Distorted Realities

Well everyone, here is another topic that I could just start rambling about when there really could be a nice article about it.  But I will still just say the simple thing which is about CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The idea is that people have “cognitive distortions” where negative things in their mind have become exaggerated and there are illogical thoughts that cause bad emotions.  And if people are restored to the more reasonable truth about things, then some of their pain would go away. It is a famous therapy from being so effective and it is interesting to read about during times of relative sanity. But I just want to say that I think sometimes the distortions in question are actually created in reality, and people’s catastrophic overgeneralizations, such as “nothing I do is good enough,” or things like jumping to a conclusion where you think that things can’t possibly go right, have actually been established for real in peoples’ lives.  So when they make those complaints, there might be some truth to it because of other people’s bad treatment.  And because of one of the actual bad cognitive habits of self-blame, the interpretation of people’s thoughts as automatically being wrong becomes another layer of fallacy where the patient is taking the blame for things that other people have had more to do with than anyone realizes.  I think that CBT can still help for people with trauma or stress, because basically these distortions have become learned, so the beliefs themselves can be untangled to bring relief.  However, if this component where the truth of the problems does not get understood, then to me the CBT itself becomes both another set of distortions, and another unreasonable aspect of reality that pressures people’s mental strength into cracking. Do you guys see what I mean? I am saying that every single one of those illogical habits from the CBT lists are absurdities that can take place in real life. And to assume that a mentally ill person has simply misperceived their reality to the point of insanity might actually be a misperception that itself would be seen as the most damaging distortion, other than the truly outrageously preposterously warped and twisted circumstances that cause people to break in permanent ways.

The Irony of Lacking Accommodations

Something I have experienced that is very common and defining for a lot of people with mental illness is the phenomenon of mostly doing what I am supposed to while a lot of sane people near me don’t do what they are supposed to and rely on everyone assuming that I am the one being bad because I have mental illness. Many of my friends are heroically and conspicuously not guilty of that offense, but that common problem should not be underestimated as an extreme source of additional damage to already suffering people. The fact is that when people’s brains have various problems, ranging from slight quirks and imbalances to severe damage, it creates a challenge to keep previous standards, and especially to match the ways other people are used to living and expect everyone to conform to. So, we appear to be habitually in error but are often spending a hundred times the effort of most people to do our responsibilities and help others. Meanwhile, people with a fraction of our challenges flail around without even an inkling that there might be a worthy mission or even basic decency to dedicate their own rich life to. These kinds of mistakes can be grown out of and unlearned, and people with disabilities themselves are often the most likely people to see through external trappings of social norms and superficial tickets to acceptance. However, the true blindness to right and wrong remains a problem that will eventually be reckoned with on a scale of eternal exposure and significance. 

It simply is the definition of injustice to spend years accommodating other people’s ignorance and selfishness while they refuse to accommodate my disability that is already reduced 80 percent by my own symptom management. And then that I would show up to church as a depressed person and be viewed automatically as morally inferior while already putting up with an irony that cruel in my daily life is an embarrassment too unspeakable and shameful to represent a whole culture. And yet it may never be lived down.

Think about that for a second in terms of accommodation that supposedly is required by law.  In a way, it is probably measurable, whether people know it or not.  And if the reality is that people who have it pretty easy can’t adjust their lives and treatment of others to offer a mere 5-10 percent of patience, but people like me are literally adapting to life with severe constant impairment that requires an 80 percent change in how we would prefer to behave, or even more than a hundred percent and exponential if you consider accumulative effects of things like attendance, staying alive while suicidal, and working at all when the pay is a third of what we should be making, then the question falls back to the healthy people who might be not only refusing a minimal amount of effort to include all people, but might actually be doing worse than that and spending close to a hundred percent of their whole life not caring at all about their impact on any part of the whole world.  That can be seen as a spiritual problem to be pitied above and injury or illness, but I think in the long run, it is more likely to show itself as a moral problem that goes tolerated far too much and with a cost that exceeds any basic consideration that the whole sum of disabled people have ever begged for in a state of rejection and torture.