BRAND X
Posts tagged ableism
yilduza said: also, stop writing books about how ppl with x diagnoses are evil or abusive and write books about abuse warning signs and survival that aren’t based on unreliable and ableist premises (& ignore that we get abused too)
^
Reactive Attachment Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder
Oppositional-Defiant Disorder
The list goes on…
To say little of how some of these diagnoses (especially the first and third) hugely intersect with racism and are automatically imposed upon anyone whose identity goes beyond sheltered, white Western standards (namely international &/ transracial adoptees and foster children)
Funny how Eurocentric societies believe themselves intrinsically superior and quick to deem all other cultures as less superstitious and gullible, meanwhile wallowing in their own superstitions that are actually far worse and more abusive, couched in shit-brained pseudoscientific miasma and rammed down on people with the full weight from centuries of global oppression.
26 notes (via dickensian-werewolf & mommy-cuteella)
The effects of severe abuse and neglect on children during critical learning stages of life. Therapy to resolve this attachment disorder involves the construction of empathy - the building of a conscience and soul.
[…]with any therapeutic technique there’s risk of harm to the patient, true? Be it physical or emotional, from death and injury to breaks with reality - and the more extreme the method, the greater risks you take.
Giving someone with no moral standing a morally intensive place to grow is not bad, and these kids are attempted murders who’d be treated so much harsher under the penal system - a place where many other socially deficient youths find themselves.
This is Nancy Thomas and her daughter (now business partner) Beth in HBO’s program Child of Rage, subsequently spun into a network drama of the same title.
Thomas is one of the most famous and well-paid figures in North American adoption industry & foster care systems, despite having no professional training in therapy and no academic credentials. A former dog trainer and foster parent, she claims her AT/P (Attachment Therapy/Parenting) methods as effective for treating “Attachment Disordered” adoptees, children with Asperger’s, Tourette’s Syndrome, and children from “satanic cults.”
The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s (APSAC) task force in Child Maltreatment repeatedly cites Nancy Thomas in their condemnation of Attachment Therapy, its parenting techniques, and the “Attachment Disorder” diagnosis as abusive pseudoscience.
Selected Child Victims of AT/P from 1989 - 2011 [TRIGGER WARNING: torture, sadism, murder]
(Re-uploaded gifset as I refuse to reblog Retro-therapy directly or anyone who shares his views. If this ableist propaganda’s gonna circulate, it’d better originate from a source that provides context.)
Hi, again! I don’t think your understanding is heavy enough for you to digest all the moving parts present within this discussion. Call it an argument, call it a discussion, call it a debate, but what we’re talking about pulls inference from not only psychology, but biology, ethics, sociology, history, and common sense, all in equal parts.
These attempts at disdain for —as was awkwardly phrased— “internet understanding” are pretty funny, given that you’re a Wal-mart cog with no experience/credentials in any of the aforementioned fields and your pitiable education hails from a negligible school (even by American standards) in your shitty local backwater. (To be fair, my clinical, hyperlinked sources must have honestly confused you, clearly you aren’t used to reading or providing citations). Your need to project the sad limitations of your own circumstances is painfully obvious as Internet is the only means by which you can access this level of information.
I was going to spin this into an intro post for new followers, a fun show of sorts of what happens to bio spawn cruel and stupid enough to pathologize us while peddling the snake oil of Nancy Thomas and Connell Watkins, a child murderer convicted in one of the most notorious cases of torture in modern history — but eh, when we found out everything we needed to know about you, I got so bored I decided to cut it relatively short.
Your real name is Robin DeNelson Usher and you are an ableist, child torture apologist nobody.You’re not in a position to question anyone’s understanding of this subject matter, much less anyone who can curtail your professional prospects with a few phone calls and e-mails. I can see why you chose to move to Colorado. That U.S. state has boasted practically nonexistent regulations regarding clinical practice and child welfare, which accounts for why so many sadistic quacks (like Watkins) set up shop there. Unfortunately for you, it’s also home to equally powerful contingents of child rights advocacy that have drafted landmark legislation against such lethal bullshit. The only time people like these will ever remember the name of a person like you will be thanks to me, so really, you’re welcome. I may not have enough time to disabuse of you of your horrifying beliefs and oppressive ignorance (not to mention the ridiculous factual errors in all of your statements), but I can ensure that your ass is never allowed near a traumatized child.
Oh, but do feel free to keep shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. The more fodder for us, the better.
