Content Warning: trauma, forced compliance, gaslighting

When i graduated from university with my b.a. in psychology and human sexuality, i had been in school for 19 consecutive years. By that point, and in spite of my valiant effort to avoid burn-out (by taking my higher education slowly), my candle was burnt at both ends from the oppressive “color-within-the-lines” antiquities of the draconian U.S. public school system.

(Clearly bitter; i attribute much of my suffering throughout my education to the [dangerous] assumption many people made of me that my excellence in academia [read: “high-functioning”] was a sufficient reason for them to dismiss any possible areas of improvement.)

Don’t worry, though; i’ve processed the trauma of this since and am using my critiques of the U.S. public school system to fuel my desire to improve it, as i continue to advance my education within it.

While i felt admittedly horrible about my employment prospects as (specifically) a psychology undergrad, i felt worse about two (plus) more years in school, on top of figuring out how to pay for it.

I created a plan to work, decompress from public education, collect some savings, gain (relatively) relevant field-work experience, and then pursue grad-school (presumably for a degree in psychology but what is now actually the pursuit of a social-work degree).

The only job i was aware of that was relevant to my field (and my interests) was applied behavior analysis (ABA).

Prior to pursuing ABA, i did some cursory online research (in terms of what ABA looked like in action) and had brief conversations with a few friends whom i knew to have experience in this field.

Obviously (for reasons i’ll explain later if it’s not clear now), i did not do enough research or engage in deep-enough conversations to determine if this field was right for me.

I did pursue it, however, and in applying to every organization within driving-distance of my residence (i think possibly six), i interviewed with several and went with the one that gave me the best feeling in my heart (or, the best first-impression).

Ultimately, while my stance today is very much anti-ABA, i am glad i went with my heart in choosing which organization to work with, because i do feel the wonderful people i worked with prevented a notable degree of trauma i (and the children we worked with) could have been subjected to.

As a disclaimer — before i begin my in-depth critique of ABA — my official opinion is that, while individual organizations can conduct ABA in a better (read: less traumatic, more efficacious) way than others, ABA is still inherently flawed and, thus, always traumatic and inefficacious to some degree.

Due to the strengths-based mindset of the contemporary social-worker, i am inclined to begin and end this post with the positive, albeit lesser, effects this experience had on me and the children i worked with. In that vein, i do appreciate my experience in this field specifically as it pertains to the quality of my supervisors and co-workers.

I believe the people i worked with, while not autistic themselves, held the best intentions for working with autistic children. They legitimately loved children (and education) and, in particular, exhibited a great level of respect toward and acceptance of disability. Many children lit up as soon as they saw their favorite supervisor or interventionist.

My supervisors encouraged and fielded hundreds of my questions during the initial training period (as well as during supervised sessions going forward); they understood individuals and families as the experts of their own needs (and those of their child[ren]); and they consistently strived to better understand the needs of the children we worked with in order to provide us “therapists” with the necessary tools to support those needs.

I, too, believed i held the best intentions for working with autistic children in this capacity.

Prior to practicing ABA, i had two years of (mostly positive) experience working as a care-giver with disabled adults (one of which was autistic), and i have a deep love for, as a disabled person who has struggled most of my life, supporting disabled people with maintaining the unconditional love for their authentic self that is (sadly) consistently oppressed over time by the supremacist ideologies and systems that permeate U.S. culture.

I was, however, not qualified or well-equipped to do this work (as a psychology undergrad with little relevant education and zero experience working with children, let alone disabled children) and thus unable to comprehend the insignificance of my intentions.

I believe the decision to hire unqualified people like me to perform this work is just one example of where good intentions diverge from good impacts in ABA.

Not only was i unqualified to begin with, but my training was not long enough (a total of two weeks prior to my first solo, 1-to-1 session) for me to fully understand what i was doing or how to go about doing it properly.

To practice ABA is to take on the ridiculously complex theory of how humans learn (to say nothing of what little allists understand regarding how, specifically, autists learn), and the training time my organization allotted did not provide me nearly enough opportunities for inquiry, adjustment, and improvement.

Instead, i was thrust head-first into positions where i (for example) would physically force wailing children to sit on a toilet for five minutes, believing this to be ABA-approved (and, therefore, just and efficacious) behavior, even though it never felt right.

In striving for improvement and justice, my supervisors would inform me that i needed to work toward things like giving the child more reminders prior to transition from play or make going to the toilet a more fun/enticing activity.

In other words, the intervention was correct (and justified); i was just doing it wrong.

Three problems here right off the bat: (1) toilet training simply isn’t going to be fun or enticing for certain children, regardless of approach; (2) forcing a child to comply with demands simply isn’t an appropriate or effective intervention strategy; and (3) i was being gaslit for questioning the efficacy of ABA.

