I feel this is so important for me to share this with you about what I have learned from history and some of my personal journey as a Deaf person. I might have to warn you this, though because this can be really emotional for some of you so be prepared to have some kleenex tissues with you.
I want to tell you guys about what deafness means. I have to say that average people who are in full possession of their hearing have no concept at all of the large part that the sense of hearing plays in their own development, or even in their communication with the outside world. They have taken this sense so much for granted that they have never once thought of how it would be without the ability to hear.
I will provide two example which I found in "In This Sign" written by Joanne Greenberg and her perceptive novel on deafness. Then we have other book "The Psychology of Deafness", written by Dr. Edna Simon. Those will clarify what I am trying to say.
This is what Joanne Greenberg wrote in her book:
"Mrs. Anglin had two cups and saucers and she picked up the coffeepot with her free hand and began to move forward. Janice had stopped and half-turned and Mrs. Anglin cried, "Watch out- this is still hot!" The movement of Janice's arm did not stop. Mrs. Anglin found herself blocked by the table; she couldn't move back. Janice's arm was still moving around with her turning, "Get back, look out, you will get burned!"
Margaret, coming from the kitchen, heard her mother-in-law cry out and looked up too late to see anything but her expression of irritation giving way to one of fascinated horror. Janice's upper arm was stopped firmly against the hot side of the coffeepot. With a strangle-sound she pulled away violently and cutlery scattered from the plate she was still holding. The reflex movement had turned her around and she was facing Mrs. Anglin with a wounded, vulnerable expression, like a child beaten for no reason. She touched the arm gingerly. The flesh had gone white and then red and even now an angry red blotch was coming out plainly. Mrs. Anglin's voice sounded pettish. She felt guilty and was also perhaps at the end of her patience with the evening.
"I told you....I called out and you - well, you just stood there!" Her face had lost all its softness again. "Why didn't you get out of the way? I told you -" Margaret had come around to Mrs. Anglin's side and was Signing gently to Janice: "She told you to get out of the way, but you didn't hear her." Janice opened a slow, half-frightened smile, and said in her tiny Sign, "I'm sorry - it's not a bad burn. It only startled me". Mrs. Anglin looked around in wonder and then her hand came up to her face. "How could I have done that? You told me she was deaf - that both your parents were deaf. I saw your father making the Signs but somehow, somehow I didn't believe - I didn't really believe it could be. Is it possible, really possible that a person cannot hear at all?" (pp.178-179)
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This is what Dr. Edna Simon wrote:
"The unimpaired counterpart of deafness is hearing. And it happens that the values of hearing in human experience are generally as little recognized and as difficult to grasp as the implications of deafness. Both are intangible functions that operate through unseen structures. Neither provides visual aids to understanding. Further, to hear is as natural and effortless an occurrence as it is invisible. Man would as soon ask himself how breathing keeps him physically alive as how hearing keeps him psychologically alive. He simply does not think of it at all. As for the handicaps of auditory defect, they are equally hidden from view. They do not "show, the way a distorted limb or a missing finger or blinded eyes 'show'." The suffer "'limps' only socially, 'fumbles' only psychologically, 'stumbles' only vocationally." Crippling takes place in ways that are not readily observed, and because of this the implication of auditory handicaps are not easy to identify. To obtain the "feel" of deafness, therefore, is a difficult assignment for one who hears. (1960, pp.17-18)
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Let's talk about lip-reading because I feel this is so important to understand something here.
This is what Leo M. Jacobs wrote in his book called, "A Deaf Adult Speaks Out": Average hearing people, for the most part, are so used to watching someone else's face and lips while talking that these people are unware that they are not really watching but rather listening to the speaker. Hearing people are receptive to the often implied concept that lipreading can be a complete form of communication that deaf people can learn to lips well as hearing people hear. Nothing is further from the truth. The same people also learned to speak without any effort. Again, these hearing people are not conscious of the role hearing plays in acquisition of speech; they are often unaware that hearing enables one to listen to and to monitor's own speech. It is because they can hear that they are able to develop normal speech effortlessly. It is often difficult for them to comprehend that speech is either very difficult or impossible for a hearing impaired individual to develop. (pp.10-11)
This is where many people misunderstood about Deaf people, thinking that they all can lip-read, when in fact, most of them can't.
