Another perspective on murder-suicide of the disabled

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Found this blog post yesterday:

http://www.nopointsforstyle.com/2013/10 ... amily.html

What she's saying is that not only does having a severely disabled child shred the parents' whole lives, destroying everything that gives it meaning, it's the fact that the system DOES NOT CARE about this fact. Again and again the bureaucrats deny help. Go away and deal with it, seems to be the message. Nobody wants to lift a finger or spend money to help. We see this in the posts made by adult autistics on WP: no, you're not disabled, no you don't need SSI, no you don't need Voc Rehab, get a job you lazy bum, just do it and go away. It seems that much of America would be perfectly happy with the use of gas chambers to dispose of the disabled, as seen by the calls for "euthanasia" every time a murder-suicide happens. We've already seen this movie, only it was in German and the ending was really, really nasty.

it needs to be repeated, that all too many of the high-functioning AS types here on WP [aka "the big fish in the little pond"], are deep into aspie denial and NT emulation mode, and highly resent the presence/existence of the lower functioning members here who have the temerity to speak up, because we remind them of what they are running from.

I remember this story. Funny how it started with the god damn mentally unstable mother throwing a big tantrum that got her daughter kicked out and yet they still say the school was to blame.........

Pezar and Aunt Blabby; I have the greatest respect for both of you for being unafraid to state your truth.

Couldn't agree more

same thing happens with trauma. we were trained to spot it in ourselves while i was learning clinical skills.

tragically cruel trick of human nature.

can you please rephrase that or tell me what it refers to?

I meant, what autistics are told by the system, not what the HF ones tell LF ones.

Another story on this:

http://www.upnorthlive.com/news/story.a ... lXMKBBLqSo

She told the nurses at the hospital that she was frustrated and wanted Issy and herself to go to heaven. She had to leave the van periodically to put more charcoal on the grills, and this fact, that the doors were opened and closed repeatedly, may have saved both their lives. If she'd planned ahead, the murder-suicide would have succeeded.

I dunno if the mother here is autistic or not but I liked what she wrote here:


http://theconnorchronicles.wordpress.co ... stapleton/

okay let me see if i can filter down the details correctly so it makes sense (not my strongest point).

in layman's terms it's called "blaming the victim." basically when people encounter a person whose had a life experience that threatens their sense of safety or their world-view, subconsciously there is a drive to find a way to make that information "fit" without changing either. So rather than being able to hear and see clearly, the incoming information gets distorted by the listener's unconscious agenda to stay safe and maintain control.

The easiest way to do this, is automatically to blame the victim for what happened.

"Blaming" could be outright blaming (you brought it on yourself, you are lying, you aren't trying hard enough), or just finding some other way to rationalize what happened; they were lazy, they deserved it, her skirt was too short, etc. etc.

We even do it to ourselves. "I am a bad person" rather than "something bad happened and I couldn't understand or stop it."

It's easier to accept that someone brought something on themselves, than to believe that things do happen that are completely outside of our control. It's much less threatening to believe that someone deserved it somehow. Especially if you don't have the same personal experience, it's very easy to discount and question.

Sometimes this is a real important psychological defense. For instance, there is something called "vicarious traumatization." That means that you can become traumatized just by hearing about someone else's traumatic experience, if it causes you to question your own safety and trust in other people. It can literally shatter your world-view.

Rather than suffer traumatization themselves, people find a way to "flip" their understanding of the situation so they can maintain the illusion of control in their own lives.

It's completely unconscious. You really notice it when people hear about something bad that happened to someone else and get *angry*, not at the perpetrator, but the person it happened to.

Having a condition like AS can be very scary and threatening to people whose world-view and sense of safety depends on a certain vision of success for personal value, who are frightened at the prospect of dealing with the challenges of AS, of not realizing their dreams (or the dreams they've been programmed to want), of being alone (which scares most people, including folks on AS, even folks like me who enjoy it).

So rather than face those feelings - and perhaps lacking the ability to cope with them, or even the insight to realize they are having them - those people get angry and attack (blame, put down, etc.). ANGER is a feeling that gives people a sense of power. Fear is experienced as the opposite and many people can't stand to feel that way even a little bit.

Remember, anger and fear are flip sides of the same automatic brain response to a perceived threat - fight, flight, and freeze.

As mental health therapists at my particular school, we were trained to identify when we were having that "blame the victim" response, to just admit it and put it aside and get help with it, rather than take it out on our already suffering patients.

We were also trained to spot "vicarious traumatization" and yes, it happened to me, or rather it tipped me over the edge into an already festering pool of untreated trauma from my childhood.

i was raised to hate the word victim and to take responsibility for EVERYTHING, including things that ARE NOT my fault. I truly believe in the important of accepting responsibility. But i've also come to realize that holding myself responsible for CERTAIN things is not only unrealistic, but damaging and holds me back. It doesn't allow me to accept myself or change the RIGHT things to heal or improve my life. It makes me feel ashamed or guilty for things i literally cannot change, creates me develop a sense of identity that is inaccurate and disempowered and guaranteed to bring me shame and perpetual frustration. And i refuse to live that way if i can help it.

auntblabby did that make it easier to understand or did i completely confuse with too much detail?

THANK YOU! that is EXCELLENT! I saved that wisdom in my puter wisdom vault so THAT is behind a lot of the right-wing hatred of the less-fortunate.

oh good and absolutely yes i think so.

so what is it about left-wingers that immunizes them against that psychological fault?

offhand, i don't think it does. left-wingers react to different things on the political spectrum. deep down inside, everyone does it. when we make divisions like left/right wing, we are doing it; neither of us are trying to "get" the other's reasons for thinking and feeling the way we do, so all we do is end up circling each other, attacking and attacking. i'm not talking about the pundits and political career-makers; i'm talking about the average citizen.

i think the concepts "left" and "right" wing are just labels used to polarise society, distract people from what's going on, and make careers at this point. i don't know anyone who clearly falls into one camp or the other, although out of fear and displeasure many have aligned themselves with one or the other party. I think this is a terrible mistake. We are being manipulated into seeing each other as the enemy, while the true enemies of the people accrue more and more money and control over all of us.

anything more would be a marxist rant on my part.

IOW we are all as manipulated puppets being set against one another by invisible puppetmasters in echelons beyond reality? I can understand that. we need to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.