- My name is Laura Rauscher and I am adjunct faculty here
and teach a course in disability policy
and I'm teaching course in Intro to Racism this term.
I'm also the Disability Services Director
for Smith College and really thrilled to
see so many people here tonight.
I'm really looking forward to this special opportunity
to have a time to focus on issues of disability and ableism,
something that many people have asked
for more opportunities to consider.
More spaces where we can think about those issues,
and think about the intersectionalities.
So many issues that we're all dealing with and sometimes
this is a slice of it that doesn't have enough focus.
And so, we're very thrilled to have this opportunity
with our special guest tonight.
So I'm going to introduce our guest speaker
and we will have a presentation and then,
if we have a few minutes for questions afterward.
Do we do that?
OK.
So, our topic tonight is a Clinically Meaningful
Understanding of People with Disabilities
and the Impact of Ableism.
Our guest speaker AndreA Neumann-Mascis, PhD
is a clinical psychologist with area of specialty
that includes gender variance, trauma
and physical and psychiatric disability.
Dr. Neumann-Mascis has been working as a provider,
educator and an activist since 1992,
and has had access to working with people
in a wide range of setting, including in-patient
hospital units, community mental health settings
and street-level outreach and shelter programs.
Dr. Neumann-Mascis founded and developed
The Meeting Point, a multidimensional center
for healing and growth in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
The Meeting Point serves the LGBTQ community,
survivors and the disability community,
and is growing to meet the unique strengths and needs
of queer people and their alies through community activity
and personalized approaches to wellness.
Really want to welcome you here tonight
and thank you for coming.
Go ahead.
(applause)
- I'm incredibly excited to be here.
I'm a huge fan of Smith and I'm a huge fan
of the work that happens here and I want to acknowledge
that this is happening at probably the worst possible time
for a lot of you.
So I appreciate the extra effort that it took
to want to be here tonight when there's so much pressure
on you right now.
I also want to thank the disability awareness group
that had a great deal with my being here tonight.
I want to thank Samuel and Talia.
(applause)
And also Laura.
And I know that making space for this topic
is itself kind of parallel process, right?
Like the struggle involved in making space for this topic
reflects where we are in our relationship to ableism
and our understanding of ableism.
And so we are all manifesting that struggle
right now together.
What we're going to do tonight is we're going to talk
about disability and our understanding
about disability across time.
I'm going to talk about that in a couple different contexts.
We're definitely going to talk about intersectionality
and for those of you who are
doing social justice work of your very own,
you have transferable skills for the conversation
that we're about to have.
And then we'll also talk about sort of
the meaning of all of that clinically
and what the clinical implications of that are.
So that's what we're going to do.
Where we're going to start is this is actually
a really exciting time to
come into an understanding of disability
because we've traveled kind of an incredible arc,
and it's an arc you may or may not have direct awareness of.
But where disability starts,
where our understanding of disability starts,
is really in the medical model of disability.
So the medical model of disability is all about location.
The medical model of disability locates
disability in the body, it says that if you are
having a disability it's because you have a medical problem
that needs to be fixed or cured.
And fixed or cured means that you are aspiring to be
more like the category of able-bodied persons.
You are aspiring to a standard of abilities that
we have defined as the abilities required to be human.
That's where the medical model
starts with disability, right?
Where we go from medical model of disability
is something called the social justice model of disability.
And the social justice model of disability
is a model that says, actually, we - all of us -
are part of the human community.
And if, as part of the human community,
we are all not able to participate in the human community,
the problem is actually not with our bodies,
but in fact at the structures
that prevent us from being active and involved
in being part of the human community.
So it's a conceptual shift that's simple
and yet really profound.
The conceptual shift says very simply,
if I come up to a flight of steps
and I can't get up that flight of steps,
the medical model would say
it has to do with my motor skills.
The social justice model of disability says
that is has to do with the presence of the steps.
Right?
So that's an enormous shift in how we begin to conceptualize
differently what it means to be
part of the human community in that way.
From the social justice model of disability
with move to what some people call the
human variability model of disability.
And human variability actually came out of a lot of
research being done about the differences
in people's relationships to machines.
But what that research discovered
is that human beings are variable.
