transabled.org

This is a truly intense question, to which I have given a great deal of brain space.

I started seeing a psychotherapist in regard to BIID earlier this year. One of his first questions was “Why are you here? What is it that you want?” This is an excellent way for psychotherapy to start, but it is a non trivial question. Why *do* we see psychotherapists about BIID. I had already given some thought to this and I replied “I don’t want to be cured. I just want to reach better self acceptance about it; to let it sit comfortably with me”. This was the first time I had verbalised about not wanting to be “cured”. It was a profound statement. I still had to mull it over for some time before I was absolutely sure of it.

Curing me of BIID would rip my heart out. It has had a huge influence on the development of my personality, going back to my earliest memories. Most of this influence has been positive, in my opinion.

I’ll just list some of the more obvious examples of how I perceive that BIID has beneficially affected who I am: I am a much more empathetic and compassionate person. I am more sensitive towards the emotional and physical needs of people with disabilities. I am not “scared” of people with any kind of disability, and I am very open to friendship. I am passionate about accessibility and other societal issues pertaining to disability. I take a lot of risks (this started as a conscious decision to want to injure myself when I was seven, but it spilled over in a positive way in regard to relationships and career). I could go on.

In short, depriving me of BIID would disconnect me from who I am.

It’s a gift.
How many people run around, frittering & wasting time, trying to get SUVs & married women & drugs & money – the things TV sells us, all of which lead only to emptiness & disillusion?
As I’ve said before in talking about existentialism & absurdism, BIID gives us meaning – meaning which a lot of people continually seek but never find.
We have a meaningful quest, and at the end, a meaningful reward proven so by some of us & our predecessors. It gives us both purpose and satisfaction.
If I lost it, I’m certain I’d become a coke freak (sorry – gotta be honest here).

I think there’s no way I could address this question in a neat-and-clean way because for decades I was alone with my BIID, it was just this namesless weird compulsion, urge, need. I spent, and spend, so much of my life hiding this central part of myself that it’s become a habit of mind that I can’t imagine myself being without. If someone had named it when I was a child or early teen and said, this is what you’ve got, we can cure this, would you like to be cured? I can imagine myself saying yes, but at this stage of life I don’t think so.

I pretty much said the same thing in the past. Only way I would want to get rid of BIID would be to forget everything, but I also think I learned a lot about myself in my struggles and I wouldn’t want to lose that.

I’ve in recent years been treated and in part “lost” two minor disabilties called “dyspraxia” and “auditory processing disorder”.

On the whole I’ve found it to be a positive and rather deep experience.

If you want to talk about having your view of the world changed, losing a disability would have to rank pretty high.

I think I’m still the same person, fundamentally. But I’ve learned a lot.

After Meridith’s comment, I wonder even more whether BIID is really a disability. “Dyspraxia” and “auditory processing disorder” are things I’m sure most of us would want to get rid of. Since most of us (it seems) would not want to rid ourselves of BIID, can it really be a disability? It must be something else.
Also, for some reason I’ve not yet pinpointed, this discussion seems to indicate that mental disability is worse than physical.

If I was asked by anybody whether I wanted to get rid of my BIID, I would definitely say “YES”. Without a second thought.
It would not only mean giving away an important component of my life, but also getting over it. As you get over a phase of depression or of love sickness, mourning, anything which has been part of your life for a certain time. With BIID I would not lose anything valuable, as I think it consumes such an awful amount of time which I could use in a much better way. In there first place, maybe, BIID struck me in order to fill some sort of a gap, but now I would like to add some real meaning to my life, there are so many important things to be done in this world, that I would love to let my BIID go in order to gain some wasted time of my life back. If only I knew how to do this…

Bracy,

My opinion is that the theory most likely to explain BIID (at least of the ones currently available) is that it represents a glitch in the brains somatosensory cortex. Basically people who want to be paraplegics or amputees have a situation where for some reason their somatosensory cortex, does not include the portions of their body that they want paralyzed or amputated. Basically they have the “reverse” or phantom limb syndrome. As for why people would want to be blind or deaf, the neurology of that, I think is less well understood, but it probably another neurological glitch.

Whether something like this is a “mental illness” in the same sense depression or bipolar disorder is, is a question that I think those who know more about psychiatry than me or most people on this line could debate in depth.

But if it’s a neurological glitch, then there is a real possibility that some time in the future-hopefully soon- there might be a way to correct it.

As for “dyspraxia” and “APD”, darn straight most people would want those things mitigated or gone. And some people have better luck than others on that.

But I’ve heard debate over the definition of disability. Some people would be considered disabled for being blind in one eye or deaf in one ear-which might be less of a problem in life than dyspraxia, APD, or BIID.

Katie,

I seriously doubt you did anything to bring this on yourself. If it’s a neurological problem, at the very least it’s probably not something that happened in some kind of quest for meaning. It’s probably not your fault, not your parents’ fault, nor anyone else’s.

And it probably isn’t something people do because they “don’t know how hard it is” to actually be an amputee or a paraplegic.

I think you probably could find another source of meaning in life whether you get rid of the BIID or not. If/when you are cured someday you certainly could. But why wait on it? Life is to short for that.

It seemed worthwhile to revisit the question two years later. After all, my psychological state has shifted significantly over this time period. I find that my comment of two years ago still stands exactly as it is. “Curing me of BIID would rip my heart out” sums it up quite accurately. What has changed is that I am now more sure of what I wrote than when I wrote it. I see more and more positive aspects of BIID.