Living with our anger as marginalized or abused people

Real Social Skills

When you’ve been mistreated for a long time, it can be hard to notice that something is wrong. 

Even if you do know it’s wrong, even if you hate it, even if it makes your life awful, it can be very, very hard to realize that it’s ok to object. It can be hard to be upset or even actually *mind* what’s going on in any active way. (And, if you’re like me, you might feel like the problem is that you’re just too broken, and try to shame yourself into becoming someone else)

And then maybe you finally start to get angry. And maybe you meet other people who are angry about the same thing.

And maybe – you start to say so. You find ways of expressing anger. You say the angry things and you even tell people they’re hurting you and that it’s wrong. And you yell and express yourself in emphatic terms in other ways. And you don’t die. You learn that it is, in fact, actually possible to say these things out loud and actually press the issue and win from time to time. And that even when you lose, you survive.

And at first it’s exhilarating and liberating. Because it gives you really, really important things that you’ve never had before.

But sometimes, for some people, this can lead to a place where most of what you have access to is rage. And.. that’s not a great place to be in either. It’s dramatically better than not being able to get angry and express it, but it’s still pretty horrible.

And, a caveat here. Do not even think of using this post to shame people for their anger, or for the amount of time they spend being angry. People have damn good reason to be angry, and sometimes anger is all you have and it is a terrible, terrible idea to try to stop being angry in those circumstances. Anger is important.

Anger is also exhausting and draining.

And anger is not the only way to be able to say what’s wrong without backing down. It is possible to get to a place where you can do that, *even without being actively enraged*. It’s very, very hard to do that, and it’s not always even remotely possible. But it’s a useful skill to acquire and use sometimes, because it means you can sometimes fight these battles without it costing you as much all the time.

It doesn’t mean you stop getting angry. We all get angry, even enraged, sometimes. Trying to eliminate anger is incredibly destructive. Don’t do that, and don’t pressure others to do that. We need anger. We have reason to be angry. Anger is not a failure.

There are other tools, in addition to anger, that we can use to protect ourselves and fight these battles, for instance:

  • Avoiding or limiting emotional entanglement with toxic or dismissive people
  • Spending time explaining things to people who are worth talking to and actually give a damn
  • Spending time with peers who understand and face the same things, and doing things other than being angry about the things
  • Emphasizing and appreciating the value of people like you, even when everything in your world is trying to tell you not to. (Eg: celebrating your culture, eating your food even when it’s stigmatized, body positivity, supporting businesses run by marginalized people, seeing unique value in the perspectives you have)
  • Saying no to things that hurt you even when you’re calm
  • Telling people that they’re hurting others and need to stop even when you’re not enraged by what they’re doing

These tools do not replace anger, but they are also helpful. And so are others. There are a lot of reasons it’s worthwhile to learn additional approaches, for instance:

  • Anger is expensive. It is not as expensive as seeing yourself as someone who isn’t entitled to anger and suppressing it at all costs, but it is expensive and being angry takes a tole.
  • Anger can center the villains more than the good guys. We have damn good reason to be angry. But, push come to shove, good is more important than evil and sometimes it’s worthwhile to center the worth and lives of our own rather than focusing on those who seek to harm us (we can’t ignore them; this is not about positive thinking or pretending that if we don’t acknowledge evil it will go away or any of that BS. What it’s about is making sure we’re remembering to value the people we’re fighting for)
  • Sometimes anger isn’t as effective as something else could be. (It’s more effective than doing nothing, and it’s absolutely legitimate so don’t even try to use this to tone police people. And sometimes it *is* the most effective available tool. But it is not *always* the most effective approach, and it’s good to have other options sometimes)

This is hard. It is also worthwhile.

Don’t turn all your tools into weapons

Real Social Skills
i sing sometimes like my life is at stake ‘cause you’re only as loud  as the noises you make…….i sing sometimes for the war that i fight ’cause every tool is a weapon – if you hold it right.
-Ani Difranco

I think most people who read this blog are fighting some battle or other. Maybe it’s a battle for justice, on behalf of many. Maybe it’s a principle. Maybe it’s mostly your own life you’re fighting for. One way or another, I think most of you are fighting.

And the thing about fighting is, it’s *hard*, and it wears you down.

And some of you are fighting more or less alone, or with limited support. And you have to take your weapons where you can find them.

Maybe it’s your words. Maybe it’s your affect. Maybe it’s your hands. Maybe it’s relationships. There are all kinds of things. And it’s important; you have to take weapons where you can find them.

And every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. And when you’re fighting, and looking for weapons, it’s possible to start seeing everything as a weapon first and foremost. That’s dangerous. It can destroy you.

