Of course! They don’t *want* your experience to matter!
That’s why I included so many quotes in my not-yet-published book School Trauma, to make it abundantly clear that I’m *not* just talking about my own experience.

I’m really glad you’re getting some relief, at last, and hope “remapping” does not equal “cannot move 3 feet without injuring self”. It sounds like not though. YAY!

Glad you’re starting to feel better. Hope the upswing continues.

long night awake working on a project. Brain fried. Time for zzzzzzz.

TI

I’m already on elavil (been trying it for months) and it’s had no effect on the pain, but a wonderful effect on sleep.

I’m also noticing that I’m yet again having to sort of remap my body. When I first went on Neurontin (actually, second), the contrast was so much that I had to remap in an even more drastic way, since my whole life had been spent viewing body parts as things that almost always contain an extreme burning sensation.

This is doing it again. I’ve still got joint pain but so little nerve pain that I keep feeling like my body’s made of rubber or something instead of made of pain, then I realize this isn’t “rubber”, it’s what bodies are supposed to feel like.

Meanwhile there’s still nerve pain on my face and sometimes the back of my head, but there’s considerably less of it. (Not sure how much is due to the treatment and how much to the meds.)

I’m also pretty delighted because I’ve rarely met an anti-convulsant I could tolerate. (Interestingly enough, Trileptal is a cousin of Tegretol, which was the first anti-convulsant I was ever given — actually really the first prescription brain-med of any kind I was ever given — and which I rapidly took myself off of because the entire world seemed off-key. But I remember other aspects of Tegretol being more tolerable than, say, Dilantin, Depakote, Topamax, etc. So maybe this isn’t as surprising as I thought.) And I’m also not getting all the little clusters of deja vu, or disorientation, or random spatial layouts flying through my head too fast to tell them apart, or other things that tend to herald seizures, so I guess that’s a good thing too.

Also, small amounts of tricyclic antidepressants (elavil, desipramine) also work well for nerve pain, for what it’s worth.

I know of a young woman who is retarded and has ADHD and co-ordination problems. She is being made to do some form of “behaviour therapy” which involves punishing herself for arguing by hurting herself with an elastic band.

She is with a family who frequently humiliate and assault her. She needs to argue.

What can be done to help her stand up for herself against these people? (FYI: she revealed this on a forum. She lives in the US. I and most of the forum live in the UK.)

By the way, glad the meds are working.

ABA = Applied Behavioral Analysis.

Wikipedia article here.

Most of the sites that come up if you search are pro-ABA. The Wiki article at least has criticisms. There’s more more criticism here.

This stuff reminds me (simplistically speaking) of stuff that people used to do to train left-handed people into being right-handed people.

Could you please give me more information on ABA? I have read several articles by Michelle Dawson, and while I know she is against ABA, I do not really know what it is, how it works, or the detrimental effects it can have on people with autism. TIA (Thanks in advance), and I love your blog!

P.S. I am also a very sensual/sensitive person (hates loud noises and rough textures on skin, is social when she really wants to be social, has trouble not throwing a fit when people’s cell phones ring during one of her training workshops). So, I could be “on the spectrum” for all I know. My sister has none of these problems, and neither do my parents, so I wonder…