Able-bodied people often feel awkward around people with disabilities
I broke my leg a while ago. I was not too clever on crutches so I used a wheelchair. I went to a restaurant with my family and was shocked that the waitress looked over me and only addressed my husband and daughter. Perhaps before I had that experience I might have acted like the waitress. I might have, in my embarrassment of not knowing how to behave, ignored me altogether.
Over the next few weeks it will be, in London especially, impossible to ignore the athletes participating in the Paralympics, but will that affect public attitudes to disability more generally? Why can able-bodied people be so awkward with others who happen to be differently able?
In an experiment in which able-bodied people were asked to sit next to a disabled person, half were first allowed to stare at the disabled person through a two-way mirror and half were not. All were then measured according to how closely they sat next to the disabled person. It found that those who were allowed to stare sat closer than those who were introduced without first having had that opportunity.
This suggests that wanting to avoid disabled people comes from a lack of previous exposure to them – there seems to be, if not a fear of the unknown or of difference, at least an anxiety about it. There is a conflict of what the able-bodied think they ought to feel about disabled people and the actual emotions experienced.
Disabled people experience hate, guilt, patronising attitudes, avoidance and persecution. Why? Although we can measure behaviour, finding out why that behaviour occurs is harder because we tend to give the answers from the point of view of the person we would like to be, rather than face up to who we actually are.
Vulnerability
Working as a psychotherapist with parents, I have found it is often a child's whining or crying that triggers rage in a parent because it is easier to fall back on anger than to awaken memories of one's own childhood vulnerability, or to acknowledge the shame of feeling impotent in a situation we feel incapable of making better. So if we perceive or imagine vulnerability in another person, it may be more comfortable for us to persecute or patronise than to empathise or accept.
Humans are innately wary of those who are different and to feel that anxiety makes us vulnerable. Rather than acknowledge our own anxiety, most of us would rather ignore or deny our response, or go even further and marginalise, blame and persecute those we feel to be the source of our ill feeling. Maybe we will try to justify it by saying disabled people cost us money, or slow us down.
A tale was told to my husband about an acquaintance who recently found himself travelling first class with physicist Stephen Hawking and how the thrill of celebrity proximity was soon superseded by finding himself annoyed by the occasional bleep from medical equipment.
In Britain there is legislation that coerces planners to consider the needs of disabled people. Some of the mockery towards political correctness may be fuelled by guilt that we needed campaigns to bring about legislation to begin to work towards equality. It is easier to mock than to experience our shame.
Yet an unquestioning embrace of political correctness can mean we go too far and bracket all the differently abled people together. A teacher who works with children with profound and multiple learning disabilities told me they have such severe learning and physical difficulties that they will never be able to say "mommy" or show they recognise who mommy is. Yet she must teach subjects such as geography, French and maths because it is the children's right to have those lessons, even though it does not appear possible that they could gain from them. We can be so keen not to discriminate that we can be in denial of difference.
The world of disability is a shifting landscape. There are people who until relatively recently would not have survived, but we are now working out how to be with them.
I hope the more access and opportunity is granted to disabled people, the more familiar they will become to those who are able-bodied – and that we will learn to look past disability and see the multifarious people we have not been used to acknowledging. – © Guardian News & Media 2012
Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist