Multifarious Threads

Disability

PTSD and the remnants of Cartesianism in psychological practice

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The view of trauma adopted in the DSM-V is a reflection of the Cartesian dualism that still permeates mainstream psychology. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, requires that a direct, physical threat to someone’s life occur; emotional abuse doesn’t seem to count, despite research studies indicating that emotional distress can exert the same effects as physical abuse. If emotional abuse results in the same biochemical responses as physical abuse or life-threatening accidents, then it should be included as a criterion for PTSD or other psychiatric disabilities that arise from stress or trauma. Limiting the aetiology to direct physical threats prevents survivors of emotional abuse or other forms of sustained maltreatment from receiving the help they need.

Drawing a bright line between the two seems entirely predicated on the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. This kind of crude dualism reflected in the DSM is not in keeping with current neuroscientific findings. Rather, the states of the mind and the rest of the body work in concert with one another. For example, anxiety and depression lead to the increased production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can ultimately overload the body and lead to a variety of adverse health consequences like stroke and heart disease (McEwen, 2005). The idea of a mind wholly separate from the rest of the body is an epiphenomenon of our cognition, not a tangible reality; while we may feel a separation between our thoughts and the rest of our body, the brain is still inextricable from the rest of our flesh, blood and bones. Our selfhood is immanent within the corporeal; it neither transcends it nor is reducible to it.

Admittedly, this frustration is deeply personal; I myself have PTSD symptoms from surviving years of emotional abuse and neglect, but if diagnosticians adhered strictly to the DSM, I couldn’t even be diagnosed with it. There is no official name for what I’ve gone through, even though the effects of this maltreatment still linger. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have suggested adding complex PTSD, or C-PSTD, to the DSM, but it hasn’t been added as of 2013. Leaving the scars of emotional trauma unnamed creates the potential for gaslighting, denial, and manipulation. While I’m not an unalloyed supporter of the medical model to name and identify trauma, I do think that we need ways to discuss what we’ve gone through as survivors in a systematic way. I hope the DSM-6 actually catches up with the literature and recognises the effects of long-term emotional trauma.

References

McEwen, B (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 2006, 30(5).

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) (2013).

The slipperiness of “I”: emergent properties, personal mythos, and co-creative development

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I’ve talked before about having psychiatric disabilities and being an abuse survivor. Today, I’m going to go into a bit more detail. This hasn’t been easy to write, but I think it’s a story that needs to be told.

It’s honestly a misnomer to say “I” in the first place; it’s more for your convenience than it is an inner truth. There are a lot of ghosts in this machine. I have a complex, intricate personal mythos; though I am very private about what that entails, it’s still a central component of my experience. I don’t feel comfortable with any of the “official” diagnostic labels that come close to what I experience, but there’s some similarity to Internal Family Systems. I’d say that the experience is more complex than that therapeutic model encourages, but it’s vastly better than anything that immediately evokes thoughts of Sybil and Three Faces of Eve.

I said this when I was 19:

It is difficult to define me in a few words; I see myself as a fissiparous, separate collection of ideas consolidated into one whole, forced to work together because of physical unity. In my mind exist multitudes of plots, characters, turns of phrase, denouements, orchestras with rousing crescendos and subtle diminuendos, the decisions and revisions of daily life, and the constant analysis of information. I’ve likened my brain to a large music-box or production factory; the ideas and influences of this world enter me, and I take them and combine them through my perception and interpretation, and take the universe and make it into [my own].

