#dangersona

the way i was treated as someone with diagnosed depression and anxiety was still horrendous. a fucking crime against humanity. but it got easily worse when i was given PD or PTSD diagnosis. the amount of diagnoses you have, which kinds, and how stigmatized they are, seem to be one of the biggest forms of classifying you as a threat. and it depends on the impact your mental illness has on your life, how it impacts the people around you, how “normal” you appear to be and how functional you are within society, and other things will land you somewhere on the threat spectrum, regardless of any actual proof of criminal or violent behavior. (and if you do have a criminal or violent history of some kind, that will get you some of the worst stigmatized labels. and then there’s also racism and all the other regular marginalized conceptualization of who is and isn’t a threat.)

for me, i had no history of physical violence or anything like that, but i had brutal ptsd, depression, i was angry at injustice and i was confident and asserted boundaries. i defined my own reality against their ideology, gently tried to educate and correct the authorities when they decided false things about me and then asserted them as facts, and i didn’t see myself as deserving of bad treatment. i rejected the “forgiveness” bullshit about abusers and mostly refused to do things i didn’t want to do. i was disabled and i didn’t preform shame for being different. so... i’d say i was something like a medium threat. and in order to contain me, the therapists would apply punishing doctrine and ideology, gaslight me, and ultimately they nearly blasted me into smithereens with thought stopping clichés, shame and guilt, instilling harm ocd, teaching me that i am inherently bad, and that i don’t deserve to be a person. i got kicked out of some treatments because the psychiatrist got sick of me (not because i was being inappropriate in my appointments or anything but because... i think my csa history made him uncomfortable and he was tired of me not improving in any way), i would be humiliated and coerced, manipulated, and so on and so forth. my freedom was seen as the main problem, not my suffering. 

depending on where you land on that spectrum according to the mental health authorities who are steeped in indoctrination and stigma and suspicion of their patients, you may receive more baby talk, pity, and condescension, or you may experience threats, police calls, physical abuse and forced drug administration to pacify you. and of course it’s all justified to them because they are the self appointed zookeepers of us wild animals. we must be contained, and in their eyes, some of us may be allowed more freedom than others. 

just to specify to the invalidation gaslighting and victim blaming, the thing is that that shit is still the norm. if i ask for help/talk to a professional and get treated this way, well then on top of the whatever hell i was experiencing before, now i also have to try to cope with another betrayal and emotional suffering and isolation etc. what do i do when that happens? well... i try to remedy that right? so i go to another Helping person/professional and ask for help and probably talk about how i got denied last time. and um. guess what usually happens, especially as a Mental patient reporting mistreatment from psych professionals to other psych professionals? they zone in on the Crazy Person genre of victim blaming: gaslighting, denying, accusing me of delusions, start to see me as a threat, etc. 

so now, instead of actually 1. GETTING HELP FOR THE ORIGINAL THING!! and 2. remedying the brutal denial of reality and my misery, i just get gaslighted and victim blamed again. on top of everything else. and um yall it just continues from here to be the same thing over and over, sinking me deeper and deeper, until i finally have to conclude that TELLING PEOPLE the TRUTH is DANGEROUS. because it is. and at the point where ive gone through this 20+ times and have to report being failed so many times, usually by the people who are rhetorically SUPPOSED to help, like therapsychiatrists, now they have even more suspicion and sense of threat from me because i report such a long string of victimizaation, which they conclude simply cannot be true because its simply too negative to be real. which introduces me to even more brutal pathologization and victim blaming and stigma etc because its an even more threatening atack on their own ideology that the world is safe. 

“asking for help/reach out!/talk to a trusted adult/expert professional!” is not a no harm no foul situation where it cant hurt to try. it takes immense bravery and vulnerability. it does hurt to try when the norm is still getting fully denied and blamed. and “keep going! dont give up! you just havent found the right fit” is yet another rhetorical thing that keeps me going on that brutal downward spiral, getting worse and more miserable with each try that i give my all. and like, if you can imagine, at this point it is past excruciating and is beginning to really affect my self esteem, my identity, and my understanding of reality because i keep getting gaslighted and then sent away, accused of being stupid evil and crazy, taught not to acknowledge reality because i cant be trusted to have any original thoughts or ideas cause they say im doing it wrong, and am brutally dependent on some Reality Authority even though they ONLY keep taking and taking and taking from me. 

ive been through the wringer so many times. and its just more of the same. its a velvet curtain and beyond it is absolutely nothing but lies an manipulation and literal brainwashing. 