(laughter)
And in fact they demonstrate a scope
of abilities that are worth understanding
and the differences in those abilities not only
are worth understanding, but are themselves beneficial.
So human variability model says, well the way that we're
conceptualizing this all together is problematic
because we are conceptualizing
sort of a mythological category
that not only does not include all human beings,
but actually actively excludes the ability
of a lot of human beings.
Again, kind of a profound conceptual shift.
For those of you who are big fans of
disability studies research,
this is the time that you
might be channeling Garland Thomas.
For those of you who are big fans of queer theory,
this is the time that you might be channeling Foucault.
But the concept here is basically that
if we have a categorization of human beings,
we have inherently a dichotomy of that categorization.
If we divide the world into able-bodied and disabled.
If we divide the world in straight and gay.
If we divide the world into people of color
and not people of color.
Then the function of that division is
really about creating a stratification.
It's really about how creating a categorization
of human beings that defines what people have access to
what resources in the world.
So human variability says we want to obliterate that.
We want to say that we are all part of the human community.
We want to say that we are all people who have resources.
That's a really, really exciting idea,
except that we also live in this world.
(laughter)
So, while I and some of you would want to join people
in sort of obliterating categorization,
and we are all actively in a system of categorization,
and we are all actively in a system of categorization
that is inherently oppressive.
And not acknowledging that actually serves no one.
Enter the disability justice movement.
The disability justice movement is phenomenally exciting
because the disability justice movement
now sort of conceptually re-embodies disability
It says in fact we are more than the sum of our parts,
and all of our parts count.
Disability justice says that the experience
of being a person with a disability
is radically different and radically impacted
by complicating identities, including race,
including class, including gender, including heterosexism.
That all of these factors that define membership
in various communities have an enormous impact
on the ways in which being a person with a disability
is experienced and expressed.
Is that making sense?
So, by way of illustration, I am a person
who is visibly queer.
I'm also a person with a visible disability.
I'm also white.
I was also raised in a middle-class family.
Part of what that meant was that I was mainstreamed
before it was legal or cool.
I was maintained in regular education settings.
Beyond that, because I was conditioned to believe that
these systems were meant to work for me,
I knew how to advocate for myself in those systems.
So that every time we moved that I was then
relocated into special education, I could advocate my way
out of special education
and into advanced placement classes.
The trajectory of my life experience
and my experience specifically with disability,
and the fact that I am sitting here in front of you,
is entirely defined by those factors.
It is entirely defined by those identities.
And it is entirely defined by my location
within that larger system.
So, I could sit here and sort of say,
isn't that amazing that I did all those amazing things?
Except that in doing that I would have
to divorce myself from a system of privileging
that has, in and of itself, profoundly informed
my relationship to disability
and my experience with disability.
What disability justice says is not only
do we have to have that level of consciousness,
but, in fact, our ability to respond to disability
has everything to do with a conceptual shift on a
social and emotional level to collaboration.
That it is in collaboration and in an understanding of
ability exchange that is the answer to allowing everyone
to be a part of the human community in that way.
And I'll say more about that in a minute
and it will make more sense.
But first I'm going to drink.
Pardon me.
How's all this going?
Am I going to fast?
Everybody OK?
You coming with?
(laughter)
Excellent.
So from that trajectory and from that
location that I mentioned earlier,
what we now think I understand together is
that there is no way to
meaningfully understand the clinic...
Meaningfully respond to the
clinical needs of people with disabilities
without having that social justice framework in place.
That you have to have an understanding of someone's location
and an understanding of someone's experience
of oppression in order to meaningfully
understand their experience
of being a person with a disability
and living a disability identity.
So, from here I'm going to talk a lot about social justice
and the way that we're going to define social justice,
it means a lot of things to a lot of people.
But the way that we're going to define social justice
for the purposes of our conversation today
is in two parts:
The first part of social justice,
as we're going to define it today,
is that we believe that all people have the right
to have access to the resources
that they need to make a life.
We believe that all people have the right
to have access to the resources
that they need to make a life.
What do I mean when I say that?
I mean housing, I mean healthcare, I mean education,
I mean access to a spiritual community,
I mean all of the things if you think about
the fundamental components that construct
the life that you have, all of us
need access to those resources.
