What some of y'all call “recovery” and “healing” is just… growing up.
The theme I keep coming back to, the theme I keep writing about over and over, is the inextricability of ableism (specifically neurobigotry) and ageism.
The pathologizing of youth. The infantilizing of disabled adults. The structuring and micromanaging of childhood leading to ever more opportunities for “deviancy” to be classified as “disordered.” The “neurological” push to raise the age of majority. The constant framing of disabled parents and caregivers as “unfit” or “bad influences” on children. And on and on.
Ageism and neurobigotry are such an interconnected tangle loop mobius strip that people are using the “healing”/“recovery” framework for basic human maturation.
When you were little, you uncritically accepted the worldview of your parents and other adults in your life, but now that you’re older and “recovered,” you see it differently?
That’s called growing up. You grew up.
When you had less information and experience informing your worldview, you saw things one way, and now that you’ve “healed,” you see things differently?
That’s called learning. You learned new information and changed your perspective accordingly.
Look, learning and change and growth and maturation are (or should be) lifelong processes with no endpoint, and one of the cultural factors making people so weird about “maturity” and age of majority issues is the assumption that a “Real Adult” is in their fixed final form. So people think “If I’ve changed and grown in the past 5 years, that means that 5-years-ago Me was Still A Child and should not have been allowed to make major life-altering decisions,” and also think that once they reach An Endpoint, they can or should stop changing. And that’s a problem.
But. But. Changes in one’s relationship to oneself and one’s family of origin are especially common during times of major transition. That’s not pathological. That’s not even abnormal. If you see the world differently than you did before a major life transition, that does not mean that you went from a diseased state to a nondiseased state (“recovery”), or from an injured state to an uninjured state (“healing”).
Time passed. You got older. Everyone else got older. You changed. Other people changed. Your family changed. The social context in which you live changed. The pathology paradigm has no place in this phenomenon.People are out here saying that “People should heal themselves before they have their own children,” and then when asked, what they mean by “heal themselves” is “learn how to effectively communicate with children.”
That. That is a skill. Learning a skill is not “healing.” Lack of a particular skill set is not a disorder you have to “recover” from. You just have to learn the skill.But that’s also why when we say “You don’t have to recover from your disabilities, recovery isn’t a moral obligation,” people say things like “You want to use your disability as an excuse not to change and grow.”
My good bitch, what does change and growth have to do with recovery?
And this isn’t even a new observation, because people have talked about how parents of developmentally disabled children will credit “therapy” and “recovery” for their children’s natural developmental trajectory (if your child gained a skill after a year of intensive therapy, that doesn’t mean “the therapy worked,” that means they got older and developed the maturation to acquire that skill). A lot of the rhetoric around early childhood education does the same thing (the reason your 6 year old can hold a pencil now and he couldn’t last year is because his bones got stronger and his fine motor skills improved, not because his high-quality preschool made him ready to compete).
But this. This is adults doing it to themselves! And it’s so very original-sin-coded. You are born Unhealthy, but through continual effort and right practice, you can Recover and Heal.
No! You just grew up!