You were saying? X
And you’re focus is strong semantically, but don’t press the issue of correlation and signs too heavily. Credentials are good, but they don’t qualify a man to be a healer, per se; Doctorates are no match for a strong mind - ask Socrates, ask Bill Gates. Oh, and realize that most thoughts or techniques which are controversial are often times dismissed or neglected come first appearances - ask Galileo, ask Copernicus.
I say all that to paint a picture of how Nancy and Beth’s worth isn’t drawn from the credentials they lack. I say all that to illustrate how something beneficial to understanding the human experience can also be found as ethically questionable by some (see Milgram study for other examples.)
And there are three other issues with the rational behind your position. You seem to think Nancy Thomas’ Attachment Parenting is synonymous with all of Attachment Therapy. You seem to have an internet and superficial understanding of what she did, reportedly, in treating Beth. There weren’t any rebirth sessions, there wasn’t any abuse - what we saw in the treatment of Beth Thomas where themes no different from what you’d find in strict parenting. There was discipline, preventative measure, and exercises in ethics - nothing more. You should also research Connell Watkins’s role in her treatment, because it may give insight as to how straight edge everything was.
The second problem I see with your understanding is that you seem to have something against the use of animal training techniques in the treatments of human beings. But we’re animals, right? And as I mentioned earlier, attachment parenting is really no different from applied behavioral analysis - the only method approved by the Surgeon General and Psychological Association researching the treatment of Autism and behavioral deficiencies. A method based on Skinner’s Operant Conditioning, one of two respected training techniques.
And the last issue resonates back to you having an internet understanding of this issue. Websites won’t make it clear that Attachment Parenting is not completely synonymous with what we now know as Attachment Therapy. A lot of websites also won’t make it clear that Attachment Therapy refers to a number of techniques - some being more far ended than others. In recent years, Nancy has fallen in with the negative connotations of AT, and those are the years wherein my approval of her ideologies wane, but again, she practiced the respectable system of attachment parenting with Beth.
14 notes (via retro-therapy & brandx)
“These children need a different kind of love — the type that forces them to love others[…] it is the therapist’s job to disturb the disturbed.”
— Foster Cline, Conscienceless Acts“In the beginning, your child should learn to ask for everything. They must ask to go to the bathroom, to…
Jesus.
Our whole adoption complex is so fucked. Why is it so hard to grasp the concept of only adopting a kid so you can love/support them and let them grow into their own person? If I had been adopted rather than raised by my biological parents, I would have been diagnosed with some bullshit attachment disorder (because it just wasn’t my style to attach to anyone as a kid) and probably killed or at the very least traumatized by some bullshit corrective therapy.
If you were adopted rather than bio spawned, you’d be diagnosed with attachment disorder REGARDLESS of your real behavior and/or “style.”
All adoptees are stigmatized from the get go. This is why even East Asian adoptees (widely branded as the most docile variety) are automatically likened to Lord Voldemort.
Attachment Disorder’s “symptoms” are purposefully catch-all inclusive. Are you quiet and withdrawn? Then you’re “empty-eyed” and “not affectionate on parent’s terms.” Are you affectionate and playful? Then you’re “superficially engaging and charming” and just waiting for an opportunity to poison your family’s water supply with strychnine or some shit.
Oh, and then there’s our supposed “inability to feel pain” whilst being “overly sensitive to touch.”
I can’t even begin to go into detail on what happens when disability enters the picture, or when we come from different cultures than the oppressive one we’re adopted into.
Attachment theory worships eye contact as a bonding benchmark, utterly failing to realize that many of the non-Eurocentric (and far less violent) cultures that comprise the adoption industry’s “supply regions” traditionally teach children to avoid directly looking at adults as a SIGN OF RESPECT.
I’ve worked on a lawsuit with another adoptee who is congenitally blind. She was diagnosed as dangerously attachment disordered by one of the leading adoption experts in all of Europe for failing to memorize Braille characters that she had not yet been taught.
I heard all of this as a domestic adoptee. This attitude took a small child with a limited capacity to love and made her into a psuedo-sociopath with their “therapies” and “love”. Well, guess what? I didn’t want any role in their love. They want to see a sociopath, well then you can have one. I have love. It just wasn’t for them.
^ Direct & verbatim quote from the APA APSAC (American Psychological Association & American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children) Task Force that debunked such pseudoscientific, abusive attitudes and practices for what they are.
(Hell, there’s not even any scientific support for the rampant notion that adoptees have lifelong ‘attachment problems’, but that’s another post.)
