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8:36am June 2, 2015

Nightmares

jrcabuse:

     How long will the nightmares last? How many more nights will they have me back in their grasp? In these dreams I am strapped once again to the devices. I feel the fear in my stomach. I see the same faces that I left behind, living the same day over and over. Popsicles sticks, counting, anxious faces, darting eyes, working to earn praise, then starting over again. Sometimes I fight the staff back with a confidence I didn’t have before. My favorite is when I told Matthew Israel to his face to go fuck himself. He did that nod, instructing the staff to shock me, but it didn’t hurt. That time was not a nightmare with a moment of victory. But mostly, the dreams are terrifying. I get shocked, and it hurts. I can’t escape. I can’t dial the phone to call my mom for help. 

     I have been through a lot of shitty programs, schools and situations. But the Judge Rotenberg Center wins the distinction of being the only one I have nightmares about. I don’t think they will ever end. Because that pain is etched in my mind. But maybe that’s ok. It keeps my anger fresh, and my longing to make it right. I never will forget the feelings or the pain. At least now, I can wake from those dreams and look around at my new real life, where I feel safe and happy. 

8:36am June 2, 2015
jrcabuse: Part of my actual official recording (behavior) sheet from Judge Rotenberg Center. Just some of the things I was shocked or it in trouble for. There is much more too. Under MDIS2 is I get shocked for having “5 IVB1 in an hour” at bottom shows what IVB is- talking to self, laughing etc. JRC claims they only shock major behaviors. Liars. See MDIS1- I also got shocked for “touching telephone, tic like body movements (I have Tourettes), hand movements in front of face, jumping up and down etc and much much more. This is only part of my sheet

jrcabuse:

Part of my actual official recording (behavior) sheet from Judge Rotenberg Center. Just some of the things I was shocked or it in trouble for. There is much more too. Under MDIS2 is I get shocked for having “5 IVB1 in an hour” at bottom shows what IVB is- talking to self, laughing etc. JRC claims they only shock major behaviors. Liars. See MDIS1- I also got shocked for “touching telephone, tic like body movements (I have Tourettes), hand movements in front of face, jumping up and down etc and much much more. This is only part of my sheet

8:36am June 2, 2015

Another Unfortunately True Story

jrcabuse:

In my first few months of being at JRC, I had been asking about where my glasses were. They had gotten taken from me at some point after I got there, and they said I was too “unsafe” to have them. Even though I was very nearsighted and had worn my glasses since I was 13. Not being able to see well contributed to my frustration and anxiety. 

One day my case manager at the time came to my workshop with a pair of glasses and forced me with a 3 step direction (under penalty of shock) to put them on. They weren’t my glasses I had never seen them before. She pinpointed me “arguing with staff”. She said I HAD to wear them, that I was mistaken and they were mine, she found them in her desk drawer. I couldn’t see anything out of them and it made me sick to wear someone else’s prescription. Her and the workshop supervisor forced me to wear the all day, saying I just needed to get used to them again. THEY WERE NOT MY GLASSES. I think at some point they realized they were wrong, but at JRC staff can never admit to making a mistake, so they will maintain to the end that they are right, at students expense and much to our frustrations. 

To save myself, I ended up “losing” the glasses so I wouldn’t have to wear them anymore. Of course that got a new behavior added to my program “hiding or losing. throw away glasses”. The truth is I would never hide or throw away my actual glasses, I really need them to see. I was forced into doing that because they were forcing me to wear someone else’s glasses! Like, who DOES that? Oh yeah, JRC…

8:35am June 2, 2015
jrcabuse: Proof JRC was shocking us on the board. This was mine. So many other students got this too. See number 3, where it directs staff to make sure the torture is good by being discrete, so the student (me on this one) “doesn’t know the application (shock) is coming”

jrcabuse:

Proof JRC was shocking us on the board. This was mine. So many other students got this too. See number 3, where it directs staff to make sure the torture is good by being discrete, so the student (me on this one) “doesn’t know the application (shock) is coming”

4:47am January 30, 2015

I miss you, Chris.

I didn’t know Chris Slater well, although we spent over a year together on the same autie-positive chatroom.  But I remember certain things about him.  And I remember when he died.

This was his webpage from around when I first met him.

