A new week, a new mega! Welcome all disabled comrades. As always, we ask that in order to participate in the weekly megathread, one self-identifies as some form of disabled, which is broadly defined in the community sidebar:
"Disability" is an umbrella term which encompasses physical disabilities, emotional/psychiatric disabilities, neurodivergence, intellectual/developmental disabilities, sensory disabilities, invisible disabilities, and more. You do not have to have an official diagnosis to consider yourself disabled.
What is Disability Justice?
... In 2005, disabled queers and activists of color began discussing a “second wave” of disability rights. Many of these first conversations happened between Patty Berne and Mia Mingus, two queer disabled women of color who were incubated in progressive and radical movements which had failed to address ableism in their politics. Their visioning soon expanded to include others including Leroy Moore, Stacey Milbern, Eli Clare and Sebastian Margaret. These conversations evolved over time, at conferences, over the phone, formal and informal, one-on-one and in groups.
While every conversation is built on those that came before it, and it’s possible that there were others who were thinking and talking this way, it is our historical memory that these were the conversations that launched the framework we call disability justice.
Given the isolation enforced by ableism and capitalism, many of us have often found ourselves as leaders within our various communities, yet isolated from in-person community with other disabled people of color or queer or gender non-conforming crips. Many of us have found “liberated zones” online that celebrate our multiple identities. Disability justice is a developing framework that some call a movement. We are still identifying the “we,” touching each other through the echoes of each other’s hopes and words.
Given this early historical snapshot, we assert that disability justice work is largely done by individuals within their respective settings, with Sins Invalid and the Disability Justice Collectives based in NYC, Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C., being notable exceptions. These groups and organizing structures often come into being, fall apart and regroup with different names and configurations over time. Online groups like Sick & Disabled Queers can offer opportunities for people with disabilities to communicate and create new norms together. Some voices may emphasize a specific aspect of disability justice over another, which can be expected in all early movement moments. However, what has been consistent across disability justice - and must remain so - is the leadership of disabled people of color and of queer and gender non-conforming disabled people.
Disability justice activists, organizers, and cultural workers understand that able- bodied supremacy has been formed in relation to other systems of domination and exploitation. The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, created in the context of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of Indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy uses ableism to create a lesser/“other” group of people that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable. A single-issue civil rights framework is not enough to explain the full extent of ableism and how it operates in society. We can only truly understand ableism by tracing its connections to heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. The same oppressive systems that inflicted violence upon Black and brown communities for 500+ years also inflicted 500+ years of violence on bodies and minds deemed outside the norm and therefore “dangerous.”
Furthermore, racism, anti-Islamic beliefs, ableism and imperialism come together to feed us images of the “terrorist” as a dangerous Brown enemy... All this is compounded by the ways ableism, along with queer-hatred and the violence of the gender binary, label our bodies and communities as “deviant,” “unproductive,” and “invalid.”
A disability justice framework understands that:
- All bodies are unique and essential.
- All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.
- We are powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.
- All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more, and we cannot separate them.
These are the positions from which we struggle. We are in a global system that is incompatible with life. The literal terrain of the world has shifted, along with a neo-fascist political terrain. Each day the planet experiences human-provoked mudslides, storms, fires, devolving air quality, rising sea levels, new regions experiencing freezing or sweltering temperatures, earthquakes, species loss and more, all provoked by greed-driven, human-made climate chaos. Our communities are often treated as disposable, especially within the current economic, political and environmental landscapes. There is no way to stop a single gear in motion — we must dismantle this machine.
Disability justice holds a vision born out of collective struggle, drawing upon legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance. Within a thousand underground paths we ignite small persistent fires of rebellion in everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority — Black and brown people — share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know in our bones that there have also always been disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, a world that values and celebrates us in all our beauty.
Source: Sins Invalid
Mask up, love one another, and stay alive for one more week.
You have a few avenues to approach this.