If you see everything as a weapon , it can be hard to use tools in other ways. There will be times when you have to fight, there are times when hurting people is unavoidable. But when fighting is the center of your life and all your tools become weapons, it can cost you absolutely everything you care about.

Even when you really need weapons; sometimes especially when you really need weapons.

When all you have is a hammer, then all problems look like nails… But it works in reverse too. If all your problems look like nails, all of your tools will like like hammers. It works that way with weapons, too. If you see everything in terms of physical or social struggle and violence, it’s hard to see your tools as anything but weapons. And that can end up costing you everything you care about.

You have to fight the fights; but it shouldn’t be the only thing you do.

Your hands can make fists. Sometimes you have to make fists; sometimes you have to fight. But don’t let the people you’re fighting make you forget that they can also make bread. Or whatever else. Hands can do many things, and the fight is necessary, but it’s not enough. Don’t let your enemies deprive you of all the other uses of your hands.

Similarly – Your words can be weapons, you can use them to hurt people when it’s needed, and to assert power when power is what’s need. But don’t let them make all of your words into weapons. Because you need them for other things too. Words aren’t just for tearing down oppressors. They’re also for honoring people you respect. They’re also for love. They’re also for telling stories.

You’re probably singing sometimes like your life is at stake. But don’t forget that you can also sing love songs. When you’re singing like your life is at stake, make sure that you don’t forget to value your life as an end in itself. Don’t make your whole self into a weapon.

Don’t forget that patterns and beauty and love exist, and that we can build worthwhile things even in this messed up world. Life is worth fighting for; it is also worth living.

Mel Baggs on the problem with ‘autism experts’

Real Social Skills

Mel Baggs added to the post on the problem with ‘autism experts‘:

All you have to do in order to become an autism expert is get a degree and form a theory about either what makes autistic people autistic, or how to make autistic people more normal. That’s it. You don’t even have to prove your theory.

And if you do actual “research”, it doesn’t have to be real research. It can be stuff with holes in it a mile wide, that is designed to prove your theory and nothing else.

You don’t actually have to know a single thing about actual autistic people. If you have to know anything, all you have to know is things that other experts say about autistic people. Most so-called expertise in autism consists of memorizing bullshit that experts have come up with to explain behavior that they don’t understand.

It’s quite rare to find an expert who gets it, even about the simple things. I’ve met a few, but they’re few and far between.

One expert I met did not believe that sensory issues were a real thing. She literally didn’t believe that overload was real. She believed that meltdowns and shutdowns were manipulative behavior done by autistic people to avoid doing what we’re told. She did not understand basic, basic things, like that an autistic person might have trouble holding a conversation with more than one person at once. It became obvious over only a short period of time that she understood virtually nothing of what goes on in autistic people’s heads.

She also refused to speak to a cognitive interpreter I brought along, even (hell, especially) when I became completely unable to communicate in words of any form whatsoever. (At that point in time, I could speak some of the time, type some of the time, and do neither some of the time.) She wanted me to communicate and when I couldn’t communicate in a way she understood, she blamed me for it.

To her, what goes on in our heads didn’t even matter. Her goal was to control autistic people’s behavior. She was very famous for being good at controlling autistic people’s behavior.
I’ve noticed that it’s the most manipulative staff types who insist on accusing disabled people of manipulation. She was no exception. Her entire specialty was manipulating autistic people. Anything that prevented her from manipulating us, was what she called manipulation on our parts. She never directly accused me of manipulation, but I read one of her books later on and it turned out that at the times she got the maddest at me (during shutdowns and the like), I was doing things that she classified in her book as manipulative behavior: Shutdowns, meltdowns, temporary loss of specific skills, etc.

She is not unusual among autism experts.

I used to know a little boy who was sent to an extremely well-renowned autism expert. Very famous, has written books on autism. After she put him on one of her behavior programs, he lost all of his previous toilet training out of sheer terror. He also developed post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms from her behavior programs.

I’ve read her books, and she basically knows nothing about autism. She knows a lot of statistics, but she doesn’t put them together in a useful way. She simply uses them to reinforce stereotypes about autistic people. She can rattle off all the “received wisdom” about what makes autistic people autistic, but she doesn’t know the first thing about what makes our minds work.

And again, she doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a shit. All that matters to her is manipulating autistic people. There’s a lot of that going around. She also said that the boy in question would never learn to talk, never do this and that and the other thing, and that he had a severe intellectual disability. He learned to talk and he went to gifted classes.