The second part of social justice is
that we recognize that access to those resources
is stratified based on identity membership.
In this culture, which is the culture
I'm going to speak from, in this culture we know
that people's access to housing,
that their access to healthcare,
that their access to transportation
and that all of that access is stratified
based on identity membership.
That's a big deal.
And it changes fundamentally the access that people have
to create a life.
We all have that, right?
This is Smith.
(laughter)
But what does that have to do with kind of
the intrapsychic experience of people with disabilities?
Where I want us to shift together
is really into an understanding of the self.
So we have this social justice framework,
we understand there are systems of oppression in play,
we understand that those systems of oppression
are defined based on identity membership
and now what we're going to do is
we're going to look at that
from an intrapsychic perspective.
Fun, huh?
(laughter)
The way that we're going to look at that from
an intrapsychic perspective is through self psychology.
If you are not currently lovers of self psychology,
please read a little Kohut, it will make you feel better.
(laughter)
Self psychology basically says that we,
all of us, have a self.
And that that self is constructed and reconstructed
and reconstructed based on our significant relationships
and based on the experiences that we have in lives.
So we have a self, that self needs food,
that food is relationship.
Self psychology also talks about the way in which
those relationships impact how we then perpetuate
ourselves in the world.
See, I have these two paths going in my brain
and I can't decide which one to go on.
(laughter)
I'm going to go on this one.
So Self psychology says we have a self,
that self is constructed by relationships,
those are relationships are meaningful
in moving us through the world.
The way that self psychology talks about those relationships
is that we, all of us, need three things in life.
The first thing that self psychology says that we all need
is something called mirroring, which is what it sounds like,
mother smiles, baby smiles, mother smiles, baby smiles.
We need to have an accurate reflection
of our emotional experience in the world.
Oh, you look really anxious, oh you look really sad,
you look really, really like you have a lot to do.
(laughter)
Thank you for being here.
(laughter)
That is the reflection of mirroring
and what happens in mirroring
is an experience of validation.
And in validation we have an accurate and
meaningful sense of ourselves.
So that's the first thing self psychology says we need.
The second thing that self psychology says that we need,
and this one is my favorite,
it's called idealization.
And idealization has two parts.
The first part of idealization is that
we all need someone to look up to and aspire to.
I want to be just like you when I grow up,
you're amazing.
We all need that experience.
We also all need someone who makes safe for us.
Someone who has our back.
Someone that we turn to in a moment of anxiety,
who is able to give us what we need.
And the third thing that self psychology says
that we all need to survive and thrive
is something called twinship.
You're a Smitthy, twinship.
It is the experience of a likeness and belonging.
That experience of, I identify with you,
you and I are the same, we have that experience
of a likeness and belonging.
What happens when we have a rich relational environment
in which we get all of those things,
and if you think about it, and it's not that hard,
I bet you could think of the last
interaction you had today in which
you felt adequately mirrored.
The last interaction you had this week in which you
felt adequately a sense of identification and belonging.
Like these things are fundamental
to the core of ourselves.
And they are fed to us in our relationships all the time.
The good news about that is that even if
we didn't get it to begin with,
we can get it now.
And that is where healing occurs.
So what happens is all of us need
these things to survive and thrive.
These things become internalized
through a process of transmuting internalization,
(laughter)
and become fundamentally a construction of the self.
So that's self psychology.
We're going to put that right here.
Alongside self psychology, we're going to look at,
just for a second, the exciting things that are
happening about the brain.
For those of you who are not, at this moment,
looking at everything that is happening with the brain,
please do.
(laughter)
We have the technology, ladies and gentlemen,
and to see things actually happening
in the structure of the brain in some really
profound and meaningful ways.
And what's vital about that and what's exciting about that
is that the brain also, not shockingly,
constructs and reconstructs and reconstructs
and reconstructs itself
based on its experiences and based on
specifically its relational experiences.
The neuroconnections that we make in our brain
are an active reflection of what
we are feeding our brain.
So the self health is impacted.
We can articulate that through self psychology,
we can articulate that through the self-object functions
that we talked about, we can also articulate that through
what we know in neuroscience -
the brain is shaping and reshaping
and reshaping itself.
