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8:39pm June 29, 2014

karalianne:

madeofpatterns:

into-the-weeds:

autisticfandomthings:

People who take the words from ideologies but not the ideas are really scary. Because they cloak their horrible ideas in the language you use to fight people like them, and it makes it really difficult to explain what they’re doing wrong.

Like…

“Behavior is communication” as a way of justifying ABA behavior modification therapy.

“Behaviour is communication” but then they ignore what the person is saying through their behaviour.

And behaviour isn’t always communication. I did a paper on self-injurious behaviour (I read information about self-harm of the type people do when they feel like crap and I read about the kind of self-injury that includes head-banging and biting yourself and so on) and sometimes it’s not the person trying to communicate, it’s the person trying to deal with other types of pain. They aren’t trying to tell anyone else that they hurt, they’re just trying to stop that hurt, or at least deal with it on some level.

One way that I often take ‘behavior is communication’ is that anything that the person is doing, regardless of what, communicates something about the person.  Not all communication is voluntary.  When I see an autistic person doing something unusual, I can usually tell something about them, or their awareness, or how they’re feeling, or their sensory state, or things about their motor skills, or all these other things, and to me their physical behavior communicates a huge wealth of information.  So by that meaning, behavior is communicating things whether it intends to or not, or even whether the person is aware of it or not.

At the same time, that’s not how a lot of people mean it.  They seriously think someone is engaging in particular behavior with the specific intent to communicate.  And that is not what “behavior is communication” ought to mean.  Because that also makes it sound like behavior is all voluntary, which can be quite an insult, among other things.

Notes:
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  14. autmystic reblogged this from gingerautie and added:
    Hearing “behavior is communication” always makes me feel really defensive. I understand what it actually means, but what...
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  17. withasmoothroundstone reblogged this from clatterbane and added:
    One way that I often take ‘behavior is communication’ is that anything that the person is doing, regardless of what,...
  18. clatterbane reblogged this from karalianne
  19. this-reading-by-lightning reblogged this from into-the-weeds and added:
    This this this. The fact that so many autism parents and autistic people still think that it’s appropriate and justified...