August 1, 2011
On Saturday, July 30, 2011, the tension at Another Way was so high that I forgot that I had something prescheduled on Sunday and that I wouldn’t have been able to go by Another Way on Sunday anyway.
The place doesn’t seem to be staffed mostly by professionals, which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing. It seems as if the idea behind the staffing is to have people with psychiatric histories be the staff in a place that is for the support of people with psychiatric histories.
Unfortunately, it seems to be a common stage of the process of having had a psychiatric history that people go through to take some time transitioning out of being traumatized by the loss of personal power and by the stigmatization that goes along with having been diagnosed with a mental illness. Instead of immediately developing enhanced compassion for others and a real desire to have an egalitarian way of life, a lot of people go through the stage of victimizing others in the same way that they themselves were victimized by mental health care professionals, and by society in general which is horrible to people with psychiatric histories. “I’m saner and/or more in control of myself than you are;” that tends to be the personal competition about it, for a while.
Then, there’s also the fact that the big harassers have sought not only to stigmatize me but to create the means to stigmatize all women, and that’s very appealing to people who haven’t transcended their own stigmatization. There were days at Another Way in the beginning where the harassment was more constant that it has been almost anywhere else, and the reactions to my objections to being harassed were as pr more agitated or even violent as they've been almost anywhere else.
@ 4:14 p.m.
On Saturday, July 30, 2011, the tension at Another Way was so high that I forgot that I had something prescheduled on Sunday and that I wouldn’t have been able to go by Another Way on Sunday anyway.
The place doesn’t seem to be staffed mostly by professionals, which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing. It seems as if the idea behind the staffing is to have people with psychiatric histories be the staff in a place that is for the support of people with psychiatric histories.
Unfortunately, it seems to be a common stage of the process of having had a psychiatric history that people go through to take some time transitioning out of being traumatized by the loss of personal power and by the stigmatization that goes along with having been diagnosed with a mental illness. Instead of immediately developing enhanced compassion for others and a real desire to have an egalitarian way of life, a lot of people go through the stage of victimizing others in the same way that they themselves were victimized by mental health care professionals, and by society in general which is horrible to people with psychiatric histories. “I’m saner and/or more in control of myself than you are;” that tends to be the personal competition about it, for a while.
Then, there’s also the fact that the big harassers have sought not only to stigmatize me but to create the means to stigmatize all women, and that’s very appealing to people who haven’t transcended their own stigmatization. There were days at Another Way in the beginning where the harassment was more constant that it has been almost anywhere else, and the reactions to my objections to being harassed were as pr more agitated or even violent as they've been almost anywhere else.
@ 4:14 p.m.