Gas Lighting by providers how I stopped it

Gaslighting is a term used to describe when a person tries to manipulate the situation or your interpretation of a situation to make you believe that your recollection of events is not correct and that they can then use it to manipulate you into doing things. 

This so we need to be aware that it’s not your recollection of events that has changed it is that a person or a provider is trying to manipulate you into believing that you are not capable of remembering events correctly and this can happen intentionally or unintentionally when it is intentional some things can be done about it and you need to be aware that providers have a duty of care to prevent things from happening to you so what you might see as gas lighting might ae duty of care issues. I am talking about when a person is systemically doing things to make you doubt yourself and your abilities.

Gaslighting - Wikipedia

 This from a provider could be changing a shift time and not telling you and making you believe that they did tell you however there is no record of a phone call email or text to let you know that this happened.  However, on their end, there is a record that they did but there are no missed calls or texts on your phone or emails. I have had this happen frequently with a provider that I have been with and it’s not great as you can’t plan for your week if this happens, and it simply isn’t good business practice to treat clients this way.

That there is money miss accounted for in your house or living facility that has gone or can’t be accounted for, but you can’t remember spending it or that you have no receipt for it as most sil houses need each client to keep a budget or a receipt book for where their money has gone.  there is no reasonable explanation for it, and you are consistently told that you have spent it.

However, it is important to remember that there are things that are a duty of care issues that can happen and can simply get missed in communicating the change that the support provider needs to do to be compliant with the NDIS and other associated laws.

These are all things that a provider can do, and it is gaslighting, but we need to remember that a provider is running a business and that in running a business they are working with people with a disability, and they can have mundane things happen to them like:

·       Having shifts run over time

·       Having clients have an emergency

·       Having support workers get stuck in traffic

 we see that these are all things that aren’t gaslighting when the fact that things like this can happen, and when it isn’t communicated respectfully to the client, but the office says that they have been we see that this becomes gaslighting and this isn’t something that you don’t want to become a feature of dealing with support agencies.  I found that by taking these steps the support provider for a limited time became quite good and I was happy but as I found out.

there was a mass (Skout in the office and we see that this created issues for getting down the line that was left this left people scrambling to fill support workers' shifts with regular clients left a lot of office staff doing several jobs including having support coordinator’s that were also housing managers ( I can’t find if this is illegal or not but it is very unethical)  As both are full-time jobs and I will do a post on bad support coordinators that promise the world to get you to move to their company but never deliver.

To prevent it from happening there are several steps you can take that I have found that helped in dealing with the support organization that I have left that I have found that I needed to take so I could prove to the agencies that people in their organization where doing this and they needed to update their procedures and policies to better reflect the behavior’s that would be tolerated or not tolerated by support workers and office staff.   

 

 

·       Right down or record what a support worker said they could help with and did they follow up on it.  ( I have found that they were either told that they couldn’t or were instructed to say that they could help but couldn’t or forgot about it and it became low on their list of things that they needed to do I know that they can’t help outside of the shift but there were somethings that I had to prompt a support worker that they said that they could help with but they didn’t remember even though I had seen them put it in there shift notes. )

 

 

·       Follow up on the support worker if they said they could help were they able to or were they restricted from doing so and why what risks did it pose to the worker that they weren’t able to help you. ( I found that there was a variety of reasons that a support worker couldn’t help me and a major one was that they were told by the higher-ups in the agency that they were employed by that they couldn’t help me as it would be a risk to the company image, or that they simply forgot or where telling me that they forgot, or that they didn’t have time and this is dangerous as don’t promise even verbally what you can’t deliver as some clients won’t understand why you can’t help them and how dangerous this is for them.

 

This is a massive one to go into and it can happen for several reasons but I found that I needed to keep a record of when they said a support worker was rostered and when they actually turned up as this turned out to be a rostering issue in this organization and they thought that I was high functioning enough that having what felt was a new support worker every week was doing enough as they were covering the shift, this I felt wasn’t good enough and I felt that this was when I needed to change agencies for support so I am writing this in the hope that others don’t get gaslighted in the same way that I did and that it prompts a discussion around support and how to help people to receive good support.