But what we have together in that body of knowledge
is something that's pretty profound,
which is that who we are as human beings,
the construction of ourselves,
is getting fed and re-fed
and re-fed all the time.
If we go back now to the earlier part of our conversation,
and talk about the social justice piece of that,
it changes a little bit how
we think about micro-aggressions.
It changes a little bit how we think about the impact
of being a part of an identity membership
in which you're access to the human community
is made different from everyone around you.
It impacts the structure of the self.
Well, what does that mean,
it impacts the structure of the self?
What we're talking about when we're talking
about the construction of the self is things like
resiliency and affect management and
the ability to attach and the ability to
form relationships and the ability to connect.
All of those things, if you think about
all the things that you've been learning,
that's where personality disorders come from,
all of those things are fed and re-fed and re-fed
based on relationships.
So now, if we're talking about having an identity,
that removes you systematically
from the experiences of being in the human community.
When we're talking about resources,
when we're talking about access to resources,
we're no longer just talking about
whether or not someone get can get up a flight of steps.
We're actually talking about what it means,
on a structural level, to have access
to participation in the human community.
What it means to have access to
a rich-relational environment.
What it means to feel seen and understood
and have a sense of belonging and a likeness.
What it means to have someone and something to aspire to.
That's actually what we're talking about
when we're talking about an identity
that disenfranchises you from full participation
in the human community.
Is that making sense?
That's kind of profound, right?
Because now the question that we have to ask ourselves
is well, if I'm sitting with someone and they're
experiencing anxiety, how am I going to pathologize that?
How am I going to understand that?
How am I going to conceptualize that?
Am I going to conceptualize that as something that is
fundamental to how they function in the world?
Or am I going to conceptualize that as something
that is fundamental to how
the world is functioning for them?
But there's another piece of this
that's even a little more insidious.
The piece of this that's even a little more insidious
is if you think about everything that you have learned
in your classes about healing and about psychology
and about an understanding and assessing people
who come in and sit across from you,
it's all fundamentally based on autonomy.
We have an entire system that is fundamentally,
that defines health based on autonomy and differentiation.
So think about what you ask for in an intake.
When you ask someone what's happening for them in an intake,
you want to know something about their living situation,
you want them to be living independently,
you want them to have a close, but not too close,
relationship with their families of origin,
and you want them to have some kind of romantic
relationship and you want them to have a job.
Sixty-five percent of people with disabilities
are unemployed.
The No. 1 reason for that unemployment
is lack of transportation.
Is that a mental health issue?
So think about the ways in which
we create the social context that says your health,
your emotional health, your wellbeing,
your autonomy defines your self,
and defines the way that we value
what is happening for you.
Defines how we decide that you're healthy or not.
That's a big deal.
That's a really big deal.
There's something else that is also a big deal in that,
and that is that we know that people with
disabilities are profoundly disproportionally
impacted by trauma.
We know that people with disabilities are about
twice as likely to be victims of violent crime.
We know that people with disabilities
are profoundly disproportionately impacted by
sexual and physical abuse in families.
One of the reasons that we could extrapolate,
that that is likely to be true,
has to do with the ways in which
someone's personhood can be distanced from them.
What we know about people who perpetrate violence
against other people is that they perpetrate violence
against other people who are not likely to be believed.
People are picked if they are not likely to be believed,
they are picked if they are perceived
as disenfranchised.
If they are perceived as removed from the human community,
they are substantially more likely to be picked
as someone to be victimized.
So that's how some of these things begin to them play out.
So, I think, where I want to go from here is
kinda into the clinical relationships specifically.
Are we ready for that?
Excellent.
(laughter)
So what does it mean to function
from a clinically-informed position?
Now that you have this mantle behind you,
now that you have an understanding that
having a clinically-meaningful perspective
on disability requires a social justice position.
Now that you understand that that impacts the
construction of the self and impacts the brain.
What does that mean in real life?
Part of what it means in real life
is a recognition that ablelism is in the room.
Whether or not you are a good person
is not at stake.
You are absolutely a good person, I swear.
(laughter)
That's not at stake.