He was an ABA success story.  This means that when I knew him, in his late teens and early twenties, he didn’t know who he was.  He believed himself to have overcome autism.  But all he’d done was stuff his head full of nonautistic behavior, to the point where he had no room left to think his own thoughts, make his own decisions, or run his own life.  Sometimes when you talked to him it felt like someone else was speaking through him.  But since he did not use assisted typing, nobody cared how much influence others had on his communication.  Which was, much of the time, far worse and more pervasive influence than I’ve seen with many FC users.

Anyway, he had a tendency to be… over-dramatic, at times.  So at one point he and his girlfriend called together all the regulars in the chatroom, Chris had something he wanted to say.  He made a big show of describing how he was rocking and flapping now, instead of suppressing those impulses as he’d been taught.  It took a lot more than that to overcome his ABA training, but it was a start, and he was well on his way to becoming his own person, not a puppet of his trainers.

And then he died.  In his early twenties. Right as he was getting a foothold to understanding who he was.  It would’ve been even worse if he’d died still a complete robotic ABA puppet.  But it always seemed unfair to me that he died just as he wsa learning to come to terms with everything that had been done to him, coming to terms with what a “The-World success story” meant and how to get back to acting as his real self – one challenge you face at that point is to become who you are in the moment, rather than a parody of who you imagine you would’ve been.  And when he died, he was walking that line, sorting out the difference, learning who he was.

I don’t remember exactly what happened.  I think there was a head injury.  His brain swelled up a lot and he went into a coma.  His parents were told that if he didn’t recover in a few days, he’d never recover.  (Where “recover” often means “become nondisabled”.)  His  parents took him off life support.

An autistic woman who claimed to be able to talk to dead people’s spirits (and I don’t hold that out as an impossibility in general, although for her, I was skeptical) said he was just as sad and bewildered as the rest of us were.

I was mad that he’d been given up on so soon.  I happened to know that there were people who’d survived much worse brain conditions of that sort, for much longer, and who eventually came out of the coma and regained some abilities. Sure, they usually had some new physical and cognitive disabilities, but they were alive, and generally glad to be alive.  I also know (from reading stuff by people who work in them) that some ICUs develop a toxic culture where the doctors and nurses present worst-case scenarios to the families, in as lurid a manner as possible, in order to persuade the families to pull the plug so that their patient doesn’t end up severely disabled.

At any rate, I miss him, and it seems cruel that he died before living the life he wanted, as who he was.  He’d literally spent most of his life living as other people’s dreams for him, not as himself.  And that was just plain tragic.

You never know how long your child will have on this earth.  If you love them, then for the love of everything holy, don’t try to train them to be a robotic extension of your dreams.  You might lose your child before you have the joy and wonder of finding out who they really were under all that “act normal” training.  He’s not the first the-world success story I’ve met, nor the most recennt, who struggled with major identity issues as a result.  Some people “wake up” in their thirties, forties, fifties, even seventies and eighties and realize who they are for the first time consciously.  Of course for the oldest people (who, if they had a diagnosis, would either probably be diagnosed as psychotic or intellectually disabled or both), there was no ABA officially, but behaviorism existed and people were trained with or without it, to be something they weren’t.  Not everyone lives long enough to reach that point.  Chris was lucky he began figuring out who he was so soon – but he didn’t live long enough to finish the process (as much as such a thing can ever be finished), and it pisses me off that people were gambling with his life like that. By which I mean, putting him in the position of not knowing who he was.

6:17pm August 22, 2014

➸ "They did a study on sensory integration and it didn't help autistic kids at all."

karalianne:

into-the-weeds:

chavisory:

karalianne:

I was told that by a staunch ABA supporter once.

I didn’t have the words to counter this at the time, but here are the words now.

Did they use the exact same techniques with all of the subjects? Because that’s not how sensory processing differences work.

What was the criteria for inclusion in…

Also, a lot of “sensory integration” therapy involves aggravating the sensitivities in question.  Which doesn’t actually result in desensitization, for the most part.

Just because the sensory therapies don’t work because they’re badly designed doesn’t mean that sensory differences in autism aren’t real or a huge source of surface behavior.

What the study actually found is that sensory supports didn’t decrease autistic behavior. The kids were still autistic. They weren’t assessing for calmness, quality of life, ability to focus, etc. Just indistinguishability. Which sensory integration…..doesn’t…..target…..

Thank you, someone knew what study it was! I never bothered to look it up because I knew it hadn’t been done properly anyway.

Just proves the bias of the researchers.

Which is one of those variables a lot of people don’t bother to consider.

Of course, it’s one of those studies that probably gets trotted out by ABA proponents as “see, it doesn’t work but ABA does” when, you know, sensory-related therapies aren’t meant to make someone “indistinguishable from their peers” they’re meant to help them calm down and stuff.