Never trust an autism expert who tells you what your child will never do. That particular expert is famous for giving autistic children the most bleak prognosis she can possibly come up with (one that actually fits a small minority of autistic people), and for saying things like that autistic children will never love their parents. (Which is exceedingly rare among autistic people, and when it happens it’s not usually because of autism.) She considers this “straight talk” and believes that to do anything else would give parents “false hope”. So she opts for false despair instead.

I could go on.

And on.

And on.

Autism experts are, for the most part, not actually experts in anything directly related to autism. Generally all that they are experts in is manipulation or in other experts’ ideas about autism. That’s different from being an actual expert in autism.

Even autism experts who are actual experts about autism can get a lot of things wrong, they’re just people who actually get it about some facet of autism. And that’s some facet, they don’t necessarily get it about all facets, and many times they focus only on one part of autism and ignore others.
Among those with an actual clue about autism, I would name Martha Leary, Morton Gernsbacher, Laurent Mottron, Michelle Dawson, and maybe Anne Donnellan. This doesn’t mean an endorsement about everything they say or do. It just means that they understand something major about autism, which most experts do not.
You’ll often hear slogans like “parents are the real experts” or “autistic people are the real experts”. Those things are both true and not true.

Most autistic people are at minimum fairly expert about our own personal experiences (most people in general are not as expert about our own experiences as we think we are, which is why I’m qualifying that). Some autistic people are experts on more than that, while others are not.

Temple Grandin is a good example of what happens when the average autistic person gets held up as an expert on all of autism. She’s done a great deal of analysis of her own personal experiences. For a long time, she simply did not go beyond her own personal experiences, at all. She would literally say, “Autistic people are picture thinkers” and things like that. That’s a direct quote. Given how few autistic people were speaking publicly about autism at the time that she was doing this, it’s understandable that she would make these generalizations.

However. Eventually she learned that not all autistic people were picture thinkers. Then she talked to, she said, hundreds of other autistic people about the way they thought. I’ve talked to hundreds of autistic people about the way they thought and come up with easily dozens of different thought patterns — even within the realm of visual thinking there’s immense amounts of differences as to how it happens. But instead of noticing how many differences there were, she decided to put all autistic people into a tiny number of categories as to how they thought.

So now there were “visual” thinkers, there were “music and math” thinkers, and there were “verbal logic” thinkers among autistic people, according to her. Three. Out of hundreds, she came up with three. I still don’t understand.

It’s common for autistic people to do things like that. Either assume all autistic people are like them in a particular way. Or, when they find out that not all autistic people are alike, to then decide there’s only two or three kinds of autistic people. Temple Grandin did that with her idea that there’s a continuum between “Kanner-Asperger autistics” like herself and “regressive-epileptic autistics” like Donna Williams.

Many autistic people who do this will assign one type of autistic people to Kanner autism and the other to Asperger’s. What gets ridiculous is when different people are assigning different things to both. Like some autistic people will claim that picture thinking is a Kanner thing, and others will claim that picture thinking is an Asperger thing. There are arguments about which one has more sensory issues, more cognitive issues, more self-injury, more additional conditions, etc. Pretty much none of it goes back to what Kanner and Asperger observed in their patients. Or even what they described in their patients. (What they observed and what they described are two very different things, in keeping with the long tradition of autism experts making shit up when they don’t understand things.)

But even when all these generalizations are going on, autistic people tend to know more about autism than autism experts do. Although some of us, also, learn to simply repeat what experts or other autistic people have said about autism, rather than describing our own experiences. (Some of us may not even be able to describe our own experiences rather than repeat things others have said.)

But when we do describe our experiences, and when we are not succumbing to pressure to ‘be autistic enough’, we tend to be reasonably expert about that, at minimum.

When autistic people actually become what I’d consider an expert on autism, it’s usually because we’ve spent a long time learning to understand autistic people who are not ourselves. This may be through interaction, scientific research, or personal research. And preferably the autistic people we are learning about are not in a specific insular community that self-selects for a smaller range of people. When we learn a lot about the experiences of a wide range of people, or learn a lot about specific aspects of autistic thinking and perception through scientific research, that’s the closest to an actual expert that you’re going to find.