This society we live in, they put so much stress, or emphasis on hearing. When one can't hear, they feel the need to change that or to do something about that. I have to tell you what I've learned according to Deaf history.... in the past, where they did so many different kinds of experiements on someone's ear. I have read this book called, "A Place Of Their Own", written by John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch. This will give you an idea and see how our society are willing to do anything, in my opinion, they did was way too far!
A sixteen physican, Alexander of Tralles, described noise therapy in a discussion of the medical treatments for deafness of his day. Althought he was not confident that physicians would be successful using any method known, he recommended that they "leave nothing undone" anyway.
This is what he wrote: "Many doctors have not merely prescbried all possible internal methods, but, after having carried out ateriotomy [cutting of a vein to bleed the patient], take out a trumpet, place the end in the ear and blow. Others have run large bells and yet others have used instruments of their own devising. For if in serious cases most of the remedies seem to have no worthwhile effect, one must all the same give serious thought to these and should nor delay in giving help and leave nothing undone: for quite often something may occur contrary to expecation. " Blowing a trumpet in someone's ear probably produced pain and may have destroyed any hearing a deaf individual previously had. Nevertheless, this practice continued at least into the seventheenth centruy, when it was reported that doctors in Spain put so much noise into deaf peoples' ears that the ears bled. Ears were not only overloaded with noise; they also received substances of various kinds. Physicans frequently recommended pouring or syringing various liquids into deaf individuals' ear canals. Medieval text mentioned oil, honey, vinegar, bile of rabbits or pigs, garlic juice, human milk, smoked goat's urine, and eel fat mixed with blood as auditory canal purgatives. The rationale for these concoctions presumably was that they would open the pathways connecting the brain, or inner hearing mechanism, with outside noise.
When a child is born into this world, it turned out this child does have the ability to hear. So what's next? What we should do is to take that ability away from that child so that child can be deaf like us. How does that make you feel? That is how some Deaf people feel because it's their identity, and they did not want anyone to try and take that away from them.
"A Place Of Their Own", written by John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, here is what they said about Christianity and Catholic Traditions:
Some passages of the New Testament actually created problems for deaf people. The Old Testament book of Exodus had reminded that the people of Israel that deaf people were part of the Lord's creation and therefore deserving of respect, but both Mark and Luke took an opposite approach. They portray deafness as an indication that an individual has been possessed by a demonic, evil being. Chapter 9 of his deaf son to Jesus. The boy had "a dumb spirit" that caused him to gnash his teeth, to foam at the mouth and to grieve. Jesus then "rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, 'thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him." With this, the boy apparently was cured, but deaf people now could be viewed as persons somehow inhabited by an evil presence. This is a remarkable turnabout from the Old Testament view that certain people were deaf because God made them that way. The most damaging blow to deaf people in the New Testament, however, is in a single sentence of Paul's epistle to the Romans (Chapter 10, verse 17): "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God". Whatever Paul may have meant by this, people who interpreted the Bible literally believed that it indicated that those who are deaf are denied the possibility of faith. Without faith, they cannot be Christians and cannot be saved.