And yes, there are definitely people who practice sensory-related therapies incorrectly, too. Far too many people think all autistic people should be brushed or given deep pressure, etc. and that’s only true for certain people. You need to assess everyone carefully and watch responses and make sure that what you’re doing isn’t putting them into shutdown… which can look like calming down if you don’t know the person really well. And if it’s shutdown, well, you’re now abusing the person instead of helping them.

I don’t actually believe in sensory integration theory or sensory integration therapy.  They’re simplistic and they don’t take into account how autistic sensory processing actually works.  They’re just like these theories that someone’s painted over the reality, and they don’t actually mean anything.  Like they’re too tidy.  "Hypersensitivity looks like this, hyposensitivity looks like that, seekers look like this, avoiders look like that, this is what we do for this, that is what we do for that,“ and 99% of it is complete bullshit.

Autistic people do have differences in sensory processing, often major differences, but sensory integration theory is not an explanation of autistic sensory processing, nor is sensory integration therapy a solution for it, except sometimes by accident.

(My brother and I were both diagnosed with SID as kids btw.)

3:39pm July 5, 2014
When the world is a jumble, my hands set me free.  I swim through colors and textures with no awareness of their meaning, but my hands flicker their way through the currents and pick out the map to take me home to my body again.  They translate an incomprehensible jumble of sensations into a powerful kinesthetic rhythm.  When I hear sounds, they dance in a precise accompaniment that lets me understand what those sounds mean.  They tap on surfaces to give me a sound-feel-picture of my environment.  They jump of their own volition into complicated dances that, even though I don’t plan them, other people with the eyes to see can read every nuance of my emotion through each tiny movement.  When I can’t find my hands, they flicker and flap around until I can feel them again.  My hands are involuntary dancers, and anyone with the eyes to see, can read everything about me through the motions of my hands alone. My hands are the one part of my body that I have a consistent connection to.  I can type at speeds faster than I’m capable of thinking up words.  I can crochet all day long if I want to, and my hands never tire.  As a child, I picked up the violin so fast that I was in the junior high orchestra by the age of six and first chair first violin by the age of seven.  My current violin playing doesn’t hold up to such illustrious beginnings, but what I lack in technique I make up in soul.  When I make paintings, I paint with my fingers in ways that show the pure rhythm and shape of things without the distractions of realism.  My paintings have been sold, and ended up in galleries, without my ever trying. My ability to type is one of the most important abilities.  For some reason, it is completely different from speaking.  I am able to control the words that come out, to a much greater degree.  This gives me the ability to communicate in your language, when my language isn’t enough for you (which it usually isn’t, nobody wants to learn a non-word-based language spoken only by a handful of people, few of whom are in a position to teach it). If I still had to use my mouth, I’m not sure I could bear it.  The last two times I spoke came suddenly, and left just as suddenly.  Each was brought on by a medical emergency.  My ability varied from almost-fluent, to obviously “broken” English.  But I remember the feeling of my brain splitting open, of everything inside me breaking, falling to pieces, destroying itself, setting me on fire, setting my whole soul on fire, immolating myself for the purpose of being able to speak for… what was it?  A couple days, once, and an hour, the other time.  And it hurt so badly, I’ve never felt pain like it.  Like the original Little Mermaid, who had to endure knife blades in her legs every time she took a step on land.  Knife blades in my head, in order to speak. But that was communicative speech, an extreme rarity for me.  If I had no typing right now, if I had to rely on speech, it would be a disaster.  I would have over 80% of the time that I had no speech at all.  During the 20% or less of the time that I had speech, it would be random words, random sounds, things I pick up here and there and repeat, nothing to do with my thoughts.  But since people so readily equate speech with communication, I am sure people would spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to work out what my random words meant.  And not spend enough time trying to give me a means of communication that would allow me to tell them what was inside my head. Meanwhile, I would of course be communicating the way I have communicated all along, which is also heavily involved with my hands.  I hand people objects.  I arrange objects around me.  All of these things have more meaning than any words ever could, and I do them all with my hands. My hands are everything to me.  Everything.  They allow me to communicate to you in your language.  But they also allow me to communicate to you in my language.  And my language will always be more important to me than your language.  It always has been.  Whether I’ve tried to choke down your language and spit it out as spoken words, whether I’ve tried to do the same more successfully with the written word.  It doesn’t matter, it’s not my language, it was never my language. My language is the language of objects, the language of paintings, the language of the violin.  When I type the words that you care so much about, my language is the rhythm and music of the movements of my fingers.  My language is the dance of my hands as they help me make sense of the world.  My language is the involuntary flickers of fingers in response to sound, emotion, and light.  My language is the objects my hands clack together, the objects my hands arrange around me in precisely measured intervals, all pointing back to one source. My language is the way my hands trace currents in the air that you can’t always perceive.  My language is the way I weave myself into my crochet projects, and the way my hands can meet anything mechanical and find a way around it. My hands are the one part of my body that I can rely on, despite a decline in motor planning everywhere else.  When an object talks to me and tells me what to do with it, it doesn’t talk to my brain, it talks to my hands, and then my hands know what to do, even if I don’t understand a thing.  My hands are what dance around to make me aware of myself and my surroundings.  My hands are what talk to my surroundings, and allow my surroundings to talk back through me.  My hands are everything. At my school, when our hands did things the teachers didn’t like, they’d say “sit on your hands”. I got to the point where I’d anticipate it.  I’d mutter “sit on your hands”, and then sit on my hands.  I felt proud. And now I feel so ashamed. Everything I told you just now about what my hands are for, what they do in my life, how they are the one part of my body that is a direct window to my soul. And they told us to sit on our hands. I will never sit on my hands again. My hands are my life.  My hands are my language.  My hands are my art.  My hands are a dance.  My hands are communication.  My hands are my soul.  If you have a problem with that… if you sat on your hand so hard it went up your ass, it would serve you right.  But the part that is the saddest to me, is that you don’t know what you’re destroying.  You don’t even think you’re destroying anything.  But my hands are everything.  They are beauty.  They are wisdom.  They are knowledge.  They are art.  They have a language of their own.  And anyone who knows how, can tell everything about me, by watching my hands.  And you will never be able to take that away from me.