You are, however, a person who is a product
of a really ablelist culture.
And so, you do have within you,
all of the bigotry and biases
that being a product of a ablelist culture also embuse.
So, ablism is in the room when you
are in a therapy relationship with someone.
Now the way that that manifests
is going to depend a lot on the context of safety
that's created in the room.
So some of what that means in sort of real life,
is being willing to dimensionally understand
the life experiences of your clients.
And that means oftentimes when people are trying
really hard to be good people,
and not sort of respond badly to difference,
the way that they go about doing that
is by ignoring difference
or distancing themselves from difference
or being overinclusive in the way
that they think about difference.
That's going to quell your anxiety as a provider,
it's not necessarily going to be the thing
that is most helpful to your client.
So, where that starts then, is having a really dimensional
and meaningful understanding of
what you client's experience is.
And what I can tell you for sure
is that ableism impacts every aspect of their life.
So ableism impacts their home, it impacts their work,
it impacts their relational choices.
It also impacts every decision that they have made
about the significant choices that they have in their lives.
The decision about where to go to school,
the decision about where to work,
the decision about where to live,
the decision about who engage with or not engage with.
All of these things are informed by experiences of ableism.
Beginning to understand that in real-time
means beginning to understand dimensionally
what is happening in someone's life.
So it means understanding meaningfully
whether or not someone's workplace is accessible.
Is it totally accessible?
Is it partially accessible?
If it's partially accessible, does that mean
that they don't get to go to staff meetings?
What are they not getting to do
in that partially accessible workplace?
Can they go to the bathroom?
That's a thing.
If someone's home environment is accessible
or not accessible.
If it's not accessible, why not?
If it's not accessible, who is it in their life
that is compensating for that lack of access?
And what does that mean for that relationship dynamic?
What does it mean for a relationship dynamic
if someone is set up in such a way
that their life needs to be facilitated?
How conscious is that?
How much conversation has there been about that?
What does that mean about that person's
ability to experience boundaries?
One of the things that is often true
for people with disabilities is that their
experience of personal boundaries is dramatically different
than the experience of personal boundaries
of able-bodied people because there's a way in which
the body that is identified as a disabled body
is a body that is also commodified.
There's an objectification process that happens
that means that someone is not able to afford
the same relationship to privacy.
The same relationship to intimacy.
The same relationship to interacting in a meaningful way
with their bodies and their environments
in the way that someone else might be able
to take for granted.
So understanding what's happening
for your client in real-time means also
sort of dimensionally understanding these things.
But it means things that are
even more dimensional than that,
which include things like how are you thinking about
the impact of disability in how you understand what's
happening for your client diagnostically?
It is really, really easy to integrate disability
into a sense of pathology.
It's also really, really easy to divorce disability
from how you're understanding that person's self
and their identity and how they move through the world,
which is going to be comforting to you
because if I'm not thinking about it,
I can't do it wrong.
But it's actually going to rob you of the ability
to meaningfully understand what's happening for them.
Micro-aggressions, those experiences in the world
that we have of being diminished and devalued,
those experiences that are the opposite of mirroring,
are also the experiences that corrode the self.
if you have a client's that's chronically in positions
that they are experiencing things that are
corrosive to their self, that is impactful
in how you think about what you're doing with that client.
That is impactful in how they move through the world.
Another piece of this is a piece that
has to do with trauma.
For those of you who do trauma work
and are being trained in trauma work,
there's a lot of transferable skill in understanding trauma
because you are working with people who are
disproportionally likely to have experienced trauma.
You are also working with people who,
because of medical interventions,
have often had experiences that very much replicate trauma
because they are the experience of having someone,
who has power over you make decisions about your body
that are painful to you over which
you feel powerless in that moment.
That is fundamentally the definition
of a traumatic experience.
So there are ways in which interacting with
the medical community creates a system of trauma
for the person that you're working with.
So those are some of the clinical issues
that may be present.
Other clinical issues that may be present, though,
have to do with your client's relationship
to disability and their social and emotional world's
relationship to disability.
What I mean when I say that is
family of origin, for example.
Families have a lot of really
interesting ideas about disability
A disability is incredibly, incredibly triggering.