You can ask her to explain Maslow's Hierarchy to you. I hate it. It's individualistic and a cooptation of better concepts and it's just gross but your run of the mill therapist who just scraped by to get their qualification is almost certainly going to like it. (I'd go so far as to say that overvaluing it is a sign of a bad therapist.) But regardless of that, if she can tell you as an expert in her own words how a person is (ostensibly) incapable of engaging in so-called higher order needs in Maslow's Hierarchy without having their lower order needs being met such as, I dunno, your physical needs and your need for safety then you are (allegedly) incapable of achieving your higher order needs like, I dunno, engaging in therapy then you will have her on that front. You might have to ask a pointed question like "Does that mean my need for housing is a necessary precondition for making progress in therapy?" or to remark that it seems as though according to Maslow's Hierarchy your concerns about the very real threats to your physical needs and your safety are a valid reason for engaging in therapy.
You could ask her what she sees as valid reasons for engaging in therapy are or if she believes that people who have "invalid" reasons for engaging in therapy are capable of achieving positive outcomes through therapy.
You could try asking her to account for her work with you so far: the primary mode of therapy she is engaging you with, what she has identified as your therapy goals, how she is working towards facilitating you to achieve these goals, what barriers to these goals she has identified, how she is working to address these barriers, and how she views your progress together. A good therapist will welcome this sort of accountability and your willingness to take a bird's eye view of the therapeutic process while (however they want to label it) being engaged in an "empowering discussion" that is "client-led", or whatever buzzwords they would put in their casenotes. You are entitled to view your casenotes btw. A bad therapist will get defensive and they'll bullshit their way through these answers but, ultimately, a therapist is supposed to have these things in the front of their mind when working with a client and they should be able to answer these questions with little effort. Imagine a business consultant not being able to answer these sorts of questions from a client - that would be the mark of a terrible consultant. At the risk of committing the sin of commodity fetishism to get the idea across here, a therapist can be understood as your mental health consultant and if they don't know what your desired outcomes are, if they aren't identifying and adapting to the barriers, and they aren't able to explain how they are working on achieving these outcomes then they are rubbish and they aren't likely to achieve anything.
A therapist should be able to work with clients who are "resistant" (and the use of this type of wording is routinely weaponised by lazy therapists who want to shift the blame for their own lack of dynamism and responding to the client's needs and circumstances onto the client); after all, if there was no resistance then wouldn't a client be able to just "fix" the issue instantaneously (and likely all by themselves)?
The risk is that they'll take a dim view of an approach like this but then if they do that they are not taking a client-centred approach and they are not working on a basis of facilitating the client's self-empowerment.
(This is another bugbear for me: therapists and workers in caring roles or support roles almost always centre themselves in the empowerment process. It's all "I work from an empowerment model" and "I'm empowering you to do x and y". I hate this so much. Power isn't given, it's something that is taken. Not necessarily in a zero-sum way of taking power away from others but in the sense that power is claimed and exercised; it's enacted. You don't give others power, you can give them authority or permission to exercise power but this is not a one-way transactional thing, and you can provide the tools and the context for people to empower themselves. You, as a therapist or a support worker, are not the power fairy who goes around distributing empowerment to the deserving and decidedly passive recipients of your beneficence. This is particularly endemic in how privileged people talk about "giving people a voice". Please stfu. You aren't doing that. Almost everyone has a voice, especially in a metaphorical sense. What you are giving them is a platform or your attention. Stop flattering yourself and centering yourself as the active agent in their autonomy. Stop exaggerating your role in this. You don't "give" a baby the ability to walk, you don't "give" a child the ability to ride a bike or swim. You are providing the conditions for them to learn how to do these things themselves. If a teacher wouldn't say "I did that. I gave them the ability to pass the exam." because it's gross and erases the effort and the autonomy of students then why is it that in the professions that are apparently so fixated upon client empowerment it's totally acceptable, if not downright encouraged, to treat empowerment in this sort of framing?)
Thanks, I would like to try this. But I need to frame it in way that won't anger or offend her. Any suggestions?
I wouldn't do it straight off the bat after the vaguely threatening email because that wouldn't go over so well but personally I'd probably just start a gentle discussion about Maslow's Hierarchy and I'd muse on the historical development of the concept and mostly ask them open ended, philosophical and practical questions about it. (I have a tendency to be a bit sanctimonious online but irl I'm much less inclined to be unless someone is really imposing on my goodwill or they're wilfully spouting misinformation.) But that's my style of conversation tbh and I'd feel pretty comfortable discussing the topic. It might be a different for others though, and maybe approaching it from a place of learning would suit them better, for example, than taking the approach of musing from a postcolonial critical perspective of Maslow's work would, you know what I mean? I can't tell you what an "authentic" way (cursed term) is for you but I'd encourage you to approach this sort of discussion in a way that feels right to you.