When the world is a jumble, my hands set me free.  I swim through colors and textures with no awareness of their meaning, but my hands flicker their way through the currents and pick out the map to take me home to my body again.  They translate an incomprehensible jumble of sensations into a powerful kinesthetic rhythm.  When I hear sounds, they dance in a precise accompaniment that lets me understand what those sounds mean.  They tap on surfaces to give me a sound-feel-picture of my environment.  They jump of their own volition into complicated dances that, even though I don’t plan them, other people with the eyes to see can read every nuance of my emotion through each tiny movement.  When I can’t find my hands, they flicker and flap around until I can feel them again.  My hands are involuntary dancers, and anyone with the eyes to see, can read everything about me through the motions of my hands alone.

My hands are the one part of my body that I have a consistent connection to.  I can type at speeds faster than I’m capable of thinking up words.  I can crochet all day long if I want to, and my hands never tire.  As a child, I picked up the violin so fast that I was in the junior high orchestra by the age of six and first chair first violin by the age of seven.  My current violin playing doesn’t hold up to such illustrious beginnings, but what I lack in technique I make up in soul.  When I make paintings, I paint with my fingers in ways that show the pure rhythm and shape of things without the distractions of realism.  My paintings have been sold, and ended up in galleries, without my ever trying.

My ability to type is one of the most important abilities.  For some reason, it is completely different from speaking.  I am able to control the words that come out, to a much greater degree.  This gives me the ability to communicate in your language, when my language isn’t enough for you (which it usually isn’t, nobody wants to learn a non-word-based language spoken only by a handful of people, few of whom are in a position to teach it).

If I still had to use my mouth, I’m not sure I could bear it.  The last two times I spoke came suddenly, and left just as suddenly.  Each was brought on by a medical emergency.  My ability varied from almost-fluent, to obviously “broken” English.  But I remember the feeling of my brain splitting open, of everything inside me breaking, falling to pieces, destroying itself, setting me on fire, setting my whole soul on fire, immolating myself for the purpose of being able to speak for… what was it?  A couple days, once, and an hour, the other time.  And it hurt so badly, I’ve never felt pain like it.  Like the original Little Mermaid, who had to endure knife blades in her legs every time she took a step on land.  Knife blades in my head, in order to speak.

But that was communicative speech, an extreme rarity for me.  If I had no typing right now, if I had to rely on speech, it would be a disaster.  I would have over 80% of the time that I had no speech at all.  During the 20% or less of the time that I had speech, it would be random words, random sounds, things I pick up here and there and repeat, nothing to do with my thoughts.  But since people so readily equate speech with communication, I am sure people would spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to work out what my random words meant.  And not spend enough time trying to give me a means of communication that would allow me to tell them what was inside my head.

