Talks For: Recent Disability & Rehab

Adapting to disability is very much a matter of learning how it's done. People with disabilities gain mastery in living with their disabilities, thanks to a rehabilitation stay, community-based programs, and drawing on resources such as disability groups, the Internet, and Gary's books. Wheelchair skills, dressing, being healthy, using assistive technologies, problem solving for whatever someone wants to do in their life. Gary motivates people to do the work, gain the techniques of living with disability.

In his years of living with disability since 1973, Gary has witnessed nothing short of an historic, revolutionary change in the experience of having a disability. Following his injury there were few accessible restrooms, building entrances, cut curbs, or blue parking. Little consolation to someone with a very recent disability, but the fact is that the quality of life available to someone with a disability is greater than it has ever been in the history of humanity on earth!

A key part of how people successfully adapt is the transiton from Walking Mind to Wheeling Mind (or Blind Mind or Deaf Mind or Limb Loss Mind and so on). Because we are all built to seek to feel OK about ourselves as we are, over time our attention naturally shifts to a focus on what's possible rather than what we've lost. Wheelchair users, for instance, naturally come to see that the wheelchair is not a confinement, but the source of their mobility and independence, a tool to master and treasure. When you can't walk (or see or hear...) then your perspective is very different.

The need for intimate relationship, sensual experience, for our relationships to continue to include the pleasure of sexual sharing — all of these are entirely possible in the context of a disability. This essential human need does not disappear simply because of an impairment of some kind. Although people who acquire disability must go through an adjustment process, must deal with aspects of loss, the discovery of the true nature of intimacy many people with disabilities report shines light on what relationship — and sex — is really about. As an 18 year old boy at the time of his injury, Gary certainly had a lot to learn!

Gary builds some of his talks around his own story of the spinal cord injury he acquired on the Fourth of July, 1973 at the age of 18. He doesn't tell his story for the sake of admiration or simple drama, but as a launching point for the key points of the talk. Gary's story is the basis of his having observed the incredible changes in the disability experience in the ensuing years, and the foundation of his belief that people are well equipped to adapt and integrate and normalize a disability experience. Among other things.