As for the bird's eye view accountability stuff, that would require more tact although a reasonable therapist these days should at least draw upon humanistic psychology and client-centred therapy, one foundational aspect of this approach being unconditional positive regard, so if a client is being "difficult" then a therapist should, at least theoretically, engage the client without reacting to the "difficult" behaviour or to respond in such a way that generates a feeling of judgement or rejection in the client.
A therapist worth their salt is going to be able to draw upon unconditional positive regard at least as a tool in their toolkit when a client appears to be hostile, as a hypothetical example:
"I'm done with all this fucking therapy. It's bullshit and I never get any answers from you it's just a series of questions from you and it never goes anywhere."
"I can understand why it can be frustrating. I do appreciate you being honest with me about how you're feeling. Is there something in particular that has made you arrive at this conclusion?"
"Yeah. I've been doing this for over a year and I haven't made any progress. I'd be better off doing something that makes me feel good rather than talking in circles for an hour. It's a waste of my time being here."
"I know it's hard to put in a lot of time and effort only to feel like you haven't made any progress but I've seen you make progress through our work together."
"Bullshit. You're just saying that because you don't want to lose business."
"That's not true - I have a waiting list of clients. I don't view you as a cash cow."
"So why do you bother if I haven't made any progress after all this time?"
"Well I think the person who first started therapy with me a year ago would have stormed out or just ghosted me if they felt this way back then. Instead you are here talking about your frustrations with me in an honest and vulnerable way. That might not feel like progress to you in this moment but we have spent a lot of time working through what happened in your divorce and one of the things that contributed to this was because you learned through your upbringing that bottling up your emotions was the only safe way of dealing with them which ultimately caused a lot of friction in your marriage which went unresolved until it piled up to the point that the relationship broke down. Now you are here sharing some pretty raw emotions openly with me. That takes a lot of courage and from my perspective it represents the growth that comes from you consistently putting in hard work."
That sort of thing. A competent therapist shouldn't really shut things down unless they are inappropriate (e.g. sexual advances or seeking approval to abuse others) or they are threatening (e.g. making threats against the therapist or others). They should be able to deal with a client expressing difficult emotions in an unfiltered way with equanimity. That's kinda their whole job, y'know?
As a more personal example, I told my therapist that they need to stop centring themselves in my experience and that they need to be more precise with their language or more open-ended with certain questions because I have plenty of insight so they need to trust in my ability to use this insight rather than presuming what's going on for me and placing themselves in the middle of it.
Basically a polite way of saying "Back off, butt out, and if you're going to ask me a question then either be skilful in your use of language or just ask me directly in an open-ended way because I'm quite capable of describing what's going on for me" lol. This was because I had hit a nerve the previous session and it drew out a lot of pent up frustration that I have with myself. My therapist assumed that I was reacting defensively to how I perceived them to be judging me/putting expectations on me and they asked me if I was feeling angry.
I was kinda blindsided by the questions and my therapist's approach and it took me days to puzzle out where they were coming from with their line of inquiry.
Basically it was all me. My therapist didn't even come into consideration in this. I wasn't feeling angry because I had sublimated my feelings of anger by internalising them into frustration a long time ago so it felt qualitatively different to me and if my therapist asked me "What emotion are you experiencing in this moment?" I would have immediately said frustration and very likely I would have said frustration at myself. But they asked me if I felt angry and I baffled and said something like "Huh?? Not at all." From their perspective I was obviously feeling angry and from my perspective I was feeling something that didn't fit my definition of anger at all.
Same goes for them leading a series of questions inquiring about if I was reacting to me feeling like I needed to defend myself from them. If they had just started from first principles and asked me directly what has caused these feelings of frustration to manifest I would have explained that it was all coming from me having expectations of myself that I am unable to meet and which I feel incapable of resolving so it has just built up until I unintentionally struck a nerve in myself by saying something that caused it to come pouring out all at once.