It's incredibly triggering.
So one of the things that you want to know
from your client ultimately is what the belief system was
in the family about disability.
Where did the disability come from?
Is it somebody's fault?
Is there a source of blame?
Is there a spiritual or religious-based belief system
around why that disability occurred?
What is that disability mean?
How does that disability shape the identity
that the family has?
How does that disability shape how the family
is relating to one another?
All of those things are going to have had
some pretty powerful impact on how your client
understands themselves, and how your client
understands their relationship in the world.
Ableism will have informed those
most intimate relationships in that way.
So understanding those belief systems.
Also, understand a belief system around cure.
Just because I have embraced disability identity
in the way that I have or the social justice movement
says that we should, all of us, have the right to
live in the bodies that we're living in,
not everyone is living that way.
And so understanding what someone's individual
relationship to their own disability is
and their relationship to the issue of cure
is a powerful influence in what happens in the therapy.
And is impactful in what happens in the therapy.
But there's something else.
And that is what's happening for
the able-bodied provider in the transference.
in that relationship.
Disability is triggering that.
Doesn't make you bad.
It does mean that there are ways
that disability can trigger our own sense of mortality.
It can trigger our own sense of vulnerability.
It can trigger or own sense of defensiveness
around that vulnerability.
When we get really overwhelmed
by someone else's life experience, we blame them.
We don't mean to, but we kind of do.
We kind of start to rationalize.
Think about what happens for you when
you see someone who is homeless.
How often does it happen that you think,
oh well, they're probably addicted.
Oh well, they're probably psychotic.
We do that because we want to distance ourselves
from the experience of that person.
We want to objectify that experience
and distance ourselves from that experience
because we don't want to resonate with that experience.
We find issues of disability incredible threatening.
We find issues of disability incredible threatening
because we have terrible, terrible models in this culture
of what it means to be a person with a disability.
It doesn't look good.
And so, in feeling threatened in that way,
we often will distance ourselves from our clients,
we'll distance ourselves from people with disabilities.
We'll distance ourselves by say, "They're so inspiring."
We'll distance ourselves by saying,
"Wow, I would never do what you do.
"How do you do what you do?"
It sounds like a compliment inside your head.
What's true in real life... (laughter)
What's true in real life is that it is
an active objectification.
And it is an active objectification that is designed
to rayify my membership and your membership
on that food chain.
I want to make sure that you know you are in your place.
I want to make sure that you know that I am not you.
I want to make sure that I know that I am not you.
Guess what?
Disability is coming.
You're all us.
(laughter)
But there's a way in which, especially in
a transferential relationship,
where so much of what we do depends on
bringing ourself to the room and bringing
our own sense of empathy and our own sense
of residence to the room,
if there's a threat to that,
if you are experiencing that as threatening,
of course you are because you also
are a product of this ablelist culture.
That is not your fault,
but it is worth resolving because you will not
be able to give your client what your client
so deeply deserves, which is being meaningfully
seen and understood, meaningfully responded to,
meaningfully developing a sense of safety and belonging.
Those things are your client's right.
Those are the things that you signed up to support.
And if you are having a lot of traffic
about ways in which being experience near with your client
is threatening to you, then you're not going to provide them
the things that they need.
And that's painful and that's a tremendous loss.
The other part of that is the pressure of disembodiment.
The problem with having a complicated body
in a culture that does not value complicated bodies,
is that there's a tremendous amount of pressure
to disavow yourself from that body.
There is a tremendous amount of pressure from the therapist,
there's a tremendous amount of pressure from the family,
there's a tremendous amount of pressure from yourself,
from your internalized enablism, your experience,
my experience, of being able to say,
Yeah, I'm not really... I'm fine, I'm fine.
Because I can't afford to not be fine.
I can't afford to have a need like that.
That is the impact of ableism.
It is also this kind of profound
expression of disembodiment.
This kind of profound expression of like
the person that I am and the person that
I am out in the world, and the person that you see,
and the person that I'm interested in
having you interact with is that person over there
that's kind of to your left of this particular body.
And we see that in trauma survivors as well, right?
The experience of trauma survivors being like,
you know, when I inhabited that body, bad things happened.
