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Content Warnings: compliance training, working in systems which knowingly oppress, refrences to ABA and suicide ideations in children

I keep seeing professionals talk about how they are a good [professional] in a broken system! The people who are willing to admit that maybe there is smething wrong with how others do their job, keep talking as if they can be the exception. And always, they are talking as if they can be the savior.

These people aren't admitting or recognizing their compliance in the system. These people aren't truly even recognizing the broken system.

So, people. I'll tell you something you don't want to hear, but need to. If you actually want to help disabled people you need to actually recognize: what you were taught is abusive.

Those classes you took to get the degree and license, they taught you to do things that are abusive. That professional development you take, it teaches you more ways to abuse us.

The entire larger system of how we are "helped" from education to support staff, from medical fields to early intervention is built upon the idea of us being less human and others being saviors who come in and save us, frequently by fixing us, without asking us what we want or need.

If you are working, in special education, as a therapist, somewhere with disabled people, you are complicit by working in this system.

And sometimes its the best option, yes. But you are still, complicit, and you were still trained in abusive methods, and you still need to know the ways your field is built to break us in the name of "fixing" us.

I am not saying that currently, while we don't have any other options, nobody who wants to do good should work in this system. I am saying, you need to recognize the system, and you can't just go and say you're an exception, because as much as you want to be, and as much good as you do, you're still working in the system. And - this both will cost you, if you are truly going to actually care - and it can be so very worth it, because while it is only mitigation, mitigation is also a very huge deal.

When I am there in the room while someone once again has their body taken from them I am complicit. I have to be in a broken system, I cannot be in that room and not be complicit, as much as I successfully reduced the frequency that these students would have control of their bodies snatched out from under them. It was worth it to me, being able to throw myself in the way, knowing ways to distract, knowing ways to redirect the actions of the BCBA onto myself, and I never, never, never, could prevent it all. I was complicit, by being in that room and not pushing the therapist out of the way. I was complicit, by not screaming and making a scene. I was complicit, because I knew what was happening, and I let it, and helped the student afterwards once there was a moment, where I could let them process and breathe and have an adult who would let them make a mistake. Because every last analysis said it was better to do what I could, and I couldn't do that if I was gone.

But that didn't make me not complicit.

It is pain to know that sometimes. I can cry from the nightmares of what happened to me in that school, and I will absolutely always, be aware that there were times that I made mistakes and if I moved a different way, if I said a different thing, maybe they'd have been hurt less, because I didn't stop it, I only mitigated, and reduced, so that I could keep preventing the majority I could prevent, and keep being there for the students who needed an autistic adult in their life. I hurt people, even though I didn't want to. And the fact that I didn't want to, and that it was a mistake, and that it was hurting them by doing the wrong thing to try to mitigate harm, does not change that. I was still complicit. I still did harm, as every one of us did, and will do.

You cannot work in the system and not harm. You cannot work in the system and care and not make mistakes that will hurt someone you care about. We all are part of the system, it does not matter how much we choose to be there in order to protect.

And it is so easy for that compilance to turn into being about you, what is protecting you. It's what's keeping you employed. You need a job, you need to be here. It's so easy for compliance to become a habit. You need to do these things they're the right thing to do, they're what you always are doing. With regular professional development teaching more and more abusive techniques and coworkers treating them as normal the pressure does not stop as soon as you get a job. Even if you meant to support and started there supporting, now you're continuinually being trained into the necessity of fixing. It's so easy to lose yourself into the system that you were trying to bend to protection, as it breaks you and tears you down, depending the way the cracks form.

I will never regret working in the school system. It broke me in ways that nothing else did, and I will still never regret it. Because I absolutely think it was worth it even knowing the day to day triggers I struggle with, the PTSD that I do not know how to explain. It can be worth it to do things are the best we can in the moment, fighting in the imperfections of the world, while others are working on improving it. It can change people's lives and it can save people's lives.

But it's not being a savior. No number of people who's lives you can say you've changed make you a savior. You still are in the system, and that system is still broken. The system still requires compliance with it to be there, and that compliance still is compliance about humanity and personhood and our compliance for into indistuishability leading to maybe almost human but not really.

None of us are saviors, even when we're both the one who was forced through the therapies and the one who's the adult with power. We're still the adult with power who is choosing to comply for the hope to do what we can. We might choose to fight through mitigation and saving one single person's life, and that life is worth so very much. We all deserve someone who tells us we can live.

But the cost is still there. You have to recognize the cost or how can you save that life. Because if you don't that cost is weight that is there still whether or not you believe it acknoweldge it it still does things it still hurts it still causes pain.

I have the names of students who told me they didn't think they'd be alive if it weren't for me in my head. They're names I always remember. They're things I have to hold on to because of that pain that I went through. Those lives are worth every moment of being there. And it cost. It cost me and it cost them. Because I was working in a system that demands compliance to exist and as much as I had abnormally strong power to bend that, it was bending, not breaking.

I was able to make most of that pain go onto myself and what that did to me is long term trauma. The cost is immense. That cost exists. I was not able to mke it all go onto me. I know the names of the students who hurt because of things I didn't do. Some of those same students were people who I don't think I could have done life changing things for them without waiting there, and that hurts too. It still is a cost that both them and I will have to live with.

It's power and hurt and pain and trauma and the best option that existed in the moment and trauma of those students still exists. The system is a system that we live in and we work in and we aren't more powerful than that system, we can't break out and be that "good one". We are not that all powerful one who is able to somehow fix everyone and everything despite the system. We do not need to be fixed. It's power and hurt and pain and trauma and trying to survive the best we can.