Disability, relationship, and the negotiation of loss, 2022, Watermeyer, McKinney

Disability, relationship, and the negotiation of loss
Watermeyer B, Mckinney V. Med Humanit 2022;48:2–8. doi:10.1136/medhum-2020-01186

Abstract
Oppressive stereotypes of invalidity and tragedy have
positioned loss and grieving as contested issues in
the field of disability studies. Ascriptions of ’denial’
are rejected by many disabled people, as a reductive
medicalisation of their lived reality. For these and other
reasons, this paper asserts that disabled people are
afforded limited or awkward social spaces for grief, be it
to do with social positioning, embodiment, or any other
aspect of human experience. This is significant because
grieving may have an important relationship with
political mobilisation, both personal and collective. The
paper presents autoethnographic material from the life
of the second author, who has lived with quadriplegia
for more than three decades. Using ideas from critical
psychoanalysis it traces how political, relational and
intrapsychic mechanisms constrain and sanction his
expression of feelings of loss, contributing to a relational
predicament of melancholic suspension, analogous to
that attributed to subordinated racial groups. Here, one
is forced to strive for assimilation into an unattainable,
ideal social role, while simultaneously being alienated
from one’s inner experience, with implications for both
creativity and personal power. The paper concludes
that, paradoxically, stereotypes are countered not by
dissociation from grief, but rather the claiming of it.

https://mh.bmj.com/content/medhum/48/1/2.full.pdf

 

I don't feel like doing my own analysis, but here are some quotes I found I could relate to, to give the jist;
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"The historical application by rehabilitation science of bereavement models to the onset of disability has often pathologised disabled people, through the attribution of emotional distress to the problem of denial — that is, an inability to accept impairment ..[..]. Such thinking reduces experiences of loss in the lives of disabled people to difference or dysfunction of the body, circumventing an examination of how adventitious disability will also always bring social disadvantage, borne of devalued identities and an exclusionary world. In short, it makes sense of social ills by blaming the victim."
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"The ascription of loss to the lives of disabled people has typically been part of a pathologising, othering view, which reduces the distress of exclusion to the problem of ‘denial’."
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"We need the containment of an accepting other, someone who we trust to be receptive to our chaotic emotions and help us digest them ... This means trusting that the other will not be overwhelmed by our feelings, become angry or withdraw"

I have certainly struggled with family members being angry about my situation, for me, but me having to deal with their emotions about it
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"He continued to discover how little space would be made for him in the social world for communicating experiences of his new body and social positioning."
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"When confronted with the confusion of overwhelming grief and abandoned to it by the withdrawal of an anxious social world, there is nowhere to find refuge but within. Without the stimulation of the outside world, or the enlivenment of relationship, VM found himself slipping into dissociation, as the weeks and months of unchanging drudgery and sadness in the home piled upon one another."
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"Crashing inequality now separated them, in their opportunity to participate in relationships, outings and activities, learning and
careers, and every other aspect of the social life of young, middle class people. Such inequality can feel unbearable for everyone;
it is excruciating and senseless to suddenly be deprived, baffling and unspeakable to continue having. Faced with these odds, it appeared that an unspoken compromise was reached, in which everyone withdrew in acquiescence to the idea that the social system could not withstand the situation’s contradictions."
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"The disabled serve as constant, visible reminders to the able- bodied that the society they live in is shot through with inequity and suffering, that they live in a counterfeit paradise, that they too are vulnerable."
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"The disabled serve as constant, visible reminders to the able- bodied that the society they live in is shot through with inequity and suffering, that they live in a counterfeit paradise, that they too are vulnerable." .so it is the problem of the healthy who are really disassociating from the reality that bad thing can happen to anyone without any reason .