate out some of my mom’s really unbalanced splitting behavior and wanting to blame him for literally everything that ever went wrong–to the point she kept taking it out on me because I reminded her of the man–from his very real lousy behavior. With someone I haven’t seen or talked to since I was 11 years old. When he was several years younger than I am now.

I don’t know if trying to get back in touch as a grown-ass adult would even be good for any closure there. But, I’ve been thinking about it some lately. My mom is also not around to flip completely out on me in response to whatever I might decide to do there.

(Assuming he’s still around, anyway. I know where he was, and he was still there 10 years ago. But he’d be getting up there, and it’s not like he was taking great care of himself before he hared off, way back when. Who knows.)

I ran across this post from like a year and a half ago, while looking for something else.

Now that it turns out that the man is, indeed, still around and also trying to get in touch? I’m still conflicted in pretty much the same ways.

Honestly, if he hadn’t managed to get his shit together at least somewhat compared to when I was last around him? He might not have made it past 70 at all. His behavior was that unstable back then, just going by what I personally witnessed and trying to leave my mother’s takes out of it. And hopefully he has the sense not to pop up out of the blue to try and start shit. Who knows.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this whole situation more than I wanted to tonight, after getting another mail from my uncle earlier. And apparently needed to vent some–with as close to a neutral uninvolved audience as you could hope for.

(I’m also mad again right now, with the reminder that this neutrality description is the exact opposite of the therapy I got forced into when I was younger. Which was…not what I needed, to put it mildly. But, again, parents as the real clients and conflicts of interest My head would not be in some of the specific knots it is now without that. Likely some other types of knots, but not ones installed by professionals.)

voicehearer:

violence against people who are in psychiatric institutions is not lesser or somehow more deserved if the people who are in institutions “deserve” to be there or “belong” there

aka people who hear voices and and communicate with angels and demons and God and ufos and who don’t feed or clothe themselves don’t deserve ANY form of abuse even the tiniest, slightest, faintest fraction more than someone who was “really sane” and ended up in an institution “by mistake”

furthermore, the ability to institutionalize and abuse “innocent” people wouldn’t exist if the ability to institutionalize and abuse “actually crazy” people didn’t exist

but my bottom line is being “crazy” does not make you worthy or deserving of abuse in any way

headspace-hotel:

wetwareproblem:

Since conversion therapy is looming in everyone’s consciousness right now:

This is your regular reminder that ABA, the generally-recommended therapy for autistic children, is literally conversion therapy with an extra dose of “auties aren’t even real people” thrown in for good measure. It was conceived by the same people, from the same research, for the same ends: To brutalize and torture children into a narrow range of “acceptable” behaviour.

And it is considered totally legitimate and valid and even preferred by the overwhelming majority of the medical industry.

Do not leave disabled people out of your activism.

To put it as simply as possible, conversion therapy IS ABA. Conversion therapy is ABA used to try to make people straight and its no less inhumane when used to make people neurotypical.

I was one of the scary kids too, and I won’t be able to watch this either.

k-pagination:

From Mel Baggs:

“We were children trying to survive environments we couldn’t cope with. Every one of us. The system failed all of us, and we all knew it. Some of us survived, some of us didn’t, none of us came out unscathed.

All of us were singled out as the problem kid with problems, ignoring what surrounded all of us: violence, hopelessness, abuse, neglect, despair, bullying, torture, confusion, oppression.

What the media is doing to these children is its own form of violence. It is an invasion. It is telling our stories the way they see us, not the way we are.”

I was one of the scary kids too, and I won’t be able to watch this either.

t0rnado0fs0uls:

clatterbane:

I actually hesitated to reblog one otherwise excellent post a little while ago, very specifically because of that reference to the exploding emotional pressure cooker. As apt as that idea might be in a lot of cases, including my own life sometimes. Because that analogy got used against me when I was younger in ways that turned it very triggering.

I’ve talked some before about how some very serious misinterpretations of what was even happening led to some extremely harmful therapy and psych treatment in general when I was younger.