But that’s not what most people mean when they talk about autism experts. When they talk about autism experts, they’re thinking Simon Baron-Cohen, Tony Attwood, Bryna Siegel, Ivar Lovaas, and others like them. Nonautistic people with advanced degrees in autism-flavored bullshit. Many autistic people have horror stories, even as there are a few experts who truly deserve the label. Autism experts are responsible for some of the worst spread of misinformation about autism out there, and some of the worst mistreatment of autistic people. Because when they something, people listen and obey more often than they’d listen to anyone who actually knew what they were talking about.

realsocialskills added:

That said, even the bullshit or mostly-bullshit kinds can be useful sometimes. For instance:

  • Having a diagnosis can be useful even if you don’t get anything directly useful from the experts who diagnose you
  • Having a doctors note that you need accommodations can be helpful, particularly if you already know what you need and it’s just a matter of getting a doctor to sign off on it
  • Some autistic people benefit from various forms of medication; some doctors can prescribe useful medication even if they don’t have a particularly deep understanding of autism or autistic experiences
  • Bad experts can still be a useful source of referrals, for instance to occupational therapists

I don’t want to give the impression that it’s always or even usually a bad idea to go to those kinds of people for help. Sometimes it’s the best available thing; it’s in many circumstances not particularly dangerous. I don’t want to unduly scare people or dissuade people from accessing resources they can benefit from.

That said, I agree with everything you said.

Educational conversations aren’t necessarily directed at you

Real Social Skills

Marginalized people often are prevented from knowing really important things. Things that they need to know in order to live in the world.

Some conversations about things like privilege and oppression are primarily conversations between marginalized people about how to notice what’s going on and live well in a world that hates them.

These are not the same kinds of conversation as general talk about the nature of privilege or how the world works. They’re also not the same as conversations that are oriented towards getting powerful people to care about the problems of marginalized people. 

Sometimes, conversations are for peer support and work done between people who are directly affected by an issue. Sometimes they’re for people who need to understand what’s going on in a particular case, without having to explain from the beginning that the issue exists.

And often, those conversations get derailed by privileged people who assume that the conversation has space for them. (Sometimes, very well meaning privileged people who don’t understand that what they are doing is harmful.)

For instance, here’s a way it can play out:

  • Some disabled people are talking about body image or feeling physically repulsive after an instance of discrimination
  • Then someone comes and says “Hi, I’m wanting to check my able-bodied privilege here. I’ve never heard of this. Why do you feel that way?”
  • This can be really derailing and make the problem impossible to discuss, even if the person means well
  • Because sometimes you need to discuss these things with people who understand and can have insightful things to say *based on already understanding certain things*
  • And it can be really emotionally exhausting to need emotional, intellectual, and conceptual support, and then be interrupted by people who don’t understand and might be skeptical
  • Sometimes, you just want to know that you’re not alone
  • Sometimes you need to talk to people who have been there and can help you to understand it and to bear it
  • People talking about something doesn’t mean they have to be up for talking about the thing with everyone who is interested
  • It doesn’t mean that they have to be up for discussing it with every *well meaning* person who is interested, either
  • Sometimes that’s not even possible, particularly when just starting to think about and articulate the problem is terrifying and draining (which is really common, especially for people who have never had peer support before and are under attack constantly.)

It’s not always easy to tell which kind of conversation it is, but when marginalized people from a group you’re not part of are talking about something awful they’re dealing with, it’s important to be mindful of the possibility that this is not a conversation you should be participating in.

Some approaches I think help:

  • If a blog tells you that it’s for a certain group, and you’re not a member of that group, don’t weigh in on its threads
  • If someone tells you to get off their thread on Tumblr, it’s usually important to do so, particularly if it originated from a personal blog
  • If you see a conversation that looks like it might be oriented towards people personally experiencing the thing or who have back, and you want to ask a question, ask privately first
  • And ask if it’s ok to ask a question about the thing and *be prepared to take no for an answer*

Usual standard note when I’m discussing this topic: This is not that kind of blog – this is a public blog and it’s not for any group in particular. You can ask anything here that you’re sincerely interested it, and it’s ok to comment on things. I reblog things I see when I want to respond or boost; I answer asks when I feel like I have something to say. 

But group-specific blogs, spaces, and conversations very much do need to exist, and it’s important to respect that.

The problem with ‘autism experts’ as a source of help with autism-related problems

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:
I’m just curious why is an autism expert the last person you’d go to.
Because ‘autism experts’ are taught things like this:
  • Autistic people are mind-blind and can’t understand emotions
  • And need intense social skills training, or
  • Don’t quite reach adulthood ever, or
  • Should be steered into STEM majors, or
  • Need intense ABA in order to make them look normal, or
  • All think in pictures, or
  • Any number of other stereotypes
  • Many of them also do things like routinely prescribe anti-psychotics to autistic people

That’s pretty much dealbreaking in terms of trusting them. Among other reasons.

Relying on others for reassurance

Real Social Skills

A reader said:

When people rely on the reassurance of someone else it can be very dangerous for everyone involved.

realsocialskills said:

It depends a lot on the context.

I think there are different kinds of relying on others.

