This is a social story, what many autistics in the 80s were “trained” to think to appear neurotypical at all costs
Some background information you need to know:
Social stories are still used today but back in the 80s it was like social stories on steroids. They were drilled into our heads, act “normal” at all costs. I know my parents were particularly keen on this. I went from special Education classes where they knew I was autistic and visually impaired, when we moved my parents took advantage of that to mainstream me and not pass my health information along to the new school. Social stories became all that more important. Must. Act. Normal. At. All. Costs.
Being autistic was treated like it was something to be ashamed of and that is a thought pattern that is hard to break to this day.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s with autism was very much the “quiet hands movement”, (https://juststimming.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/quiet-hands/ good article!) which is to say we were silenced and punished if we stimmed. (For allistic people The term “stimming” is short for self-stimulatory behavior and is sometimes also called “stereotypic” behavior. In a person with autism, stimming usually refers to specific movements that include hand- flapping, rocking, spinning, pen clicking, desk tapping, beatboxing or repetition of words and phrases amongst others.“)
Stimming can mean we are happy or stressed or angry or any other array of emotions. Stimming is not a universal trait and no too autistic people stim the same.
It was also the land of Applied Behaviour Analysis (refered to as ABA for the duration of this post) where any stimming or “undesired behaviours” were squashed out of you as quickly as possible and replaced with “desired behaviours”.
Every night before bed, we would go through the story of how to behave like a neurotypical person. Social stories began before I could read, at first they were pictures. Pictures of faces and facial expressions I couldn’t see or understand.
Location: lunchroom table, 4 of your friends or at least people who are semi-nice to you and a new girl. You know you should follow the steps to make the new kid not think you’re “weird”.
Get your lunch, resist slapping your hands down the rows of cubbies.
Sit down
Don’t rock
Don’t hum or tap your fingers
Get out your lunch
Don’t rock
Look at the new girl, in the eyes even though it feels bad
Smile
Don’t rock
Don’t pull your sandwich apart, normal people take bites
Don’t rock
Join in the conversation, even though they are all talking at once and bouncing between different subjects and when you finally think of something to say, it was 3 subjects ago and you feel dumb
Don’t squint because the overhead lights feel like you are standing too close to the sun.
Don’t rock
Also, don’t cover your ears because the lights buzz and the clock is loud (normal people don’t hear it) and everyone is talking at once and it’s loud and people’s lunch wrappers are crinkling.
Don’t wrinkle your nose at all the smells of everyone’s lunches mixed together with the smell of pinesol cleaner
Don’t rock
Don’t talk in big words you just learned, that isn’t normal, they don’t like that
Don’t touch your clothes, quiet hands, sit on them. Don’t touch the table or walls or other people.
Don’t look relieved that lunch is over.
Go to the library instead of outside. It’s safe there because there is no one but the librarian and she is nice and doesn’t talk or make me talk.
So that is a social story, that is what runs through my head at every interaction with another person. The situation changes but it runs through my head. Still.
It’s exhausting, continuous stream of orders. But I’ve been trained like a dog that was whacked with a newspaper when it did something bad that acting “normal” is paramount to anything else.
And it is virtually impossible to crack, let alone break.
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.
knitting in the dark 