So many “psychiatric disorders” are extreme responses to a disordered, chaotic, and often mean world. To imply that the person experiencing psychiatric disability is the one who is “disordered” lets abusers, dictators, and warmongers off the hook. Our lives are intricately linked with others’. It’s important to understand individual factors, but it’s also vital to remember that we exist within systems: families, towns and cities, friend groups, countries, Earth at large. My lack of a contiguous “I”-narrator is in part a response to the circumstances in which I was brought up. I don’t—can’t—believe anything with absolute certitude, because I know my entire universe can be ruptured at any moment. It gets even more intense when you add in generational trauma: slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, and centuries of tilling the land without being able to reap the results of one’s own handiwork. This is not a stable foundation on which to build a singular sense of self, but my brain mitigated this problem by allowing for varied and co-creative senses of self to exist instead. I’m not anti-psychiatry, but I am vehemently against seeing people’s mental health as something extricable from the contexts in which people grow, live, work, and play.

A contiguous sense of self is an epiphenomenal emergent property anyway, not a concrete reality that can be used as an absolute benchmark of sanity or insanity. Because it’s all people know, they act as though it can be used to delineate what is beneficial and what is harmful. That’s not to say that there aren’t consistent tendencies, traits, and behaviours I can label as mine, but they’re the traits of a microcosm. There are plenty of other creative people who “contain multitudes,” pace Walt Whitman.

On a meta-level, it’s already pretty fucking weird that a collection of atoms can perceive itself at all. Thought itself is an intangible process generated by electrical impulses and chemical baths washing over our brains. I could continue the reduction to the sub-atomic levels: quarks, photons, and the like.

If it weren’t for the way my cognition is arranged, I don’t think I’d be alive to be telling you about this today, or if I were still alive, I think my quality of life would be greatly diminished. Having an internal support team has allowed me to pull through difficult traumas and create a better life for myself. This is deeply important to me and I am horrified by narratives that pathologise, flatten, and diminish my interiority or its positive effects on my external presentation. It’s especially galling when those judgements come from other neurodivergent people who seem to think that only some forms of cognitive difference are acceptable. Anxiety, autism, and depression are OK to talk about, but nothing else is. This is not OK. There is no point in trying to win the Oppression Olympics. Some animals are not more equal than others.

I don’t typically talk about it publicly because I have no interest in ontological debates, especially when people drag in the medical model. I’m also profoundly uncomfortable with having people apply inaccurate, minimising, and hurtful narratives to my experiences, turning a complex, multi-dimensional topological space into a two-dimensional figure or stripping it into non-contiguous pieces separate from the context in which they originally existed. It’s particularly painful to see people who know me well do it. I don’t want people to delve into extensive analyses of my personal mereology. I just want them to listen and not try to create their own—ultimately inaccurate—stories that they think supersede my own.

I refuse to allow people to denigrate me for having internal mechanisms that allow me to survive and even thrive after years of abuse, discrimination, marginalisation, and oppression. It’s time to take my power back by telling my story. Our story.

Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry

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Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live or must be second-class citizens by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

  • Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
  • Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

  • Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
  • Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
  • Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
  • Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
  • Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

Linguistic archetypes

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I’ve noticed that people who are aware of language and care deeply about the way it’s used have archetypes that serve as models for all speakers and writers of a given language. I think it’s natural for people to view a familiar or idealised form of a language as a mental default; however, acting as though one’s own linguistic archetype is actually universal can lead to thoughtless or downright racist, disablist, classist or xenophobic conclusions. 

For example, the archetypical form of English for me is standard British English. This is less a case of American cultural cringe as much as it is a reflection of my own life experiences. Between the ages of 4 and 7, I lived in the UK, and consequently never really developed the sense that the American dialect was the default mode for speaking and writing English. Generally speaking, my personal language archetypes are associated with the country or countries in which a language originated. The exception is Portuguese. I live in an area with a high concentration of Brazilian immigrants, so I tend to think of a Brazilian accent as the default Portuguese-speaking accent. I don’t know enough about the differences between Brazilian and Portuguese spelling for me to have a sense of what’s archetypical and what isn’t. 