Regardless of my supervisors’ intentions (for both me and the child) in upholding the principles of ABA and offering me this feedback, i felt hopeless to meet the child’s needs whilst feeling unable to broach the conversation with my supervisors about the inefficacies and moral failures of ABA.

These good intentions are at the root of the problem of modern ABA. Allow me to explain.

A common defense from modern ABA practitioners and supporters when critiqued on the problems inherent to discrete trial training (DTT) (and therefore ABA in general) is that they don’t use DTT; they use natural environment/incidental teaching (NET).

This is a moot defense, however, considering (1) DTT is not the sole issue of ABA; (2) DTT and NET are not necessarily mutually exclusive; and (3) NET has its own unique shortcomings.

In the example above, my supervisors (wrongly) assumed that NET is an effective intervention strategy simply because it can be tailored to an individual child (and their current environment) based on that child’s specific interests.

According to my supervisors, then, i should have been able to cycle through enough preferred activities in order to come upon one that properly motivated the child to willingly (and happily) go to the toilet on command.

Yes, in an ideal world this would be the result; in reality, however, it wasn’t.

The child was never happy going to the toilet; the child and i were both traumatized by this experience of ABA; and the parents eventually (and thankfully) un-enrolled their child from ABA services after realizing it wasn’t right or effective for their child.

Again, the intentions for this feedback were clearly good, but the root issue i am pointing to is that the rhetoric of NET as a justification for the efficacy of ABA creates an attitude and work environment that is resistant to criticism and change, resulting in trauma to both the child (through forced compliance) and the interventionist (through gaslighting).

This forced compliance of the child to perform allistic behaviors can also be viewed as a form of gaslighting and, frankly, eugenics.

Another example of good intentions diverging from good impacts (from my experience) is my previous organization’s belief in ABA’s foundational theory regarding functions of behavior.

Their good intentions were in seeking to understand why a child behaved the way they did in order to slowly and systematically eradicate that behavior (which was deemed socially inappropriate) and replace it with a behavior that was deemed socially appropriate (in order to continue to meet whatever need[s] were being communicated by the initial behavior of the child).

To illustrate, this could (and did) look like commanding a child to point to a desired object and, when the child reacted to the command in an “asocial” way (e.g. flapping, banging, grabbing, etc.), grabbing that child’s hand, forming it to indicate a point, and reinforcing this forced allistic behavior.

The mistakes made here are pretty clear to me at this point: that while the good intentions guiding this intervention were to understand and continue to meet a child’s needs, the impact was often negative in that it (1) made allistic, value-based judgments and assumptions about a child’s behavior (and its function); (2) gaslit the child in asserting a singular preferred communication method; and (3) ignored any possibility that the replacement behavior was insufficient in meeting the needs communicated by the original behavior.

In other words, and in the end, good intentions in ABA do not meet their intended impact because they originate from an allistic perspective, which asserts that autistic ways of communicating are inherently wrong and asocial, and a codified scientific system, which asserts that all autists can thrive under a single intervention strategy.

All that said, and in ending with a strengths-based mindset, i wouldn’t feel honest without acknowledging the positive outcomes i witnessed as an individual that participated in ABA. While i would argue that i saw little notable progress attributable to ABA among most of the children i worked with, some children did seem (to me) to enjoy the interventions we provided.

In my experience, the kids that saw the greatest benefit were the ones that fit the model. If their motivation to learn in this way was natural (i.e. they were legitimately interested in ABA), they (usually) had an enjoyable time with interventionists and were able to maintain their preferred methods of communicating.

Remember, though, that these children were few-and-far-between. That the number of children i saw that fit the ABA model was so minute, i believe, speaks to ABA’s (ironic) inability to produce, as it claims, truly individualized services.

Further, if the leading intervention strategy for (“treating”) autism isn’t made for/by the majority of autists or with the intention of allowing autists to be them-selves, it shouldn’t be the leading intervention strategy.

Thus, the biggest take-aways from this dissonant work experience for me come not from how ABA can vary from organization-to-organization but from the trauma inherent to ABA as a codified scientific system.

It is not enough to say that some autists benefit from ABA when the majority of them don’t (and are traumatized by it). You can do your best in this work with your best intentions, but that will never be enough to change (and improve) the traumatic impacts inherent to the foundations of ABA.

ABA could benefit from its “professionals” examining deeply the myriad ways in which it (whether intentionally or not) asserts allistic dominance over autists and perpetuates the “autism cure” myth through fascist behavior interventions that use “treatment” language to conceal the true impacts of ABA.

Then again, ABA could benefit the world even more by not existing. I am not proposing an end to support for developing autistic children (or autistic adults, for that matter, who today receive even less support). But there are better ways than ABA, and it is high time we see a meaningful paradigm shift in the way autism is perceived by allists.

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Thoughts? Leave a comment; start a conversation! Thank you for reading.