I'm not so interested in inhabiting that body.
I'm really not interested in caring for that body.
You can just, I'm, no, not doing it.
Ableism can function in a very similar way.
This is the body that has defined my confinement.
This is the body that had defined my choices.
This is the body that has defined my membership.
And this is the body that has impacted my relationships.
I'm not so interested in this body.
I'm not so interested in taking care of this body.
There's a way in which therapists can really
easily collude with that.
There's a way in which therapists can really easily
collude with like, well you're not talking about it,
and I feel ill-equipped to talk about it
and I'm terrified that I'm going to say the wrong thing,
so how bout we just don't talk about it?
That sounds terrific.
Let's go with that.
(laughter)
Except that it's a profound disservice to your client.
And again, if any of you are reading and enjoying
Peter Levine, and if you're not, please try.
If any of you are reading and enjoying Peter Levine,
what you will know, and what you'll know
if you're reading the brain stuff, too,
is that being embodied is fundamental to our humanness,
and being embodied is fundamental to our healing.
That there's a way in which healing depends on
our ability to be in active conversation with our bodies.
Trauma lives in the body in a very specific way
and when we are not able to act and react
from a trauma-based perspective,
from within the bodies that we've got,
we are limited in our capacity to heal.
Being a sexual being is a very embodied thing.
Intimacy can be a very embodied thing.
If you are supported and, in fact, encouraged,
and in effect facilitated to have a relationship
outside of the body that you're in,
there's a whole lot of life and a whole lot of self
that you don't get to have,
that you don't get to have access to.
The process of supporting someone and being re-embodied
and being re-embodied in the body that they've got.
Like, one way or the other, we've got to figure out
how to inhabit the body that we've got.
And one way or the other, we've got to figure out
how to be willing to take care of that body.
And one way or the other, we got to be willing
to introduce that body into an intimate relationship
and into an intimate connection with another human being.
We need it, it's fundamental.
It's fundamental to who we are.
We all know those early studies
before there were human subjects departments
(laughter)
where they would take a mammal and remove him
from its mother and provide it with everything.
Provide it with adequate food and adequate body temperature,
adequate hydration and not touch,
and they would die.
Every time.
We are embodied beings.
We need each other and we need to inhabit our bodies
in a way that is meaningful and part of connection.
Being a person with a disability means
inhabiting a complicated body that people are
responding to in a lot of really complex ways.
Being an ally and a healer with someone who is
inhabiting a complicated body, also means
creating a language and an understanding
for how to inhabit that body in a meaningful way.
Making sense?
This is also where I want to invite you to think about
how you are thinking about your client's life experience
different than you might if you were identifying
them as a person who is able-bodied.
If you are a person who is able-bodied,
we have an expectation that you're having sex.
We have an expectation that you're achieving goals.
We have an expectation that you're
interacting meaningfully with the world.
And if those things aren't happening,
we identify that as a problem.
We identify that as a problem and we work
actively to think about how to mitigate that problem.
It is really, really, really easy
when someone presents with a disability,
particularly when someone presents with
a disability that you are overwhelmed by,
to distance yourself from those ordinary life goals.
To distance yourself from an expectation that this person
should also have romantic relationships.
That this person should also have friendships.
That this person should also have employment.
It's really easy when feelings systemically
overwhelm to distance yourself from those things.
And it's really critical that you don't.
It's really critical that as an activist and an ally
and a provider that you hold for your client
an expectation that they get to have a life.
if the ADA has given us anything,
and I'm a little ambivalent,
but if the ADA has given us anything
it has given us a generation of people
who have grown up underneath it.
It has given us a generation of people who've grown up
with the expectation of having a life.
That's really different.
It's really different from how I grew up.
It's really different than what our cultural
expectation has been to this point.
And that's the beginning of really meaningful change.
That's the beginning of really meaningful change to say,
I have an expectation of being part of the human community.
Now my ability to do that still tremendously troubled.
Still systemically limited.
But if I don't even hold that expectation,
if I don't even have that mental picture,
of I'm a person that gets to be in the world,
then that's going to change a lot about how I interact
with the world, and it's going to change
a lot about what I expect from it.
It's also going to change a lot about
what I expect from my providers.