I don’t know you from my birth mother (har), but what is known is that no living being on earth can EVER live up to the impossible and contradictory standards systemically imposed upon adoptees. These quacks literally pathologize us as burgeoning serial killers if we’re not “respectful, responsible, and fun to be around” 24/7 even as small children.
[TRIGGER WARNING: above link contains torture, sadism, ableism]
Just a few things to keep in mind the next time you feel that your capacity to love somehow doesn’t measure up or something. Take care and stay gloriously ungrateful. X
20 notes (via bastardplanet & brandx)
It bothers me a lot that I will never know the name my birth mother gave me or even the actual day I was born. These may seem like incredibly insignificant details to other people but you only notice how important they are when you don’t know your ‘real’ name or real birthday. Does it bother you guys too?
Yes, but moreso on a political level. Personally* it doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as people ignorant enough to buy into the ableist superstition that adoptees are “primally wounded” burgeoning serial killers will assume.
I empathize with and support any and all adoptees who are greatly bothered by the erasure of the profound makings of identity. We are a marginalized and oppressed class. We are NOT “attachment disordered” we are NOT “damaged goods,” and we do NOT have “Ted Bundy disease.”
(*It IS a total infuriating pain in the ass being denied access to one’s medical history/ having it erased altogether tho)
17 notes (via theadoptionblog)
The effects of severe abuse and neglect on children during critical learning stages of life. Therapy to resolve this attachment disorder involves the construction of empathy - the building of a conscience and soul.
[…]with any therapeutic technique there’s risk of harm to the patient, true? Be it physical or emotional, from death and injury to breaks with reality - and the more extreme the method, the greater risks you take.
Giving someone with no moral standing a morally intensive place to grow is not bad, and these kids are attempted murders who’d be treated so much harsher under the penal system - a place where many other socially deficient youths find themselves.
This is Nancy Thomas and her daughter (now business partner) Beth in HBO’s program Child of Rage, subsequently spun into a network drama of the same title.
Thomas is one of the most famous and well-paid figures in North American adoption industry & foster care systems, despite having no professional training in therapy and no academic credentials. A former dog trainer and foster parent, she claims her AT/P (Attachment Therapy/Parenting) methods as effective for treating “Attachment Disordered” adoptees, children with Asperger’s, Tourette’s Syndrome, and children from “satanic cults.”
The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s (APSAC) task force in Child Maltreatment repeatedly cites Nancy Thomas in their condemnation of Attachment Therapy, its parenting techniques, and the “Attachment Disorder” diagnosis as abusive pseudoscience.
Selected Child Victims of AT/P from 1989 - 2011 [TRIGGER WARNING: torture, sadism, murder]
(Re-uploaded gifset as I refuse to reblog Retro-therapy directly or anyone who shares his views. If this ableist propaganda’s gonna circulate, it’d better originate from a source that provides context.)
14 notes
![heavyplacement:
brandx:
[TRIGGER WARNING: child abuse] “If you don’t know if a parent’s a really awesome parent or not, we have a little test. You look at the child. If the child has their head and their arms and legs still attached, that’s it! It’s an awesome mom, an awesome dad. And you know, it’s just proof right there. Because if they weren’t an awesome mom and dad, they would have ripped the child’s head off by now, or at least an arm, you know.”— Nancy Thomas, Healing Trust: Rebuilding the Broken Bond for the Child with Reactive Attachment Disorder [CONTINUE READING…]
holy shit holy shit i just googled “nancy thomas attachment” (since it’s a common name so you get a lot of unrelated people) and if it’s not actually her site, she’s out-and-out dismissed as a quack, an abuser, and even and outright cult leader. HOW DID THESE QUOTES NOT TIP PEOPLE OFF, THOUGH?
why would anyone trust someone who genuinely thinks a parent’s natural tendency is to maim and kill their children
Nancy Thomas is not a doctor. She has never attempted or obtained a doctorate in ANY field, much less one in medicine. Furthermore, she possesses no clinical training or academic credentials whatsoever.
These facts alone are enough evidence to prove Retro-therapy an intellectually worthless loser, a pathetic liar, or a salty amalgamation of the two (my money’s on the latter).
But all that only begins to address the noxious bullshit of his response. Skipping over the fun fact that not even fellow quack practitioners wish to be associated with Nancy Thomas —which Heavyplacement already pointed out— her “ethically questionable therapies” (nice euphemism btw) cannot in ANY way be construed as therapeutic OR medical.
