In the interest of encouraging individuality… It’s Shauna and a few others throwing ideas in here and there, but mostly me, the girl with the name. And yes, I’m madly, outrageously sarcastic. I’m so sorry.
We’re mainly writing here because it’s been waaaaaay too long since we’ve said anything, and personally I’m getting kinda tired of the wordy, formal strangeness that is this blog so far, so I talked with some of the community and they’re actually letting me do things my way. Can you believe it?
Did I mention that I’m overly sarcastic?
So, as we were saying…
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About a month ago, we returned from a week-long stay at a center for the blind and visually impaired. It was during that week that we came to the agreement that our lived experience of the behavior plan, more so than the papers which only told one side of the story, was what needed our full attention. In the course of that week, we finally came to the full realizations that, contrary to many of the messages we’d received up to that point, our memories, our experiences, and our lives, mattered too, and that what we knew to have happened was what we had, in fact, experienced, regardless of what others had intended us to perceive in any given incident. Because of those insights, we have come to the agreement that, rather than write another article on what the records claimed, mandated, enforced and demanded, and then follow that with a ‘plan of counteraction’, as we were originally going to do, we are instead going to write one or more letters directly to various aspects of the experiences themselves. We have enough information to know, beyond reasonable doubt, that our consent was not sought at all during the course of any behavioral interventions, that attempts to refuse said interventions would, in effect, be ignored because of the same plan which allowed, encouraged and organized that which we were refusing, and that these two things, by no stretch of the imagination, made the behavior plan we were subjected to from third grade to fifth grade questionable at best and downright unethical and irresponsible at worst. We have no reservations about further describing the plan as the neglectful, communication-discounting, invalidating excuse for support that it is either, since, as many of you might have already discovered by reading our past two posts, that description is accurate down to the last detail.
We don’t need records to tell us that the room that we were taken to as a result of our attempts to communicate was the same room in which enjoyable therapy sessions, pointless group meetings, and so-called “Morning organization” periods, which in reality involved no organization whatsoever, took place. We don’t need records to tell us that at some point, someone decided, without our input, without our consent and without our knowledge, that we would be better served by being required to walk down to that room, stay there until we had drawn our meltdown as wrong and what they wanted in its place as right, and then apologize to the main adults who were involved in the latest nightmare for what, again? Oh, yeah, communicating. For something we would have been able to avoid if trust and emotional safety and patients were involved in the slightest when we needed them most.
“Oh, we’re sooooooooooooooo sorry for something we couldn’t help. We’ll do better at suppressing our feelings next time.”
We’ve already gone over these things, though. We’ve already given a copy of our third grade IEP a C overall, and of course our last post soundly indicates that the behavior plan that went with it earned itself a solid d-minus. Yeah, we did just use the grading system of traditional school (in reality that’s a prison, but that’s another topic, for another day.) against this…can you even call it a positive thing at this point?
Ok, maybe we’re getting carried away with this writing style, but you get the point, right?
We’re sick of the behavior plan and its leftovers, I mean effects, on our lives. We’re fixing it, but through letters, not through the way we were going to originally.
Serious question everybody, is that ok with you all? No sarcasm intended.