A healing act is holding with your client that expectation.
A healing act is holding with your client
the expectation in that everybody gets to have a life,
and everybody gets to sort of be in the human community
in meaningful and challenging and interesting ways.
And that there are lots and lots of ways to
facilitate and make that happen.
And where I want to take us back to
is in the disability justice movement
because the disability justice movement
reaches way back to feminist psychology
to say it's really, really in collaboration
that all things occur.
The whole idea of autonomy is profoundly mythologized
because, that's not a word at all.
(laughter)
Mythologize.
(laughter)
The whole idea of autonomy is fundamentally based on
if I am someone whose needs are not only
completely acceptable, but are so seamlessly met,
I never have to acknowledge that I'm getting help.
Think about our model of the most autonomous person.
Think about our models of who really did it,
who really was super successful.
Bill Gates, let's think, let's pause.
That is not someone who hasn't gotten help.
that is someone who has gotten a tremendous amount of help.
Armies of people are facilitating that person
every single day.
Armies of people facilitate the people that we call
autonomous every single day.
The difference between that population of people
and the rest of us, is that that population of people's
access is facilitated in such a way
that they don't even have to be conscious of it.
They don't even have to know it's happening.
It just is.
It's just kind of true in the world
that I have a need and it's met
and I don't even really have to name it as a need.
And on top of that, I get to be called healthy for it.
And on top of that, I get to be called successful for it.
And on top of that, I get all of the relational food
of that mirroring.
Because that's the other thing that's
not happening when people are not in work environments.
The other thing that's not happening when they're
not participating in community events
and the other thing that's not happening
when they're not getting to reach a rich relational world
is they're not bringing their gifts to that world,
they're not bringing themselves to that world,
and they're not having reflected back to them
their fundamental worth.
So ultimately, the only thing that gets
reflected back to you is you as designated need.
I am not resource, I am need.
I am designated need.
Well, if I'm designated need,
then part of what that means is that I never
experience myself as resourced.
Part of what that also means is that my starting point
is always apologetic because my starting point
is I'm already taking up too much space
just by virtue of the fact that I'm here.
I've already been a problem.
I've already been a need.
I can't actually afford to need anything else
and I certainly can't afford to tell you what that is
because we've already established
that you are providing charity by affording me
my very existence.
That's what I mean when I say participation
in the human community.
What I mean is that.
That if we are all of us human beings,
then we are all of us people who have needs
and we are all of us people who have resources.
And that if we systematically remove a population of people
from that balance sheet,
then not only are we identifying
that population of people as having needs,
we're also removing their resources.
We're also removing their ability to meaningfully
contribute to the resources in the world.
And we're removing, most of all,
I am then removed from my sense of worth as a human being.
I am then removed from my sense that I can
contribute in a meaningful way to the larger world.
And that's a devastating loss.
And it's a devastating loss that's going to create
some emotional symptoms,
for which I then could be pathologized.
But that's not going to happen now because now
you have that whole context.
You're going to carry that context with you
everywhere you go, I'm sure of it.
So our option for meaningfully contributing
to a healing environment is really
about shifting gears and really about shifting
into a place of if everybody counts,
then we can afford to be embodied.
We can afford to care for our bodies,
we can afford to care for ourselves,
we can afford to be in relationships
with one another.
If everybody counts and everybody is meant to be
part of the human community, then we are,
all of us, part of designing systems that
facilitate everyone being part of that
human community not because, you know,
I'm a really good person and want to do a really good thing,
but because I want the resources that I'm
going to miss out on.
I want the personhood that I'm going to miss out on
if we eliminate an entire population of people.
If we eliminate an entire population of people,
I'm going to lose a lot.
So I'm going to be active in creating situations
that create access for all of us
because if all of use are here,
all of us can contribute in a really
meaningful way.
And I'm going to think about needs not as
that stratification, not as I am the helper
and you are the helped, but as we are collaborators together
in creating a situation.
If the situation that we are interesting in creating
is that we want to be together in this experience,
we want to be together in this relationship,
we want to be together in interacting
with the world in this way,
then let's put on the table all of our needs
and all of our resources in figuring out
how to facilitate making that happen.
(applause)