I think that sort of discussion was probably a little bit treacherous for them because they had to trust that I wasn't engaging in some sort of follow-up defensive strategy to cover my tracks and double down in denial. I basically told them in a respectful way that they overstepped the boundaries and they handled an important moment for me unskilfully. It would have been much easier for them to shut the discussion down as being problematic or hostile than it was to accept that they had the wrong approach. But they are usually very skilful and they handled the situation with grace, and fortunately since that point I've noticed that they are much more careful about not overinterpreting and they are much more open-ended in their questioning which has allowed me the room to explain what's going on for me and this has led to better mutual understanding between us since they aren't trying to dance around things and I am not put into a position of trying to reason backwards from their line of questioning to figure out what they're driving at, which means I can focus less on the interpersonal communication and more on working through what I'm dealing with.
This has been an excruciatingly long winded way of telling you that your therapist should be very much equipped for and skilled in navigating conversations that are far more challenging than a basic discussion about accountability and their therapeutic approach.
I don't believe my therapist is skilled at all. She doesn't even seem to know what to do in the sessions. She tries to make me think of things to do. For instance in the first session she asked if I had any ideas for things I've thought of that might make me feel better and I expressed a vague interest in meditation, and she leapt on that and from then on made a large chunk of each session a meditation, and not even a good one. Literally telling me to close my eyes and in a very unenthusiastic voice, showing how bored she is she'd drone for about 20 minutes whatever nonsense she could think of, always the same "Feel your breath. You can't breathe in the past or the future, only the present. Feel your feet, thank them for walking for you. Roll your ankles. Mentally scan your body and notice anywhere you feel discomfort. Turn your head to the left. Now the right." Just on and on for 20 minutes. Then in every session she gets out a diagram of a human body, brings out some crayons and tells me to colour in wherever I feel pain in my body. Then she tells me to draw a picture of whatever I'm feeling that day. Then she writes a timetable for the week (of getting out of bed, watching TV, walking, meditating, eating mindfully, etc) and tells me to stick to it. That's the end. The same every week. How on earth is this crap meant to help me? And then she got defensive last week when I said this wasn't working for me, isn't doing anything to help, and told me to quit if I want. When I explained my financial reasons for not quitting, explained how I'm worried it will lead to losing my appeal, my benefits being stopped permanently and destitution and homelessness she didn't give a shit and said that's not a good enough reason to have therapy. So I don't know how to explain to her that I need my basic needs met, in a way she will accept. She clearly doesn't understand or care about my impending potential homelessness and regular periods of starvation. I even told her about this website and how several people here over the last couple of months have helped me out with food vouchers to prevent me from starving because my situation is that dire, and you should have seen her face. I've never seen anyone look at me with such contempt before. She looked like she thought I'm some kind of piece of shit scam artist begging money from strangers. She actually told me to stop asking people on here for help. What am I meant to do, just starve to death? She clearly has absolutely no concept of what it's like to be so financially desperate and doesn't want to learn.
Hm. That does sound frustrating. I don't want to get too involved and pass judgement because I don't know the situation first hand. Not trying to be invalidating or anything but I don't want to insinuate myself in the therapeutic relationship, or lack thereof, because it's not really a wise thing to do as a bystander.
Out of curiosity, do you know her qualifications?
How would you feel about telling her that you don't need her to do guided meditations with you any more?
Have you considered what it would take to transfer to a different therapist or if it's a possibility?
I don't know this one's qualifications, but the previous one (many years ago) admitted she wasn't qualified yet, so who knows if this one is even qualified? It's not a possibility to transfer. I was on the waiting list for 5 years to get this one and this is all I've been offered. I could ask her to stop the guided meditations but then she will either expect me to think of something else to do, or she'll drag the drawing nonsense out. Whatever she does it will be nonsense, she's clearly just trying to fill the time with whatever so she can collect her paycheck. I don't actually want therapy at all. I've had four therapies in my life and they were all shit. I've accepted my situation. I'm just trying to stick this out to help my benefits claim. Another issue is I hate the therapy wing of the hospital, it stinks of perfume and air fresheners that give me a migraine and the therapist doesn't care about that either.