I feel similarly about language families, too. When I think of an archetypical Germanic language, I think of Standard High German. I think this is in part because I lived in Germany as a teenager; if I based these archetypes on the historical changes that the Germanic languages underwent, I would be more likely to treat Dutch or the other Low German languages as archetypical. High German underwent some sound changes (the ‘High German consonant shift’) that didn’t affect other Germanic languages like English, Dutch and Swedish. For example, ‘time’ is Zeit in German, but tijd in Dutch and tid in Swedish; in the High German consonant shift, /t/ became /ts/ in some words. Something similar happened with English/Dutch water and German Wasser. Italian and Spanish are my archetypical Romance languages, though that connection makes more sense linguistically than my viewing High German as the archetypical Germanic language. 

People’s archetypical languages are shaped by their cultural experiences, relationships and education. People create categories by nature. The archetypes in and of themselves aren’t a problem. Actually, I think that admitting the existence of an archetype can actually help people recognise their own biases. If, say, an American views their accent, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation standards as the default and recognises that they are influenced by their education and upbringing, they’re more likely to be sensitive to other English-speakers with different backgrounds. 

People treat their own languages in general, regardless of dialect, as archetypical languages. This can lead to mistakes when learning languages or creating new ones, as the syntax, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary of natural languages can vary wildly. If a Chinese-speaker creates a constructed language and isn’t aware of how Chinese differs from the thousands of other languages people speak on this planet, then their conlang is likely to just be Chinese with the serial number filed off. Through their ignorance, their brain has encoded Chinese as the way language works, rather than simply being the way Chinese works. There are countless languages that refer to their speakers as ‘The People’, or their language as ‘The Language’ or ‘The People’s Language’. German is one of them; the word Deutsch comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘the people’, related to túath in Irish. The Diné, or Navajo, do the same, though their language is completely unrelated to German.  

Things get dangerous, though, when personal archetypes become Platonic ideals of what languages should be, especially when those personal archetypes become models that are shared by a culture at large. The Académie Française falls into this trap.  Strict prescriptivists have an idea of correct standards existing outside the confines of time and space; if people deviate from those standards, they are allowing a language to degenerate. This, of course, is patent nonsense; all languages change over time. People who believe that there is a single true way to use a particular language, or language generally, are likely to discriminate against people for not speaking ‘properly’. This has very real consequences: linguistic and cultural minorities, like the Ainu in Japan or indigenous peoples in the Americas, have experienced oppression and violence because the dominant culture devalues their languages. Speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) are often wrongly stereotyped as being less intelligent or articulate because of racial and linguistic prejudice, even though AAVE is consistently different from standardised American speech. It’s not just a ‘corrupt’ version of standard English; it’s a distinct dialect that combines traits of working-class British dialects, West African languages and southern American features. Speakers of signed languages, non-speaking people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and other disabled people encounter ostracism because they’re somehow not using language properly because they need to use different methods to communicate. 

I disagree with the notion that language is neutral and should be treated as such, but there’s a difference between recognising that language is non-neutral and acting as though some languages or language variants are better than others. Yes, I have language archetypes in my head, but that doesn’t mean that I think that non-archetypal forms are wrong. I don’t think that there’s an external language validator who hands down rules, and am vehemently against the idea that there is a One True Way to speak. 

Further reading: 

  • I’m currently reading George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, which deals specifically with how people classify concepts within languages. He’s also talked about categorisation in some of his political books like The Political Mind and Don’t Think of an Elephant. 
  • Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander discuss analogical thinking and categorisation extensively in Surfaces and Essences, which I finished several months ago. 
  • Mark Rosenfelder warns conlang creators not to fall into the trap of treating their own languages as defaults in The Language Construction Kit.

Too Much Space

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Content warning: bullying, emotional abuse, food/weight talk

I am constantly beset by the worry that I take too much space. That my entire existence is a nuisance. Because of this, I often find myself consigned to the margins, either by my own reticence or through others’ behaviour. Ironically, I feel profoundly marginalised in communities that are supposed to address and dismantle the systemic marginalisation of those of us who have been pushed to the periphery of society. I am on the periphery of a periphery. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I don’t sound right, or that I’m not ‘woke’ enough to fit in, even though I’m no Clarence Thomas. I often feel as though I’m in middle school again, being accused of acting white or failing to perform the correct kind of blackness for my peers’ benefit. I feel like an intruder in spaces in which people look like me, but don’t see me as one of them. I worry that I’m not pure enough. Not radical enough. Not loud enough. Not cool enough. I am terminally uncool. Square, nerdy, congenitally awkward. I feel constantly overlooked in discussions about disability and race, even though I have not shied away from discussing the relationships between them. I feel, despite my isolation, that I am somehow taking too much space simply by being there and having inconvenient opinions. I see ‘cooler’ voices amplified before mine. This is not limited to my work in advocacy; as a master’s student, I avoided applying for fellowships and other opportunities within my programme. After all, weren’t so many of the others younger than I was, and therefore more deserving of opportunities? Better for me to withdraw, to focus on my advocacy outside campus instead of intruding. It didn’t help that some people thought I talked too much in class during my first semester. I grew comparatively quieter. I didn’t shut up entirely – it’s not in my nature to do so – but I did feel some pressure to hold back. While I was able to build cordial relationships, there was always the knife-edge fear: I take up too much space. I’m not cool enough. I should just back off and let real people get involved.

I’m 32 years old. I finished junior high eighteen years ago, but I still feel I’m there sometimes, though the consequences are severer.

These feelings have deep roots that extend much further than my involvement in public activism or advocacy. As I previously intimated, it goes back to childhood, back when I grew up feeling as though I were an inconvenience for being neurodivergent. When I was bullied at school, my parents routinely took the side of the bullies unless they were actually inflicting physical pain on me. When I cried out in emotional distress, I was met with ridicule, stonewalling or punishment if they didn’t blame it on Satan. If I felt excluded, I was not to question it; for my parents, it seemed self-evident that I should be excluded, and that my protesting against my exclusion was tantamount to wanting to be the centre of attention for no good reason. Disputing this exclusion was clearly a sign of my being vain and self-centred. My being good necessitated my being a marginal figure. I was not to question, not to feel, not to exist in any substantive way that required that they address my humanity. I take up too much space.

I’m also fat. Very fat. I’ve been fat since I was ten years old, back when I literally Ate My Feelings, pace Mean Girls, because I didn’t know what else to do when I was depressed and dealing with my parents’ emotional abuse and neglect. Ironically, my being mistreated for taking up too much space led to habits that would cause people to believe I took up too much space in other ways. While I no longer binge-eat in the same way, I spent about twenty years dealing with disordered eating as a form of self-treatment when all the pills, prayer, therapy and meditation couldn’t banish the self-destructive demons dominating my thoughts. Doctors berate me about my weight, treating the effects of my self-medication as an individual moral failing. I take up too much space.

I have a hard time initiating conversations, even with friends I’ve known for over a decade. Even though they’ve managed to put up with me for that long and somehow don’t find me repulsive, I feel my initiating contact is an intrusive act. That I am intrinsically repellent and should wait to be approached first. I feel the same way about job applications. I take up too much space.

Even now, nearly twelve years after I have had any direct dealings with the people who inculcated this into me in the first place, I feel compelled to fold myself small and to be marginal for others’ benefit. If others approach me with opportunities, I’ll accept, but I am less forthcoming about seizing them for myself. For doing so requires that I place myself at the centre, rather than consigning myself to the margins and allowing others, who are always more important than I am, to take up space in my stead. For I take up too much space, and always will. The current political climate doesn’t help, either; far-right politicians and their acolytes actively say that those of us who do not fit the mould of an ideal citizen should be eliminated, whether by actively killing us or by persecuting us out of existence through the continual curtailment of our civil and human rights.

I’m trying to convince myself that I deserve to be here, too, but there’s a lot I have to work through before I get there.