From: Andrew Phelps <dis_course@yahoo.com>
To: s-acc@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [s-acc] abuse enhancement
Date: Sat 06/25/11 04:36 PM
Hi
I'm seeing a different networking dynamic develop on S-ACC. People indicate that things "work differently now." We set up this "Work Group" so that our concerns regarding respect would engage via social accountability rather than by a "first wave" dominance paradigm. The prevailing "behavior object" personalization of the client/survivors has constituted the dialogical milieu.
Now the system is more and more getting tangled in its own "abuse denial." We worked that at Anaheim so that "SAMHSA blinked" and "Mickey Mouse won"
HERE. We are still accounted as "behavior objects" rather than as "persons with integrity" - but that system 'entanglement' has informed the behavior managers that they have "management deficiencies." Kmo posted recently that he's now considered to be "symptomatic" .. which to my mind serves as a rationalization for "management deficiency" .. I call it abuse enhancement.Obviously we've fought for more opportunity to engage social change effectively - and the net experience is that the system needs to find new ways to "keep us down." Their alternative would be a fulsome self-criticism like acknowledgement of the "clinical gaze" phenomenology. Many individual psychologist/clinicians I know have reached to that deeper acknowledgement of trauma treatment phenomenology, but that marginalizes them in the system power structure, by and large. For now, what we experience is new "hits" as "abuse enhancement" seeks out new ways to "keep us down."
We are into social accountability in part because we don't construct our personalities around protest, or around system accommodation. Now that the system itself has "blinked," we have to find new creative ways to renetwork and keep up our advocacy meaningfully. Nor will that be easy: Sue Poole saw the need, went for "feminist therapy" as a way through her abuse experience, and .. didn't make it (spring 2010). We need to work towards the kind of support structures where people who take new risks to challenge the enhancement(s) can do so safely.
Best
Andrew