(Also very relevant there: some other good discussion of the problems inherent in parents/other adults in power being the real clients, with the open goal of “please fix this crazy kid and make them easier to live with ASAP!” Talk about built-in conflicts of interest and potential for abuse, which don’t seem to worry much of anybody who hasn’t ended up on the wrong end.)

Anyway, I landed in the psych system when I was 13, after a series of pretty spectacular meltdowns which were managed very, very badly. With apparently no connection made to all the previous ones that looked pretty much identical when I was a smaller kid–surely that was grown out by puberty to the point of total irrelevance, right? 😩 I say “smaller” for a reason, since being close to full adult size by then probably did not help matters at all.

My mother looked for a therapist, and we saw her once before I had another bad meltdown and New Therapist suggested I be locked up For My Own Good (and before my out of control behavior hurt somebody, yeah). That happened a couple times more over the next few years, and was a close thing many more times.

Now, early adolescence is pretty well recognized as a stressful time for kids in general. With loads of new stressors in their lives. Even if people are preferring to ignore factors such as bullying and (sometimes should-be super obvious) disabilities/neurodivergence. That gets used against too many other kids who are experiencing severe difficulties, to deny that anything unusual is going on at all and avoid looking at the situations causing them distress.

But, my mom did get professionals involved. Who promptly went for a bizarre combo approach: obviously nothing unusual is going on in this kid’s life now, but they’re also obviously doing the emotional pressure cooker thing and just generally coming across as Very Weird Indeed. Therefore, the explosions must be attributable to Severe Emotional Damage from one specific truly horrendous type of early childhood trauma ! 😵 (Which never actually happened, but hey.)

I’ve talked more about how that focus can turn abusive and gaslighty really fast. But, at least as harmful in a lot of ways?

Professional endorsement of the idea that nothing happening in your life right now really matters, except as it may pertain to The Real Problem. In fact, your perceptions and reactions must be skewed enough that whatever you say about what’s bothering you/how you feel cannot be trusted.

(Oh, and it’s obvious that the people paying us have nothing to do with any problems you may be experiencing. May not always be totally conscious, but it really should not be discounted as a potential motivation.)

If you’re angry about anything that’s currently happening? It’s misplaced at best, and likely a sign of severe emotional damage. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about now. It’s all The Crazy.

Not too surprisingly, a lot of extremely stressful things were going on then, or I wouldn’t have started into that cluster of spectacular meltdowns at all. That included my mother’s extremely volatile and sometimes outright abusive behavior–which they did see in action some. And excused/enabled, because out of control severely mentally ill kids.

But yeah, nothing worth mentioning could possibly be going on then and there.

Plenty to try to sort through later, yeah. It’s been almost 30 years since I was introduced to the added psych abuse, and more fallout still keeps coming up.

Another post that’s not intended as a “poor me!” type deal at all, BTW. I am mainly talking about this at all now because I do expect that once you get beyond the specific details? That’s not nearly as unusual an experience as it should be. And it doesn’t get talked about enough, difficult as the subject can be.

It’s just particularly nasty when actual professionals get in on the invalidation and gaslighting. They’re set up to do plenty of damage, and with even less accountability.

I’m not sure of it’s cool to reblog this or not, it really resonates with me though, and gave me a lot to think about when I consider getting therapy for my own kid. (I am constantly trying to see if I’m the one causing his distress, or adding to it, bc I distinctly remember how my own parent never seemed to be a source of stress according to my therapists as a child/teen)

Lately I’ve been angry about CBT therapy, which feels like professional gaslighting. Like, everything that causes me pain or stress is really just a “cognitive distortion” that needs to be “reframed”, and like, nah. I usually know when my brain is thinking things that are bullshit, the problem comes from the fact that these are tied to trauma, little kid me still has visceral emotional reactions to it, and other sources of stress include the fascism of my country which no amount of reframing is gonna make go away.

I have an appt with a new therapist on the 14th, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot, my experiences with therapy throughout my life.