There’s relying on others when you know that your perceptions in some areas are unreliable:

  • If you know that you often think things are awful when they aren’t, or that you’ve done something horribly wrong when you haven’t, checking in with others who you trust to have a more reliable perspective can be a good strategy
  • You have to be careful who you trust this way
  • It has to be someone who is both trustworthy and genuinely willing to do this for you
  • And when one or both elements are missing, this can go badly wrong.
  • But this is a strategy that works really well for a lot of people, under the right circumstances

Then there’s the kind of relying on others that’s about needing universal approval:

  • Sometimes people have a self image that depends on other people constantly approving of them
  • And reassuring them that they are good and what they are doing is good
  • This gets really bad really quickly
  • And often leads to people on both sides of it manipulating each other in destructive ways, and pretty much always leads to one or the other person doing so
  • It’s important to be able to accept that not everyone will like you, and that even people who like you will not always like what you do and will be upset with you from time to time
  • People who can’t accept this cause a lot of problems for themselves and others

These things are very different, but they tend to get conflated.

Seeking reassurance isn’t always a bad thing

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:
Do you think that reassurance-seeking is always a bad thing? Because some of your posts seem to imply it.
realsocialskills said:
I didn’t realize my posts sounded that way, but I see what you mean now that you point it out.
No, seeking reassurance isn’t always a bad thing. It can be really good to seek reassurance, and I think everyone needs to do that at least occasionally. If you are afraid that something is wrong, it’s ok to want to check. And it’s ok to do that with the expectation that things are probably ok and that you just need to hear it.
What’s bad is when people seek *unconditional* reassurance. When people seek unconditional reassurance, they want to be convinced that things are ok at all costs – even if things are horribly wrong. That’s dangerous, and destructive. (And particularly dangerous if the thing that’s wrong is the result of something they’re going, but it’s destructive even when the problem is in no way their fault).

Some things I think I know about cultural appropriation

Real Social Skills

Some things that are not necessarily appropriation, depending on how they’re done (but can get into really dangerous territory really quickly):

  • Learning from another culture
  • Admiring another culture
  • Seeing things in another culture that are better than in yours, and trying to figure out how make what you do more like that
  • Learning values from another culture that are better than yours, and trying to incorporate what you’ve learned into your culture
  • Learning musical or artistic styles from another culture
  • Learning how to make food associated with another culture

Pretending that what you’re doing is literally the same thing people in a culture you admire do is always obnoxious appropriation, though. Here are some examples:

  • Claiming to be a member of a culture you’ve only read about because of how strongly what you’ve read resonates with you
  • Using religious ceremonies lifted from other religions completely out of their context (eg: Christians who are really into seeing Jesus as a Jew often do this with modern Jewish rituals; white environmentalists often do this with Native ceremonies)
  • Saying that you must have some distant relatives from the culture you’re interested in, or that you must have been a member of that group in another life, and acting as though this makes you yourself in this life a member of that group 
  • Reading a book written by an anthropologist describing their perspective on the childrearing practices of a group they spent a few months with, then claiming that you’re raising your kids just like that culture does

Some notes for people who might be new here

Real Social Skills

This is a blog about interactions between people, very broadly defined.

Any kinds of people. Any kinds of interactions.

I write about things I know about. I’m autistic; I move in the world as an autistic person so that’s the perspective I write from. A lot of what I know about is interactions between autistic people, or interactions between autistic and neurotypical people.

And power relationships. I know a lot about power. 

This isn’t an autism blog, though. It’s not a special place for autistic people or some category of people. It’s a blog about people. 

A blog about people that doesn’t assume that there’s a default kind of person. Everyone is real, and I write accordingly. What I say doesn’t always apply to everyone – but there aren’t special posts that are disability posts and posts that are regular, or anything.

They’re all for everyone they apply to. No matter why they apply. This is not a place to worry about appropriation. It’s ok to listen, and to comment, and to learn from this. (Even if I’m talking about something that happens to autistic people, and you notice that it also happens in another context).

For those of you who are used to being described as the default kind of person, you might find this disconcerting. Especially if you’re not accustomed to having to notice that people unlike you exist.

You might want to consider what this means about the world you live in.

Some things I think I know about trust

Real Social Skills
  • Trust isn’t automatic
  • It’s something that develops over time as you learn things about someone
  • You don’t have to trust someone right away just because they seem like an ok-ish person
  • Someone trusting you does not mean you have to trust them
  • Someone having a strong emotional need for you to trust them does not mean you should.
  • Even if someone says that not trusting them is *ist, you still do not have to trust them
  • You don’t have to make yourself vulnerable just because someone else wants you to