The Wounds and

Other Reactions to Bad Treatment

The Wounds

Wolfensberger describes the ‘bad things’ that happen to devalued people as ‘The Wounds’  This is because they feel like wounds to the recipients

and have the same effect as wounds on their life chances.  He describes the Wounds as follows:

The Wounds Caused to Devalued People

Underlying Reasons for Wounding are:

Physical Difference

or

Other Reason for Societal Devaluation

(Psychological Difference or

Behavioural Difference)

possibly leading to:

Further Functional Impairment

Which may together lead to:

1      Relegation to low (‘deviant’) status

2      Rejection, perhaps by family, neighbours, community, society, service

        workers

3      Cast into one or more historical deviancy roles

4      Forced Images- Symbolical stigmatising, ‘marking’, ‘deviancy-imaging’,

        ‘branding’.

5      Jeopardy of being seen as having multiple negative roles, scape-goated.

6      Distantiation: usually via segregation and also congregation.

7      Loss of Control, perhaps even autonomy and freedom.

8      Discontinuity with the physical environment and objects.

9      Social and relationship discontinuity, even abandonment.

10    Absence or loss of natural/freely-given relationships, and substitution of

        artificial ones.

11    Deindividualisation.

12    Involuntary Material Poverty, material/financial exploitation.

13    Impoverishment of experience, especially that of the typical, valued world.

14    Exclusion from knowledge of, and participation in, higher order value

        systems (e.g. religion)   that give meaning and direction to life, and provide

        community.

15    Having one’s life ‘wasted’

16    Being the object of Brutalisation, ‘killing thoughts’, and deathmaking.

                (Hinge wounds in Bold)

        Other Reactions to Bad Treatment

Additional Mental/Behavioural Response Patterns That Are Evidence of Disturbed Interactions with the world, and that are engendered by certain wounds and wound clusters.