Meanwhile, I would of course be communicating the way I have communicated all along, which is also heavily involved with my hands.  I hand people objects.  I arrange objects around me.  All of these things have more meaning than any words ever could, and I do them all with my hands.

My hands are everything to me.  Everything.  They allow me to communicate to you in your language.  But they also allow me to communicate to you in my language.  And my language will always be more important to me than your language.  It always has been.  Whether I’ve tried to choke down your language and spit it out as spoken words, whether I’ve tried to do the same more successfully with the written word.  It doesn’t matter, it’s not my language, it was never my language.

My language is the language of objects, the language of paintings, the language of the violin.  When I type the words that you care so much about, my language is the rhythm and music of the movements of my fingers.  My language is the dance of my hands as they help me make sense of the world.  My language is the involuntary flickers of fingers in response to sound, emotion, and light.  My language is the objects my hands clack together, the objects my hands arrange around me in precisely measured intervals, all pointing back to one source. My language is the way my hands trace currents in the air that you can’t always perceive.  My language is the way I weave myself into my crochet projects, and the way my hands can meet anything mechanical and find a way around it.

My hands are the one part of my body that I can rely on, despite a decline in motor planning everywhere else.  When an object talks to me and tells me what to do with it, it doesn’t talk to my brain, it talks to my hands, and then my hands know what to do, even if I don’t understand a thing.  My hands are what dance around to make me aware of myself and my surroundings.  My hands are what talk to my surroundings, and allow my surroundings to talk back through me.  My hands are everything.

At my school, when our hands did things the teachers didn’t like, they’d say “sit on your hands”.

I got to the point where I’d anticipate it.  I’d mutter “sit on your hands”, and then sit on my hands.  I felt proud.

And now I feel so ashamed.

Everything I told you just now about what my hands are for, what they do in my life, how they are the one part of my body that is a direct window to my soul.

And they told us to sit on our hands.

I will never sit on my hands again.

My hands are my life.  My hands are my language.  My hands are my art.  My hands are a dance.  My hands are communication.  My hands are my soul.  If you have a problem with that… if you sat on your hand so hard it went up your ass, it would serve you right.  But the part that is the saddest to me, is that you don’t know what you’re destroying.  You don’t even think you’re destroying anything. 

But my hands are everything.  They are beauty.  They are wisdom.  They are knowledge.  They are art.  They have a language of their own.  And anyone who knows how, can tell everything about me, by watching my hands.  And you will never be able to take that away from me.

12:18pm July 1, 2014

The problem with errorless learning

realsocialskills:

Content warning: This is a somewhat graphic post about ABA that links an even more graphic post.

There’s a particular variant on ABA called “errorless learning”, which works like this:

  • You break a task down into small steps
  • Then do discrete trials of the steps, over and over (If you want to know more about what discrete trials are, this post by a former ABA therapist explains it).
  • When someone does it right, you reinforce in some way (either by praise or something concrete)
  • When they do it wrong, you either ignore it, or prompt and reinforce a correct response

This is considered by many to be a kinder, gentler form of ABA than punishing incorrect responses. (And maybe in some sense it isn’t as bad as hitting someone, taking their food away, or shocking them. But that’s not the same as actually being respectful. Respecting someone takes much more than refraining from hitting them.)

Errorless learning is not actually a good or kind way to teach someone. It is profoundly disrespectful.

When you ignore responses that deviate from prompts, that means that you’re ignoring a human being whenever they did something unexpected or different from what you wanted them to do. It means you’re treating their unscripted responses as meaningless, and unworthy of any acknowledgment.

That’s not a good thing to do, even with actual errors. When people make mistakes, they’re still people, and they still need to be acknowledged as thinking people who are making choices and doing things.

Further - not every response that deviates from the response you’re trying to prompt is actually an incorrect response. There are a lot of reasons that someone might choose to do something else. Not all of them are a failure to understand; not all of them are incorrect in any meaningful sense.