like with all moral panics and sense of threat based in prejudice, its just a general vague sense of Oh No! Not This! Bad!!!!!!! there's not a concrete chain of events backed by evidence or research to explain why me avoiding dangerous toxic things cannot be allowed for any reason or else it will result in....................... my whole butt falling out or sprouting extremely inconvenient and heavy antlers somehow? me acknowledging that life sucks and the world is fucked Cannot be allowed because.... ......... it will make the frogs turn gay? this is why i half joke about the "becoming a school shooter or a serial killer" thing because on on hand, thats fucking bloody ridiculous, but on the other, it is literally one of the sources of hatred and fear of mentally ill people being allowed to even exist, because.... well we can only end up becoming one of those things. the hatred and fear is baseless and directionless, except to direct it straight at us just for being here amongst the rest of society, but is just not founded in notable patterns of behavior leading to terrible consequences, its just a overal panic about what Might happen if we allow mentally ill people any physical or psychological freedom whatsoever.

so you get psychiatry and psychology being like "anti stigma time: mentally ill people are just normal with a disease that isnt their fault and are more likely to be abused than to abuse (insert study)" and then in the same exact breath be like "make sure your mentally ill loved ones arent eating all the babies in your neighborhood! you can do this by violating their every human right ever dreamed of, or else!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or else!!!!!! if you arent surveilling your mentally ill loved ones, how can you be sure they arent the spawn of satan sent here to destroy the world?"

and so, i was taught to be terrified of myself too. just... in general, i have to Watch Out! because who knows what i might be doing. if im not careful ill end up becoming even more miserable or the antichrist.

Nearly every textbook on working with clients - whether in counseling, family therapy, medicine, nursing, psychology, social work, substance abuse treatment, vocational counseling, or other helping professions discusses methods of managing client resistance, ambivalence, or noncompliance and enhancing client cooperation and motivation. Such discussions, while softening somewhat with the development of competency-based models in the field, continue to reflect themes traceable to a Freudian influenced, medical model of helping people.

Implicit in classifying clients as cooperative or resistant is the notion that the experts know what is best for their clients. When the client disregards the expert's leamed opinion about the nature of the problem and fails to follow through on the professional's suggested course of treatment, such noncompliance often is attributed to deficiencies in the client involving distortion of reality or even some deep-seated personal pathology. In the medical model, the professional is rarely, if ever, held responsible for the mismagement of the professional relationship.

The belief in client resistance is longstanding. As noted earlier in this chapter, practice textbooks consistently teach beginning practitioners to expect client resistance and, therefore, to listen for it when they work with clients. Once they think they perceive resistance, especially patterns of resistance, they are taught to challenge or confront it because clients are assumed to be incapable of change unless they own their problems.

Our more skeptical side prompts us to point out that this ideology of resistance and confrontation is self-serving for the field, which has a long-standing commitment to the medical model. The medical model assumes a subject object relationship between practitioner and client; that is, the practitioner (as subject) is expected to change the client (as object) through the application of expert assessments and interventions. Consequently, if the client shows progress, the practitioner can take credit and feel competent. If the client does not show progress, however, the practitioner obviously cannot take credit. Practitioner and client may feel doubts about the effectiveness of the practitioner's services. However, the notion of client resistance lays most of the blame for lack of progress on the client and allows practitioners to distance themselves from responsibility.

In an article with a dramatic title, "The Death of Resistance," de Shazer (1984) claimed that the field's dominant conceptualization of client resistance more accurately represents the point of view, or construction of reality, of practitioners than it does any aspect of objective reality. Thinking along very different lines, he proposed that what practitioners took to be signs of resistance were instead the unique ways in which clients chose to cooperate. For example, clients who do not follow through on the therapeutic or problem-solving tasks assigned by their practitioners are not resisting but simply cooperating by telling their practitioners that the tasks do not fit their way of doing things.

Just as the notion of resistance flows from the assumptions of the medical model, de Shazer's reconceptualization of resistance as a form of cooperation is also bound to his assumptions. De Shazer assumes that clients are competent to figure out what they want (and need) and how to go about getting it. The practitioner's responsibility is to assist clients in uncovering these competencies and marshaling them to create more satisfying and productive lives for themselves, if that is what they choose to do.

Once we accept the notion of client competence, we are left with a humbling and challenging conclusion: What we once thought of as client resistance is more accurately regarded as practitioner resistance. Impasses and apparent failures in our work do not result from clients' resistance to our best professional efforts to make them well. Rather, they result from our failure to listen to clients and take seriously what they tell us."