8:57pm June 10, 2014

How “negative” and “positive” behavior mod harmed me.

I was exposed to behavior mod techniques that were sometimes straight out of Lovaas practically (“I’ll stop hitting you when you look me in the eye!”) and more “positive” ones. I want to talk about how the “positive” behavior mod harmed me.

I was in a sort of after-school day program thing for kids in the psych system. It was supposed to keep us out of trouble and out of our parents’ hands for awhile. We each got a staff person (called a “mentor”, a term I hated, because I think real mentorship relationships are rare and have to be earned that title). Or actually a set of staff people who were different on different days. They’d pick us up after school and do things with us.

So by this point I’d already been through behavior mod – the negative type – that taught me that going into my room alone was bad and that I had to be around people. That was at a residential treatment facility I spent somewhere in the vicinity of 6-9 months at.

But at this after-school program, it was different. The staff person knew that I loved to eat an extremely varied amount of interesting kinds of food. She told me that she would take me out for different kinds of food – Italian, Japanese, etc. – once a week, if all week long, I wrote in my diary once a day about one way in which I had socialized with other people.

I didn’t even think of the idea that I could lie about this, so I socialized more and she said what a great person I was for behavior mod because I was so easily food-motivated and stuff.

To me, at the time, it was like, all the pesto gnocchi I can eat? Sign me up!

But it had a serious effect on me, long-term.

Which was that I lost the ability – between the “good” and the “bad” behavior mod, both – to recognize and respond to overload. This resulted in excruciating pain, among other things. It resulted in more meltdowns and shutdowns in public places, when in the past I had been able to run to my room before things like that started. It resulted in getting stranded in public places too disoriented to get home, the police getting called to report the disoriented wandering person, and the whole works. The overall effect on me was horrendous.

And yet most people would see the program as harmless. At least the program with the food – the ones before might or might not be seen as bad depending on the person.

There’s a concrete example for you, patternsmaybe.