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I want people to understand the predatory and cultic aspects of #ABA therapy. I'm not joking, #ABAisaCult. I'm writing a book about this and I want to share a basic information thread here. I'll start writing when I go inside after smoking.
1/ Several months ago, I first learned about something called the BITE Model, a model of extreme social control. It is an acronym for Behavioral, Information, Thought, and Emotional Control. ABA, as a therapy and a culture, does all of these things.
2/ information about the BITE model: freedomofmind.com/bite-model/
3/ the ways ABA does behavioral control are the most obvious. ABA is a Behaviorist practice, but what is Behaviorism? I argue that it is not a science, but eugenicist and post-fascist ideology that favors "correct" behavior. What's correct behavior? Well, it relates to merit,
4/ a topic covered well by @petercoffin in this video. I agree with his (their? Feel free to correct me on ur pronouns) assessment that what is determined "merit-worthy" is something decided upon by capital and the forces that support it. The same applies to bx in Behaviorism.
5/ woops forgot to link it:
6/ bx = short for behavior, an abbreviation behaviorists often use and I find convenient enough for Twitter and note keeping
7/ ABA therapy works by operant conditioning unwanted bx from ND kids, and replacing them with wanted, or merit-worthy, behaviors. Staring at the wall while talking is good for many autistic people's communication, but ABA will force eye contact because it's "better".
Eye contact is considered a "merit-worthy" bx because it is preferred by allistic neurotypicals in western cultures. It's so merit-worthy that ABA therapists will force kids to do it, repeatedly, in exchange for tokens.
ABA's token economy is just blatant capitalist training. It is also an example of what Foucault called "an internal economy of penalty" in Discipline and Punish. abaresources.com/free2/
10/ shit, forgot to number a couple tweets. Anyway Discipline and Punish is about prisons and state punishment, but he admonishes psychiatrists and related professioals as just as complicit in the privatizing evolution of punishment and torture.
11/ He was writing this at the SAME TIME Lovaas was developing ABA, by inventing conversion therapy for use on feminine boys. He expanded the practice to autistic children, advocating physical abuse all the way. Lovaas is infamous for not thinking autistic people were people. 
12/ this is all background information for the Behavioral Control section of the BITE Model. I believe that Behaviorism is an ideological cousin of Oralism, which holds that non-speech communication is not as good as speech. Deaf people have been and still are harmed by Oralism.
13/ so, all that out of the way, let's go through the specific methods of behavior control used both by cults and ABA.
For this section, tweets will be numbered and every example of behavior control will be labeled B1, B2, etc.
For this section, tweets will be numbered and every example of behavior control will be labeled B1, B2, etc.
14/ ABA and Behavior Control:
B1: Regulate the individual's physical reality. This aspect is constant through the therapy itself, with ABA schedules as high as 40 hrs a week for kids as young as 1 or 2. ABA also has residential schools. I have family in one.
B1: Regulate the individual's physical reality. This aspect is constant through the therapy itself, with ABA schedules as high as 40 hrs a week for kids as young as 1 or 2. ABA also has residential schools. I have family in one.
15/ I haven't seen this person physically in years. I tried sending mail to them there once, and it turned out the school goes through students' mail like they're a prison, not a school. I also learned that this family member, then 17, was functionally illiterate.
16/ So they had to read my letter to the person, but they also showed it to their parents. This was a private letter in which I came out as transgender and talked about many other private things. I was outed as trans to my family by this school.
17/ This person being functionally illiterate (or at least believed to be) at 17 is a tragedy. This is pure language deprivation from staff who simply must not be trying to give students accessible communication methods. This is bc ABAers are specifically trained not to accept
18/ non-normative communication, very often forcing speech out of non-verbal people, causing them pain, humiliation, and undue lifelong stress. Being constantly criticised and normalized from infancy takes a huge toll on autistic people. ABA does this via conversion therapy.
19/ The philosophy of conversion therapy is eugenics through a different path. Instead of outright eliminating undesirables, you can train those undesirables to act like Normals. That way, they don't have to live a life of hardship/burn in hell.
20/ I hope the victim-blaming nature of "hide your essence to avoid eugenicist violence" is obvious to you all, but my experience with proponents of ABA is overall one where they seem literally brainwashed into supporting child abuse. Observe, while discussing the high rate of >
21/ PTSS observed in autistic children exposed to ABA in a preliminary study on the topic. The rate observed is 46%. That's not a few bad apples, that's systematic oppression. emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.11…
22/ PTSS controls your physical reality, especially when what they actually are is a collection of survival skills acquired in childhood to be able to respond more automatically to Behaviorist demands.
23/ it also controls their physical reality by imposing on the family a 24/7 commitment to ABA's hyper-controlling lifestyle. This includes consistent family responses to the victim child's bx, up to and including planned ignoring of communication.