In Catholic Tradition, the view that deaf people cannot be Christians held sway within the Catholic church for many centuries, and it often was attributed to Saint Augustine (354-430), one of the people most responsible for defining Catholic church and hence Christian - doctrine before the Protestant Reformation. Various commentators on Augustine stated that it was his belief that deaf people, because they cannot hear the word of God , are denied the possibility of religious salvation. Augustine's attitude toward deaf people was actually somewhat different, however. Augustine's more optimistic evaluation of deaf people, and one that is remarkable for its insight and its prediction that deaf community could exist, is in a dialogue from chapter 18 of De quantitate animae liber unus. In this discussion Augustine points out that he believes that deaf people can learn and thus are able to receive faith and salvation. This passage from Augustine also is revealing because it shows that, as early as the fourth century of the modern era, sign language (Augustine refers to "bodily movements", "signs" and "gestures") was used by some deaf people and that it was believed to be capable of transmitting human thought and belief. indeed, Augustine implies that it is equal to spoken language in its ability to reach the "soul". In the dialogue, quoted below, he asks, "What does it matter" whether a person signs or speaks, "since both these pertain to the soul?"
Evodius - It occurs to me that we should consider how it is that an infant child does not speak, but nevertheless, as he grows, acquires the faculty of speech.
Augustine - That is an easy one; for I believe it is evident to you that every one speaks that language which is spoken by those among whom he is born and brought up
Evodius - Everybody knows that
Augustine - Imagine, then, one born and brought up in a place where men do not speak, but rather by nods and by the movement of their limbs convey to one another the thoughts which they wish to express; do you not think that he will do likewise, and that, hearing nobody speak, he also will not speak?
Evodius - Do not ask me that, for the case is an impossible one. For who are such men, that I should imagine one to be born among them?
Augustine - Have you not then seen at Milan a youth most fair in form and most courteous in demeanor, who yet was dumb and deaf to such a degree that he could neither understand others nor communicate what he himself desired except by means of bodily movements? For this man is every well known. And I myself know a certain peasant, a speaking man, who by a speaking wife had four or more sons and daughters...who were deaf-mutes. They were perceived to be mutes, because they could not speak; and to be deaf also, because they understood only signs that could be perceived by the eye.
Evodius - And I say so still; for unless I am mistaken, you admit that the persons to whom you refer were born among speaking people.
Augustine - I do not deny it; but as we are now agreed that such men do exist, I ask you to consider this question: If a man and a woman of this kind were united in marriage and for any reason were transferred to some solitary place, where, however, they might be able to live, if they should have a son who was not deaf, how could the latter speak with his parents?
Exodius - How can you think that he would do otherwise than reply by gestures to the signs which his parents made to him? however, a small boy could not do even this; therefore my reasoning remains soun, for what does it matter, as he grows up, whether he speaks or makes gestures, since both these pertain to the soul?"
Western religious tradition contained varied, even conflicting attitudes toward deafness. The Judaic heritage in the Old Testament appeared to stress the important of tolerance toward deaf people insisting that they, like others, were God's children. The New Testament raised two frightening possibilities: that deafness was caused by an evil spirit and that deaf people could not be Christians. Catholic writers quoting Augustine, often accepted the latter interpretations as official doctrine, ironically ignoring Augustine's perspective and optimistic comments on the possibility of learning through sign language. The person wishing to understand deaf people, and deafness, then, could learn little from the pre-Reformation church, and even less from contemporary physicians.
This should tell you there's something quite wrong about this whole.....picture! This is one of the reasons why I left Christianity because it didn't make any sense. In fact, Deaf people was one of the most minority groups that are locked away forever from God's Word! This didn't make any sense at all. I cannot help but wondering... if this is one of the reasons why our society......the way they are today? When I heard about this, it's pure negativity! This is same true when you see those beautiful models on those magazines, t.v shows, newspapers, etc. When you saw how beautiful their body is, then, you look at yourself, you think you are so ugly. Just because of what we have been told? This is no wonder why we held negative beliefs about ourselves! That is why I had to shovel away the manure (negative beliefs about myself) so the door can open wide... because it was getting in the way of trusting my inner voice!!!!
Now, you can see why I choose to talk a lot about intuition because I feel this is SO important! When I follow my intuition, it was truly magical! That is why I am learning how to listen and go within, not having someone else to tell me otherwise!
