"Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."

-a 15yo autistic girl experiencing ABA therapy

Source

  • SuddenDownpour
    15·
    8 months ago

    Note that even what we pejoratively call “training like a dog” is so obsolete that I’ve seen/read more than one dog trainer get a bit offended for comparing their profession to ABA. Ultimately, the problem with ABA is that it assumes that the object to be worked with isn’t a subject worthy of being considered sentient, or of being capable of accurately expressing their needs or preferences, or that their mental processes are either too obscure or too wrong to even begin to take them into consideration, but rather that it’s just a very simple organism that you have to punish or reward until it learns to pretend to appear “human enough” in your eyes.

    You’d think we would have shelved it already when we already know a lot in the differences in the mental processes of autistic people.