Internalised Ableism: What is it?
The world in which we live has a lot of attitudes swirling around. These attitudes can be fairly global or they can exist within smaller pockets and I’m sure you can think of some groups that have very different attitudes from each other. When we grow up and become more and more exposed to these societal attitudes, we inevitably take some of them on as our own. We don’t consciously decide to do this, it’s just one of those things that happens. I say this because it is crucial to the topic of internalised ableism.
First, however, let’s get some definitions clear.
Ableism is the name given to a set of societal attitudes that view being physically, psychologically and intellectually able as the norm and the ideal everyone should aspire to. What this tells us all is that if and when you stop being able to do something, including being born unable to do certain things, you become inferior. Ableism is a very one-up position for non-disabled people because they get to look down on and pity those who are disabled in some way. There are many examples in our society of how this plays out but I will give a couple to illustrate the point. Deaf people and those who are hard of hearing can experience pressure to have a cochlear implant, even if they don’t want it, because the ableist assumption is that deafness is inferior and undesirable compared to hearing (Sanders, Williams & Rogers, 2021). You may have come across the concept of “inspiration porn” where well-meaning people draw motivation and inspiration to overcome obstacles or difficulties in their own lives from seeing or hearing about disabled people living normal lives. The underlying ableist assumption to inspiration porn is that disabled people can’t live a normal life without undertaking the mammoth task of conquering their disability. Now, as people living within an ableist society, we are far more likely than not to unconsciously adopt ableist ideas because societal norms like this are impossible to get away from.
Internalised ableism happens when a disabled person has taken onboard the ableist attitudes from our society as their own which they then direct towards themselves. This is, again, never done consciously and is a side effect of living in an ableist society. Not all disabled people do develop internalised ableism and that’s at least in part down to exposure to attitudes and messages that counter the toxic ableist ones. Internalised ableism is characterised and supported by a couple of interconnected strategies (Jóhannsdóttir, Snæfríður & Haraldsdóttir, 2021). One is the lack of a cohesive and collective identity or culture. It’s important to have this shared identity or culture because it helps facilitate support and unity within the group as well as helping advocate for the needs of the group and its members. This is easily denied to disabled people through the distancing of them from each other. When we don’t have universal experiences with regards to the difficulties and needs associated with the cause of our disability, we need to have the chance to be in contact with each other so we can have a cohesive and collective identity or culture. The other strategy is to keep the disabled people wanting to achieve or embody the ableist norms. The uniquely harmful part of this is that as soon as someone experiences internalised ableism, they are immediately placing themselves in the one-down position compared to the non-disabled people and the social norms of being non-disabled. They immediately see themselves as being lesser than and inferior. The internalised ableism tells them that their inability to do whatever it is unaided or without making accommodations is a personal failing and something shameful (Sanders, Williams & Rogers, 2021). It is that voice inside unfairly shaming them for their real need to rest more, to use this aid or that aid, to change this interest or to stop doing that thing. So, the natural reaction to that is to deny being disabled and to do our best to try to “pass” as non-disabled, that is if we can’t get to a state of near-ablebodiness. This can result in deliberate distancing of the disabled person from other disabled people in an attempt to get further from disability and closer to able-bodiedness, which obviously feeds into the lack of a collective disability identity or culture. So internalised ableism requires disabled people to experience shame for being disabled, deny their disability, distance themselves from other disabled people, embody the ableist ideas and strive to achieve a state of being near-enough to the ableist norm that they don’t get seen to be disabled.
Before I move on, we tend to think about disability as having a hierarchy - some disabilities are seen as worse than some, while others are seen as better. This is one of the ways that ableism and internalised ableism contribute to the distancing between disabled people. By having visible physical disability deemed to be better than an intellectual disability, for example, non-disabled people treat them differently from each other and people with visible physical disabilities can position themselves closer to non-disabled people than intellectually disabled people. It’s a really intricate way of navigating society and trying to protect one’s place in it.
In the reading I did for this article, I have been coming across the repeated use of the terms “able-bodied” and “able-bodiedness” to talk about non-disabled people and the experience of being non-disabled. While I have used them a bit myself here, I don’t like doing so because I feel like they bring too much focus on physical disability with the risk of ignoring and dismissing the experiences of those who have more psychological or intellectual difficulties. I am not sure what term, other than non-disabled, to use in order to be as inclusive as possible so if anyone does have ideas, please do offer them up!
So, why am I writing about internalised ableism?
Simply put, this is an important topic to cover.
It’s something that a lot of people struggle with. I see it out and about in the world, in the lives of the people I work with and in myself. The never-ending need to be achieving, to be putting things out into the world of value, to be fitting in, to be doing what others are doing is at odds with the very real, inescapable need to look after ourselves, to prioritise rest rather than powering through, to see ourselves as worth taking care of, even before we have done something to earn it. This is stuff that people I work with are struggling to do regardless of the label attached to their own particular difficulties and regardless of whether they see themselves as disabled or not. And, as I’ve already indicated, I am not immune to it myself. My fibromyalgia got really bad at one point because I wouldn’t accept that I couldn’t keep up the pace I was seeing emulated all around me. Our culture of busyness, the pride people take in being busy because of it and the judgements people make about laziness is all ableism in action - it’s also capitalism through and through. Good worker bees are always productive, always achieving, always working, never doing something as luxurious as resting or taking time to recover from being sick. Extending ourselves some compassion and taking care of ourselves instead of burning ourselves out on the capitalist, ableist hamster wheel can be an intense struggle. More than a few of us learn the hard way that we can’t keep going like that and some of the people I work with are still on the path to learning that. And that’s all OK. Ableism and capitalism are immensely powerful constructs which permeate most, if not all, aspects of our lives. It’s OK if we still need to learn that looking after ourselves is OK and important. It’s OK if we are still caught in patterns of criticising ourselves because we can’t do all the things, fit in with the ableist ideas of what we should be doing and how.