Like as a teen I was taught to keep my “fangs in” because I was supposedly too angry in response to things I still feel warranted my anger, and yet the double standard was clear. It was okay for folks to treat me in the ways that made me angry but I was expected to use coping strategies to endure their abuse. I was being tone policed with therapy.

No worries. If I really don’t want a post reblogged, I try to make sure to tag it right up front. This is personal enough that I did consider it, but figured some of it might be too relatable

I don’t have a lot of spoons to process right now, but one point:

It was okay for folks to treat me in the ways that made me angry but I was expected to use coping strategies to endure their abuse. I was being tone policed with therapy.

Well said. What can be extra bad about that is how it usually reinforces/enables messages you’ve already been getting from people who are hurting you 😑 Doesn’t matter what they’re doing or how little respect you’re being treated with, you’re going to be in the wrong.

I actually hesitated to reblog one otherwise excellent post a little while ago, very specifically because of that reference to the exploding emotional pressure cooker. As apt as that idea might be in a lot of cases, including my own life sometimes. Because that analogy got used against me when I was younger in ways that turned it very triggering.

I’ve talked some before about how some very serious misinterpretations of what was even happening led to some extremely harmful therapy and psych treatment in general when I was younger.

(Also very relevant there: some other good discussion of the problems inherent in parents/other adults in power being the real clients, with the open goal of “please fix this crazy kid and make them easier to live with ASAP!” Talk about built-in conflicts of interest and potential for abuse, which don’t seem to worry much of anybody who hasn’t ended up on the wrong end.)

Anyway, I landed in the psych system when I was 13, after a series of pretty spectacular meltdowns which were managed very, very badly. With apparently no connection made to all the previous ones that looked pretty much identical when I was a smaller kid–surely that was grown out by puberty to the point of total irrelevance, right? 😩 I say “smaller” for a reason, since being close to full adult size by then probably did not help matters at all.

My mother looked for a therapist, and we saw her once before I had another bad meltdown and New Therapist suggested I be locked up For My Own Good (and before my out of control behavior hurt somebody, yeah). That happened a couple times more over the next few years, and was a close thing many more times.

Now, early adolescence is pretty well recognized as a stressful time for kids in general. With loads of new stressors in their lives. Even if people are preferring to ignore factors such as bullying and (sometimes should-be super obvious) disabilities/neurodivergence. That gets used against too many other kids who are experiencing severe difficulties, to deny that anything unusual is going on at all and avoid looking at the situations causing them distress.

But, my mom did get professionals involved. Who promptly went for a bizarre combo approach: obviously nothing unusual is going on in this kid’s life now, but they’re also obviously doing the emotional pressure cooker thing and just generally coming across as Very Weird Indeed. Therefore, the explosions must be attributable to Severe Emotional Damage from one specific truly horrendous type of early childhood trauma ! 😵 (Which never actually happened, but hey.)

I’ve talked more about how that focus can turn abusive and gaslighty really fast. But, at least as harmful in a lot of ways?

Professional endorsement of the idea that nothing happening in your life right now really matters, except as it may pertain to The Real Problem. In fact, your perceptions and reactions must be skewed enough that whatever you say about what’s bothering you/how you feel cannot be trusted.

(Oh, and it’s obvious that the people paying us have nothing to do with any problems you may be experiencing. May not always be totally conscious, but it really should not be discounted as a potential motivation.)

If you’re angry about anything that’s currently happening? It’s misplaced at best, and likely a sign of severe emotional damage. There is absolutely nothing to get upset about now. It’s all The Crazy.

Not too surprisingly, a lot of extremely stressful things were going on then, or I wouldn’t have started into that cluster of spectacular meltdowns at all. That included my mother’s extremely volatile and sometimes outright abusive behavior–which they did see in action some. And excused/enabled, because out of control severely mentally ill kids.

But yeah, nothing worth mentioning could possibly be going on then and there.

Plenty to try to sort through later, yeah. It’s been almost 30 years since I was introduced to the added psych abuse, and more fallout still keeps coming up.

Another post that’s not intended as a “poor me!” type deal at all, BTW. I am mainly talking about this at all now because I do expect that once you get beyond the specific details? That’s not nearly as unusual an experience as it should be. And it doesn’t get talked about enough, difficult as the subject can be.

It’s just particularly nasty when actual professionals get in on the invalidation and gaslighting. They’re set up to do plenty of damage, and with even less accountability.

vampireapologist:

I think the most healing thing my therapist has said to me was that I’m allowed to be angry and bitter about slipping through the cracks my whole life. I was so obviously and desperately in need of help from kindergarten to 12th grade, and only once did anyone respond, when I was 12, and then I went to middle school and fell through the cracks again. I got detentions for talking out daily in elementary and middle school. I broke down crying multiple times in class as a 17 year old in HS, which is, you know, not normal. I never did my homework, failed multiple classes every year and did summer school, all while ranking in the 99th percentile in state testing.

And nobody said “this isn’t right. someone pay attention to this girl.”

instead most of my teacher’s and a lot of my friends’ parents labeled me a problem child and couldn’t wait for me to be gone.

and I’ve spent all this time thinking “well, I’m getting the help I need and deserve NOW! It’s time to move on! Don’t focus on how, if someone had paid attention, I may be attending a college with a full ride scholarship right now, maybe have my dream job already, wouldn’t have spent so long suffering and suicidal.”

But my therapist told me, not only was it okay for me to be angry that literally all of the adults in my life but my mom and friend’s mom failed me, but she was also angry FOR me. And that I was allowed to be angry at everyone who let young Molly Anne slip through crack after crack. And that being angry and accepting that I was failed would help me move on.

And it has.

You’re allowed to be pissed off about the bad things that happened to you as a kid. You’re allowed to ask life “hey, what the fuck?” It’s part of healing.

pustluk:

so it turns out i’m going back on private insurance in october because pennsylvania medicaid isn’t going to cover any of my transition-related expenses—including hormones. a side effect of this is that (for at least a year) i’m going to have to terminate with my psychiatrist and therapist, an autism specialist with whom i’ve made the only significant progress in my six-year, eight-practitioner mental health campaign.

needless to say, neither of us is thrilled about this, but certain things need to take priority and there’s little we can do to prevent it. at first, she suggested i go back to my old clinic—even if it’s just to touch base every couple weeks—until i walked us through the following:

at best, this clinic will stick me with another intern who i don’t trust and who isn’t equipped to help me. at this point in my life, i am not a client who benefits greatly from talk therapy. my official diagnoses are far outside the anxiety and unipolar depression comfort zone of most practitioners. at best, especially to an intern, this makes me a liability.

imagine i walk in during a real low (to “touch base”). my lows are scary, both to me and to the people who witness them. the only thing a new, inexperienced therapist is going to see is the alphabet soup on my client profile—”oh shit, he got fucked as a kid and doesn’t eat”—and immediately gun for a 302. this has happened to me before, once with a therapist i actually trusted, who attempted to commit me knowing i was about to go on a trip that would ultimately save my life and radically change it for the better.

if i go to inpatient, i lose my job. because i am autistic and inpatient teams don’t know or care to know about autism, i am also unable to gain enough ‘privileges’ to talk to my partner. i am completely isolated from my support network, constantly overstimulated and exhausted, and, when i finally get out, without a livelihood.

i asked my psychiatrist at this point whether any of this seemed unreasonable or paranoid. “no,” she said, “unfortunately it really doesn’t.” we’re now going to try and negotiate a single-case contract with my hypothetical insurance provider, because neither of us is the slightest bit optimistic about any of my other options when it comes to continuity of care.

this is what multidiagnosis is like. this is what it’s like navigating healthcare with autism, with complex PTSD, with complex mood disorders, and god help you with a tentative cluster B diagnosis. success stories without major setbacks are the exception, not the rule, and the exceptions most often occur at the confluence of social privilege and alignment of a client’s problems with the practice du jour of the mental healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.

the idea of a widespread “anti-recovery” movement is tone deaf at best, almost always drenched in privilege, and uncritically marginalizing at worst.