I want to tell you guys about what deafness means. I have to say that average people who are in full possession of their hearing have no concept at all of the large part that the sense of hearing plays in their own development, or even in their communication with the outside world. They have taken this sense so much for granted that they have never once thought of how it would be without the ability to hear.
I will provide two example which I found in "In This Sign" written by Joanne Greenberg and her perceptive novel on deafness. Then we have other book "The Psychology of Deafness", written by Dr. Edna Simon. Those will clarify what I am trying to say.
This is what Joanne Greenberg wrote in her book:
"Mrs. Anglin had two cups and saucers and she picked up the coffeepot with her free hand and began to move forward. Janice had stopped and half-turned and Mrs. Anglin cried, "Watch out- this is still hot!" The movement of Janice's arm did not stop. Mrs. Anglin found herself blocked by the table; she couldn't move back. Janice's arm was still moving around with her turning, "Get back, look out, you will get burned!"
Margaret, coming from the kitchen, heard her mother-in-law cry out and looked up too late to see anything but her expression of irritation giving way to one of fascinated horror. Janice's upper arm was stopped firmly against the hot side of the coffeepot. With a strangle-sound she pulled away violently and cutlery scattered from the plate she was still holding. The reflex movement had turned her around and she was facing Mrs. Anglin with a wounded, vulnerable expression, like a child beaten for no reason. She touched the arm gingerly. The flesh had gone white and then red and even now an angry red blotch was coming out plainly. Mrs. Anglin's voice sounded pettish. She felt guilty and was also perhaps at the end of her patience with the evening.
"I told you....I called out and you - well, you just stood there!" Her face had lost all its softness again. "Why didn't you get out of the way? I told you -" Margaret had come around to Mrs. Anglin's side and was Signing gently to Janice: "She told you to get out of the way, but you didn't hear her." Janice opened a slow, half-frightened smile, and said in her tiny Sign, "I'm sorry - it's not a bad burn. It only startled me". Mrs. Anglin looked around in wonder and then her hand came up to her face. "How could I have done that? You told me she was deaf - that both your parents were deaf. I saw your father making the Signs but somehow, somehow I didn't believe - I didn't really believe it could be. Is it possible, really possible that a person cannot hear at all?" (pp.178-179)
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This is what Dr. Edna Simon wrote:
"The unimpaired counterpart of deafness is hearing. And it happens that the values of hearing in human experience are generally as little recognized and as difficult to grasp as the implications of deafness. Both are intangible functions that operate through unseen structures. Neither provides visual aids to understanding. Further, to hear is as natural and effortless an occurrence as it is invisible. Man would as soon ask himself how breathing keeps him physically alive as how hearing keeps him psychologically alive. He simply does not think of it at all. As for the handicaps of auditory defect, they are equally hidden from view. They do not "show, the way a distorted limb or a missing finger or blinded eyes 'show'." The suffer "'limps' only socially, 'fumbles' only psychologically, 'stumbles' only vocationally." Crippling takes place in ways that are not readily observed, and because of this the implication of auditory handicaps are not easy to identify. To obtain the "feel" of deafness, therefore, is a difficult assignment for one who hears. (1960, pp.17-18)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let's talk about lip-reading because I feel this is so important to understand something here.
This is what Leo M. Jacobs wrote in his book called, "A Deaf Adult Speaks Out": Average hearing people, for the most part, are so used to watching someone else's face and lips while talking that these people are unware that they are not really watching but rather listening to the speaker. Hearing people are receptive to the often implied concept that lipreading can be a complete form of communication that deaf people can learn to lips well as hearing people hear. Nothing is further from the truth. The same people also learned to speak without any effort. Again, these hearing people are not conscious of the role hearing plays in acquisition of speech; they are often unaware that hearing enables one to listen to and to monitor's own speech. It is because they can hear that they are able to develop normal speech effortlessly. It is often difficult for them to comprehend that speech is either very difficult or impossible for a hearing impaired individual to develop. (pp.10-11)
This is where many people misunderstood about Deaf people, thinking that they all can lip-read, when in fact, most of them can't.