24/ Even more chillingly, this is achieved through something ABAers call Parental Adherence Training. Conversely, failure is called Parental Nonadherence. There are many studies and articles by ABAers on how to train parents effectively, but few into whether this actually works.
25/ What Parental Adherence Training effectively does is train parents not to question the therapist's methods, manipulating compliance out of not just the autistic child but their entire family unit. It trains out critical thinking, something that falls under thought control.
Sigh, I need a break. I'll come back to this later. Don't let me forget to finish this thread!
26/ One residential ABA school, the most infamous one, is called the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts. They electrocute autistic kids there. There were over 400 serious abuse allegations FILED through official channels just between 2005 and 2015, including sexual abuse.
27/ Threatening behavioral children with torture, through devices they must wear on their bodies, is as clear an example of controlling the kids physical reality as anything.
27/ B2: Dictate how, where, and with whom the person lives and associates or isolates: Isolating autistic children as punishment for being visibly neurodiverse is a common punishment, both inside and outside of ABA. Planned Ignoring is another isolating ABA tactic.
28/ Planned Ignoring means that the ABA technician (I refuse to call them therapists) will intentionally pay no attention to a child communicating in an undesired way. Can you imagine that scenario, NTs? Imagine yourself as a nonverbal toddler and you need a hug. Adults ignore u.
29/ They ignore you because you don't know how to ask for a hug in a typical way, so you run up and hug your teacher, someone you should be able to trust. But the teacher doesn't acknowledge you at all. Still needing a hug, and now a sense of stability in your world again, u cry.
30/ Your crying goes ignored. Can't they hear you? Are you not being loud enough? You scream louder now, and no repsonse. At last, age 3, you give up on human contact, and are rewarded for giving up with menial attention or a token.
31/ Admonishing "attention-seeking" bx is dangerous and factually incorrect. Attention isn't a frivolous desire, but a human need. Humans all need some degree of attention from other humans, especially small children.
32/ If, as @petercoffin argues, attention is currency in the neoliberal marketplace of ideas, then intentionally depriving disabled children of attn on a clearly ableist basis is depriving these children of a future source of social capital. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
33/ As a kid in an ABA lifestyle home, I saw first hand the deprivation of attention and affection from an ABA victim kid because of the notion that "attention-seeking" is universally bad, maladaptive, manipulative, and undesirable.
34/ ABA institutions are dangerous, and the hyper-controlling lifestyle of ABA becomes too much for many parents to deal with, leading them to dispose of them at a residential ABA institution. It's the aftereffects of deinstitutionalization.
35/ This creates a kind of profit pipeline for the ABA industry. And yes, it is a very capitalist industry. Recruit families shortly after an autism diagnosis, an emotionally vulnerable time for many parents who mourn the Normal child they didn't have.
36/ Like a cult, ABA takes advantage of your emotional vulnerability, selling you on the idea that ABA is the only thing that works, even though the autistic community near-universally opposes it.
37/ B3: Dictate how, when, and with whom individuals have sex. Not always directly, but it happens through application of eugenicist ideology. Non-speaking people are presumed to be incompetent and not understand anything, but this is the opposite of the truth. However, through
38/ this notion that non-speaking = non-understanding, one also assumes an inability to consent to sex--another lie about disabled people. Disabled adults are almost always able to provide consent to sex, and non-speaking autistic adults are no exception.
39/ The presumption of incompetence is present in all applications of ABA. ABA presumes, wrongly, that if they can train someone to act like a Normal they'll become one, and if they can't train them then they'll be forever incompetent.
40/ Thing is, autistic survivors of ABA are also seen as incompetent. Even a Behaviorist's best case scenario typically involves training the kid up for menial labor to "give their life meaning". *shudders in antifa*
41/ Those best case scenarios are not generally presumed competent enough to consent to sex, even though this is not true. Disabled people are often denied basic sex ed, and non-speaking autistics often get virtually nothing in the way of sex ed.
42/ One of the worst effects of ABA is the constant violation of the kid's boundaries during therapy is teaching the kid that their boundaries don't fucking matter. How is a kid whose boundaries have been consistently violated supposed to be able to assert their bodily autonomy?
43/ This can limit ABA victims' ability to have consensual sex as adults, as happened in my case. I had to learn in my 20s how to stand up for myself because ABA based social skills training thought it was better to accept abuse if it meant keeping relationships with those people
44/ B4: Control types of clothing and hairstyles. Often happens if an autistic kid presents a sensory aversion to a specific thing. ABA will try to force the kid to touch the thing causing them sensory distress because "you should be able to touch velvet like a Normal, jeez."
45/ ABA based sensory normalization flies in the face of healthy sensory diets. Autistic people benefit most from being able to control our sensory diet in our own terms, and given the tools to understand how our minds and experiences differ.