The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) released its task force report in Child Maltreatment condemning the entirety of Attachment Therapy, its parenting methods, and the “Attachment Disorder” diagnosis as abusive pseudoscience. The APSAC task force repeatedly cites Nancy Thomas specifically as an egregious example of unscientific methodology.
You can get the report from The American Psychological Association (which like any legitimate therapeutic/clinical organization also disavows these “therapies” as abusive crap).
As to Retro-therapy’s claim that “the efficacy of these therapies can be seen in their results,” Nancy Thomas’s daughter & now business partner Beth is the only public survivor of her mother’s methods to speak positively about them.
on and there’s the inconvenient fact that this snake oil has racked up a body count.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/b4b7b2e0e43d7f61e1837143afa2cabe/tumblr_mm2t5q1tHB1qa06xko1_500.png)
[TRIGGER WARNING: child abuse] “If you don’t know if a parent’s a really awesome parent or not, we have a little test. You look at the child. If the child has their head and their arms and legs still attached, that’s it! It’s an awesome mom, an awesome dad. And you know, it’s just proof right there. Because if they weren’t an awesome mom and dad, they would have ripped the child’s head off by now, or at least an arm, you know.”
— Nancy Thomas, Healing Trust: Rebuilding the Broken Bond for the Child with Reactive Attachment Disorder [CONTINUE READING…]holy shit holy shit i just googled “nancy thomas attachment” (since it’s a common name so you get a lot of unrelated people) and if it’s not actually her site, she’s out-and-out dismissed as a quack, an abuser, and even and outright cult leader. HOW DID THESE QUOTES NOT TIP PEOPLE OFF, THOUGH?
why would anyone trust someone who genuinely thinks a parent’s natural tendency is to maim and kill their children
These facts alone are enough evidence to prove Retro-therapy an intellectually worthless loser, a pathetic liar, or a salty amalgamation of the two (my money’s on the latter).
But all that only begins to address the noxious bullshit of his response. Skipping over the fun fact that not even fellow quack practitioners wish to be associated with Nancy Thomas —which Heavyplacement already pointed out— her “ethically questionable therapies” (nice euphemism btw) cannot in ANY way be construed as therapeutic OR medical.
The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) released its task force report in Child Maltreatment condemning the entirety of Attachment Therapy, its parenting methods, and the “Attachment Disorder” diagnosis as abusive pseudoscience. The APSAC task force repeatedly cites Nancy Thomas specifically as an egregious example of unscientific methodology.
You can get the report from The American Psychological Association (which like any legitimate therapeutic/clinical organization also disavows these “therapies” as abusive crap).
As to Retro-therapy’s claim that “the efficacy of these therapies can be seen in their results,” Nancy Thomas’s daughter & now business partner Beth is the only public survivor of her mother’s methods to speak positively about them.
on and there’s the inconvenient fact that this snake oil has racked up a body count.
19 notes (via heavyplacement & brandx)
[TRIGGER WARNING: child abuse] “If you don’t know if a parent’s a really awesome parent or not, we have a little test. You look at the child. If the child has their head and their arms and legs still attached, that’s it! It’s an awesome mom, an awesome dad. And you know, it’s just proof right there. Because if they weren’t an awesome mom and dad, they would have ripped the child’s head off by now, or at least an arm, you know.”
— Nancy Thomas, Healing Trust: Rebuilding the Broken Bond for the Child with Reactive Attachment Disorder
“I will sit on the child. I have had to do this with dogs as well, and they are generally more dangerous with their teeth and claws than children. … I pick a good book and read while I sit on a child and that really seems to upset them because they feel that I should be miserable like they are[…] A lot of people don’t want to be touched by strangers. It’s very invasive. We use that knowledge in therapy.”
— Nancy Thomas, Bonding & Attachment Workshop
“It is the child’s job to make the parents happy with the child.”
— Nancy Thomas, When Love is Not Enough
“I’ll say [to the child], “I just love having you. It saves me so much grocery money.” And when my husband serves the food, I make sure that they only get one little teaspoon of a bite. “There’s no sense in serving you a whole serving. We just have to give it to the dog.”
— Nancy Thomas, Bonding & Attachment Workshop
Well, then.
You’re an ableist, ignorant piece of shit who shouldn’t be allowed within a mile of any child, much less one who is adopted and/or autistic.
I shall further school and make an example of your child torture apologist ass later. Stay pressed. X
(Source: brandx)
19 notes
“These children need a different kind of love — the type that forces them to love others[…] it is the therapist’s job to disturb the disturbed.”
— Foster Cline, Conscienceless Acts“In the beginning, your child should learn to ask for everything. They must ask to go to the bathroom, to…
Jesus.