For instance: they might be trying to communicate something meaningful:

  • They might be putting the story pictures in a different order than you’re prompting, because they have made up a different story than the one you’re thinking of
  • They might be giving you the boat instead of the apple when you say “give apple” because they are making a joke about the boat’s name being Apple

They might be intentionally defying you in a way that deserves respect:

  • They may be of the opinion that they have better things to do than put the blue block in the blue box for the zillionth time
  • They might know perfectly well what you mean by “give apple”, but think that eating it is a better idea
  • They might be refusing to make eye contact because it hurts

They might be thinking of the task in a different way than you are:

  • They might choosing to use a different hand position than the one you’re prompting, even if they understand what you want them to do
  • For instance, they might have discovered that something else works better for them as a way of tying their shoes
  • Or they might want to try different things
  • Or the position you’re using might hurt

People do things for reasons, and those reasons aren’t reducible to antecedents and consequences. People have an inner life, and their thoughts matter. Even children. Even nonverbal children who need a lot of help doing things. Even adults with severe cognitive impairments. Even people who have no apparent language. All people think about things and make decisions, and those decisions are meaningful. All people deserve to have their thoughts and decisions acknowledged - including their mistakes.

When you teach someone something, acknowledge all their responses as meaningful, whether or not they are what you expected. 

9:42pm June 10, 2014

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

youneedacat:

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.

Someone reblogged this with some tags saying they don’t normally reblog activism.  I can assure you there’s nothing activist about this post.  Not that I see anything wrong with activism.  But if you do, it might be reassuring to note that I don’t feel like anything about this post involved activism.  I was just saying what my experience was with certain kinds of behavior mod.  Which could be used in activist contexts, but isn’t itself necessarily activism (depending on the intent of the writer – my intent was just to communicate information to a friend who’s looking for it).

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.

3:12am May 27, 2014

“

Fact: Ivar Lovaas, pioneer of applied behavior analysis (ABA) compliance training for autistic people, was first known for using the same techniques and methodologies in the NIH-funded feminine boys study. In that project, Lovaas used ABA to force boys with stereotypically feminine speech, movement, and dress to comply with more stereotypically masculine behavior in hopes this would prevent them from becoming homosexual.

What does this tell you about ABA?

”

— Lydia Brown [link] (via twistmalchik)
12:41pm May 26, 2014

➸ Everything I Need To Know In Life I Learned From My Behavioral Therapist (Camille)

Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do and how to be, I learned from my behavioral therapist before I was 5 years old.

These are the things I learned:

Life isn’t fair.

Sometimes you get punished when you don’t understand what you did wrong.

Sometimes you get punished for not trying when you were doing the best that you can.

Sometimes the people in control think you are stupid and that they are smart, but if they were really smart they’d know you weren’t stupid.

Grown ups don’t share and never say they are sorry.

The teacher doesn’t care about what’s important to you.

Feelings don’t matter, only doing matters.

Do exactly as you are told and you get a cookie.

Don’t question why you are being told to do something, just do it, and quickly.

Being autistic is a bad thing.

Don’t stare out the window in rapt amazement at the fluttering of leaves on a tree or at the formation of a cloud. It’s not allowed.

What is allowed is learning to put a lid on a box, 90 times a day, until you get it “right”.

Life is repetetive and boring.

Always hug when told to hug. Always kiss when told to kiss.

Act like a dog, but never say you are a dog.

Act like a robot, but never say you are a robot.

Only say what other people want to hear.

Don’t cry when you are in pain, unless they expect you to cry because they expect that you should be in pain.

The only important things you learn are learned from someone holding a clipboard and stop watch.

Thinking independently is a mistake.

It doesn’t matter that normal kids don’t get treated this way.

To the teacher: eye contact is more important than your pain.

Life is: stimulus - response … stimulus - response.

Don’t try to imagine someone elses thoughts, it’s a waste of time.

Saying strings of oral nonsense in response to strings of auditory nonsense is communication. Connecting words to your thoughts and then saying the words is not communication and will get you in trouble.

If other people hit you, it’s because you’re a bad person or you did something wrong. If you hit back or try to defend yourself… then you’re a bad person and you’re doing something wrong.

—

By Millford Spiltwater - 6 yrs old (not really)

by Camille (mostly)

A note from the author: Some of the best lessons in this were inspired by the experience of my friend oraboris. Thanks oraboris. Feel free to distribute this if you like. Leave it mostly intact, but add to it if you think you can improve it. If you post it somewhere only do so if you want to promote the ethical treatment of autistics and others subjected to thoughtless behavioral therapy.

8:57pm February 20, 2012

➸ Why Students Praise the Judge Rotenberg Center

An old blog post of mine where I describe a video the JRC uses to manipulate parents into disregarding their children’s complaints about the institution. It also teaches parents how to manipulate their children into only saying good things about the JRC.