This society we live in, they put so much stress, or emphasis on hearing. When one can't hear, they feel the need to change that or to do something about that. I have to tell you what I've learned according to Deaf history.... in the past, where they did so many different kinds of experiements on someone's ear. I have read this book called, "A Place Of Their Own", written by John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch. This will give you an idea and see how our society are willing to do anything, in my opinion, they did was way too far!
A sixteen physican, Alexander of Tralles, described noise therapy in a discussion of the medical treatments for deafness of his day. Althought he was not confident that physicians would be successful using any method known, he recommended that they "leave nothing undone" anyway.
This is what he wrote: "Many doctors have not merely prescbried all possible internal methods, but, after having carried out ateriotomy [cutting of a vein to bleed the patient], take out a trumpet, place the end in the ear and blow. Others have run large bells and yet others have used instruments of their own devising. For if in serious cases most of the remedies seem to have no worthwhile effect, one must all the same give serious thought to these and should nor delay in giving help and leave nothing undone: for quite often something may occur contrary to expecation. " Blowing a trumpet in someone's ear probably produced pain and may have destroyed any hearing a deaf individual previously had. Nevertheless, this practice continued at least into the seventheenth centruy, when it was reported that doctors in Spain put so much noise into deaf peoples' ears that the ears bled. Ears were not only overloaded with noise; they also received substances of various kinds. Physicans frequently recommended pouring or syringing various liquids into deaf individuals' ear canals. Medieval text mentioned oil, honey, vinegar, bile of rabbits or pigs, garlic juice, human milk, smoked goat's urine, and eel fat mixed with blood as auditory canal purgatives. The rationale for these concoctions presumably was that they would open the pathways connecting the brain, or inner hearing mechanism, with outside noise.
When a child is born into this world, it turned out this child does have the ability to hear. So what's next? What we should do is to take that ability away from that child so that child can be deaf like us. How does that make you feel? That is how some Deaf people feel because it's their identity, and they did not want anyone to try and take that away from them.
"A Place Of Their Own", written by John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, here is what they said about Christianity and Catholic Traditions:
Some passages of the New Testament actually created problems for deaf people. The Old Testament book of Exodus had reminded that the people of Israel that deaf people were part of the Lord's creation and therefore deserving of respect, but both Mark and Luke took an opposite approach. They portray deafness as an indication that an individual has been possessed by a demonic, evil being. Chapter 9 of his deaf son to Jesus. The boy had "a dumb spirit" that caused him to gnash his teeth, to foam at the mouth and to grieve. Jesus then "rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, 'thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him." With this, the boy apparently was cured, but deaf people now could be viewed as persons somehow inhabited by an evil presence. This is a remarkable turnabout from the Old Testament view that certain people were deaf because God made them that way. The most damaging blow to deaf people in the New Testament, however, is in a single sentence of Paul's epistle to the Romans (Chapter 10, verse 17): "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God". Whatever Paul may have meant by this, people who interpreted the Bible literally believed that it indicated that those who are deaf are denied the possibility of faith. Without faith, they cannot be Christians and cannot be saved.
In Catholic Tradition, the view that deaf people cannot be Christians held sway within the Catholic church for many centuries, and it often was attributed to Saint Augustine (354-430), one of the people most responsible for defining Catholic church and hence Christian - doctrine before the Protestant Reformation. Various commentators on Augustine stated that it was his belief that deaf people, because they cannot hear the word of God , are denied the possibility of religious salvation. Augustine's attitude toward deaf people was actually somewhat different, however. Augustine's more optimistic evaluation of deaf people, and one that is remarkable for its insight and its prediction that deaf community could exist, is in a dialogue from chapter 18 of De quantitate animae liber unus. In this discussion Augustine points out that he believes that deaf people can learn and thus are able to receive faith and salvation. This passage from Augustine also is revealing because it shows that, as early as the fourth century of the modern era, sign language (Augustine refers to "bodily movements", "signs" and "gestures") was used by some deaf people and that it was believed to be capable of transmitting human thought and belief. indeed, Augustine implies that it is equal to spoken language in its ability to reach the "soul". In the dialogue, quoted below, he asks, "What does it matter" whether a person signs or speaks, "since both these pertain to the soul?"
Evodius - It occurs to me that we should consider how it is that an infant child does not speak, but nevertheless, as he grows, acquires the faculty of speech.
Augustine - That is an easy one; for I believe it is evident to you that every one speaks that language which is spoken by those among whom he is born and brought up
Evodius - Everybody knows that
Augustine - Imagine, then, one born and brought up in a place where men do not speak, but rather by nods and by the movement of their limbs convey to one another the thoughts which they wish to express; do you not think that he will do likewise, and that, hearing nobody speak, he also will not speak?
Evodius - Do not ask me that, for the case is an impossible one. For who are such men, that I should imagine one to be born among them?
Augustine - Have you not then seen at Milan a youth most fair in form and most courteous in demeanor, who yet was dumb and deaf to such a degree that he could neither understand others nor communicate what he himself desired except by means of bodily movements? For this man is every well known. And I myself know a certain peasant, a speaking man, who by a speaking wife had four or more sons and daughters...who were deaf-mutes. They were perceived to be mutes, because they could not speak; and to be deaf also, because they understood only signs that could be perceived by the eye.
Evodius - And I say so still; for unless I am mistaken, you admit that the persons to whom you refer were born among speaking people.
Augustine - I do not deny it; but as we are now agreed that such men do exist, I ask you to consider this question: If a man and a woman of this kind were united in marriage and for any reason were transferred to some solitary place, where, however, they might be able to live, if they should have a son who was not deaf, how could the latter speak with his parents?
Exodius - How can you think that he would do otherwise than reply by gestures to the signs which his parents made to him? however, a small boy could not do even this; therefore my reasoning remains soun, for what does it matter, as he grows up, whether he speaks or makes gestures, since both these pertain to the soul?"
Western religious tradition contained varied, even conflicting attitudes toward deafness. The Judaic heritage in the Old Testament appeared to stress the important of tolerance toward deaf people insisting that they, like others, were God's children. The New Testament raised two frightening possibilities: that deafness was caused by an evil spirit and that deaf people could not be Christians. Catholic writers quoting Augustine, often accepted the latter interpretations as official doctrine, ironically ignoring Augustine's perspective and optimistic comments on the possibility of learning through sign language. The person wishing to understand deaf people, and deafness, then, could learn little from the pre-Reformation church, and even less from contemporary physicians.
This should tell you there's something quite wrong about this whole.....picture! This is one of the reasons why I left Christianity because it didn't make any sense. In fact, Deaf people was one of the most minority groups that are locked away forever from God's Word! This didn't make any sense at all. I cannot help but wondering... if this is one of the reasons why our society......the way they are today? When I heard about this, it's pure negativity! This is same true when you see those beautiful models on those magazines, t.v shows, newspapers, etc. When you saw how beautiful their body is, then, you look at yourself, you think you are so ugly. Just because of what we have been told? This is no wonder why we held negative beliefs about ourselves! That is why I had to shovel away the manure (negative beliefs about myself) so the door can open wide... because it was getting in the way of trusting my inner voice!!!!
Now, you can see why I choose to talk a lot about intuition because I feel this is SO important! When I follow my intuition, it was truly magical! That is why I am learning how to listen and go within, not having someone else to tell me otherwise!
Last edited by Intu on Tue Jul 24, 2018 10:19 pm; edited 2 times in total