Certain industries are more prone to such obvious capitalist and ableist attitudes - hospitality, retail and finance are three of the ones that spring to mind first. I have been working on challenging my internalised ableism and things are a lot easier than they once were. Not everyone living in ableist societies takes on and internalises all of the ableist attitudes, but when they do, it just doesn’t inflict suffering on them until they find themselves to be disabled. So it’s important to talk about with everyone, not just those who are disabled in some way.
I would like to take the opportunity now to talk more deeply about a specific type of ableism and internalised ableism.
I am currently on a journey to become a counsellor as I want to be able to offer counselling alongside coaching. In class one day, we were talking about what qualities are required for the development and maintenance of relationships with the follow-on question being how these relate to counselling relationships. Because of the framing, the quality of being empathetic came up - we’ve been looking a lot at empathy in a counselling setting. Now, as we’ve been defining it, empathy is the ability to perceive and experience things from someone else’s perspective. I remarked to the person I was partnered with that while empathy is required in counselling (and coaching!), I don’t think it is essential for the development and maintenance of all human relationships. I felt quite ableist, I said, in applying it to all human relationships.
Hear me out here. We all want to be understood by our important people and for them to both care about and see our perspectives on things. There’s also a subtle, unspoken assumption in our society that if someone really cares about us and loves us, they will naturally be able to see and understand our perspectives in all things. We often consider these things to be characteristic of empathy, and they are, to a point. But what happens when someone can’t automatically take our perspective or doesn’t naturally make us feel like they really get why we’re so upset over something?
A little voice pops up, for a lot of us in such a situation, saying that they obviously don’t care about us enough, they obviously don’t love us enough, they’re mean and selfish…On the other side of it, a little voice pops up for them saying they’re obviously a bad person because they don’t find empathy easy, the other person expects this because it’s a normal thing for people to do and they’ve failed in doing it…I want to invite you to consider this: is that not ableism and internalised ableism playing out within and between these people?
The person who naturally finds it easy to do something sees that ability as the desirable norm so, when coming into contact with someone who doesn’t find it easy, judges that impairment as saying something negative about the other person as a whole and how they see the relationship. The person who doesn’t find such perspective taking and understanding easy and natural all the time is left feeling bad about themselves as a person for failing in this way. Oftentimes people end up in these situations because both sides have made assumptions - one has assumed that doing X, Y or Z will be received positively or neutrally by the other, while the other doesn’t receive it well and assumes because X, Y or Z have been done it means A, B or C about the other person or how they view the relationship. This plays out with a few different types of people and the ones I have met and/or worked with typically are loving and caring people who want to make their important people feel good for no reason other than they want their important people to be happy.
It’s worth noting that I am not discussing those who act maliciously here. The people I’ve met and worked with who struggle with this are prosocial people who want the best for their important people.
So, what would happen if the person expecting a high level of empathy were to engage in some reframing, instead of staying stuck in the story they’re telling themselves about the situation, and see that their important person genuinely doesn’t find it easy, that this is a real difficulty for them and that it doesn’t say anything about how real or not their caring, loving feelings are? Might they then be able to extend some compassion to their important person, even if they can’t strictly empathise with their important person’s experience? Might the person who finds perspective taking or empathy difficult be more able to extend themselves some compassion as well?
The reality is that the ability to take another person’s perspective or to be empathetic isn’t something we either have or we don’t - we can learn and get better at it if we want to and are supported in it. This is supported by the simple existence of it as a feature of counselling training. Also, when you look at equality, equity, diversity and inclusion training, one thing they are actually doing is helping people to better empathise with each other. So, when we acknowledge in training courses, workplaces, social justice spaces etc that we can get better at empathy, might we be able to translate that into our personal relationships too?
When working with someone who struggles like this or indeed because of other difficulties, we don’t always name the ableism and internalised ableism because it’s not always appropriate. But my heart does ache when I tap into the pain they’re experiencing at not being able to do all of this stuff and how it’s costing them. We do work with it, even when we don’t name it. It takes time for the effects of the work to trickle through with this. But I love working with the topics of compassion for others, compassion for ourselves, perspective taking and nurturing empathy because it feels so wholesome. When people have those sort of breakthrough moments of extending a bit more compassion to themselves than they would normally or being able to hold space for compassion for themselves at the same time as compassion for others, it’s like some sun has broken through the cloud cover. It’s not a linear journey and that can sometimes frustrate people who want to be better friends, partners, community members and family members. The rewards are great though and well worth the journey!
Ableism, the societal norms and attitudes that uphold non-disabled people while also treating disability as inferior, and internalised ableism, the weaponising of ableist attitudes someone directs towards themselves and others, can cause and exacerbate many problems for people. Here we’ve looked at how ableism and internalised ableism most show up in the lives of the people I work with - the constant pushing to achieve, fit in and not attend to their needs when it could be labelled as laziness and the heavy judgements on how easy or difficult it is for them to take another person’s perspective or to empathise with them. There’s so much more to talk about with regards to internalised ableism so keep an eye out for more to come!
References or further reading
Sanders, Williams & Rogers; 2021, First Steps in Counselling: An Introductory Companion.
Jóhannsdóttir, Snæfríður & Haraldsdóttir; 2021, Implications of internalised ableism for the health and wellbeing of disabled young people, Sociology of Health & Illness. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9304167/
Discussion of inspiration porn and disability https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/why-inspiration-porn-entrenched-our-attitudes-towards-disability-ned-kelly