Our whole adoption complex is so fucked. Why is it so hard to grasp the concept of only adopting a kid so you can love/support them and let them grow into their own person? If I had been adopted rather than raised by my biological parents, I would have been diagnosed with some bullshit attachment disorder (because it just wasn’t my style to attach to anyone as a kid) and probably killed or at the very least traumatized by some bullshit corrective therapy.
If you were adopted rather than bio spawned, you’d be diagnosed with attachment disorder REGARDLESS of your real behavior and/or “style.”
All adoptees are stigmatized from the get go. This is why even East Asian adoptees (widely branded as the most docile variety) are automatically likened to Lord Voldemort.
Attachment Disorder’s “symptoms” are purposefully catch-all inclusive. Are you quiet and withdrawn? Then you’re “empty-eyed” and “not affectionate on parent’s terms.” Are you affectionate and playful? Then you’re “superficially engaging and charming” and just waiting for an opportunity to poison your family’s water supply with strychnine or some shit.
Oh, and then there’s our supposed “inability to feel pain” whilst being “overly sensitive to touch.”
I can’t even begin to go into detail on what happens when disability enters the picture, or when we come from different cultures than the oppressive one we’re adopted into.
Attachment theory worships eye contact as a bonding benchmark, utterly failing to realize that many of the non-Eurocentric (and far less violent) cultures that comprise the adoption industry’s “supply regions” traditionally teach children to avoid directly looking at adults as a SIGN OF RESPECT.
I’ve worked on a lawsuit with another adoptee who is congenitally blind. She was diagnosed as dangerously attachment disordered by one of the leading adoption experts in all of Europe for failing to memorize Braille characters that she had not yet been taught.
20 notes (via verbonme & brandx)
A small sampling of what the West’s most powerful adoption experts have to say about adoptees:
“These children need a different kind of love — the type that forces them to love others[…] it is the therapist’s job to disturb the disturbed.”
— Foster Cline, Conscienceless Acts“In the beginning, your child should learn to ask for everything. They must ask to go to the bathroom, to get a drink of water, EVERYTHING. When it starts to feel like they must ask to breathe, you are on the right track[…] it is the child’s job to make the parents happy with the child.”
— Nancy Thomas, When Love is Not Enough
“I like those kind of kids who are non-compliant, that are non-responsive … avoidant, depressed, traumatized, psychotic, whatever they are. Those are my favorite kids. Because you know what? They do the best … sooner or later, they break.”
— Ronald Federici, Treating Multi-Impaired Attachment Disorders
“These are the kids that grow up to be serial murderers.”
— Neil Feinberg, Perspectives on Attachment Disorder
(Source: brandx)
20 notes
Can you imagine a website on domestic violence (but isn’t child abuse domestic violence?) offering advice to an abuser on how to get back together with their victim?
Why are children who run away from home criminalized?
Why do we make it next to…
Cutting my birth family out of my life was one of the best decisions I ever made. I can’t even comprehend how much happier my life has been since I decided that no, I didn’t owe them anything, I didn’t need to have any sort of relationship with them, they didn’t deserve another chance, and that I deserved to put myself first.
But this is so true, I’ve had all sorts of people say things that basically amount to ‘give them a second chance’, never mind that I was put into foster care because they were abusive and neglectful, people saying, ‘Oh but I’m sure they loved you’ like that makes it all better, like I should keep quiet and forgive them.
It is ten times harder for adopted children to break the silence about abuse. Adoption industry leaders and “experts” who’ve founded foster care paradigms dictate verbatim that the public must, “believe the parents, not the child.”
The lifelong demands placed upon adoptees to be utterly grateful to our “saviors” (both the family and society we are adopted into) intersects to lethal consequence with the Eurocentric anthropologically deviant ableism that systemically stigmatizes adoptees as serial killers before we even clear puberty.
As someone who was also adopted and then subsequently put into foster care as my “saviors” continued to escape any and all consequences for their criminal abuse, I am truly SO FREAKING GLAD you managed to escape your abusers. Most of us who go through “disrupted adoptions” aren’t so lucky to survive to such an extent. We’re the secrets that not even the most liberal outfits are willing to countenance, because our very existence is a slap in the face to the bullshit White Savior Industrial Complex narrative that must always invariably end happily in some softlit ‘Third World Solidarity’ power trip-cum-fantasy.
Take care and stay gloriously ungrateful. X
107 notes (via screamthestarsout & dickensian-werewolf)
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