46/ B5: Regulate diet. Big time ABA and its surrounding culture do this. If a child presents a se story aversion to a specific food, they sometimes force-feed the kid instead, sometimes even spraying their mouths with ammonia as an aversive. This is torture. By definition.
*sensory
36/ B6 Manipulation and deprivation of sleep. Not usually directly, except in a few abuse reports about the JRC of course. Insomnia is common among autistic people bc of ableism. In residential ABA schools, bed time is generally strict and doors are locked to prevent escape.
^ Shit, that one's numbered wrong. Maybe I need another break. This thread is proving to be too long for me to go over the whole BITE Model here, but I'll cover behavioral control.
48/ Alright, this is long enough, and if I go through every example of behavioral control I wrote down (a 47 page outline for the BITE Model section) this will take forever.
So, moving on to my next thesis: ABA as thought-reform or brainwashing.
So, moving on to my next thesis: ABA as thought-reform or brainwashing.
49/ Thought-reform is the academic term for brainwashing, or at least one of them. It's the term I'm using. I'm drawing much of this from the book Cults in our Midst by Margaret Singer, a good primer on how cults work and the threat they pose.
50/ It's very difficult to explain what it's like growing up with an "ABA family" to people far removed from that sort of thing. ABA creates pockets of authoritarianism in a client base with smiles on their faces, as they train your children like animals. It's cruel.
51/ The introduction of thought reform is often subtle but generally quick, having noticeable negative but wanted effects in the child after a matter of weeks. A study revealed many exposed autistic kids will meet the criteria for PTSD after four weeks. emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.11…
52/ This suspiciously lines up with what ABA calls the first extinction burst, which will happen around that time. Basically, it means the extinction of communicative bx deemed "negative bx" by the ABAers. The child will have a "burst" of the bx before giving up: extinction.
53/ A more mild example of this is the repetitive switching of a broken light switch before realizing it won't work. But autistic children aren't objects to be manipulated into personhood, Lovaasites. We have emotional experiences far more complex than ABAers seem to think.
Planned Ignoring, as described above, is often used in conjunction with other methods of medicalized manipulation to cause the first extinction burst, namely the end of the child's resistance to having their bodily autonomy constantly violated 40 hrs a week, 1800 hours a year.
56?/ The child in the above example going through stages of ever more desperate pleas for human connection before giving up and becoming withdrawn is an example of an ABA-induced extinction burst.
They try to stamp out our revolutionary souls early. It sadly works sometimes >
They try to stamp out our revolutionary souls early. It sadly works sometimes >
56/ resulting in kids described as robotic, needing prompting to do anything. They need to be told its okay for them to do simple things like leave the table, go to the bathroom, and yes, even say no to things they don't want. They aren't allowed to say no during ABA "therapy"
Saying "no" is limited to "appropriate protests", which NEVER include the right to say no to the ABA as a whole. The important thing is that to the ABAer, the "appropriate" no doesn't matter either, because the goal is always to redirect the kid "back to task". It's exhausting.
58/ This mirrors the way we can't say effectively no to capitalism within capitalism. I mean, we can criticize it, but we are all coerced into participation in capitalism because we need groceries, shelter, and things. That's not a coincidence; ABA is training kids to labor.
59/ An example of a robotic child. ABAers deny this happens, but it's a fucking lie and their critics know it.
60/ The folks at Autistic and Allies Against ABA Ireland have related on Facebook a story of a SNA (Special Needs Asst) working at an ABA program who said they were training kids for assembly line work. Like that's a good thing to do!
61/ And to be clear, kids revoke consent from ABA all the time. That revocation goes ignored by the technician though, because, in the words of the BCBAs at HowToABA, time is money. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? Right out of the horse's mouth.
62/ Hitting, saying no, trying to escape, pushing the therapist out the door as soon as possible, are all obvious signs of revoking consent.
I saw these signs ignored with my own two eyes, in my childhood ABA home.
I saw these signs ignored with my own two eyes, in my childhood ABA home.
63/ ABAers are well aware of escape oriented behavior. It's one of the four categories of behavior a Behaviorist believes bx falls into. Imagine thinking human behavior has just four basic explanations! This didn't work for Mass Effect 3 and it won't work for you.
64/ Sorry. Had to let off steam by making fun of Mass Effect 3.
Escape oriented actions, like bolting from the room, are seen as a problem in the child. Never you mind what they want to escape from. That's not important because they're ~*h e l p i n g*~
Escape oriented actions, like bolting from the room, are seen as a problem in the child. Never you mind what they want to escape from. That's not important because they're ~*h e l p i n g*~
65/ To quote from Cults In Our Midst, ch. 3: "The key to successful thought reform is to keep the subject unaware that they are being manipulated and controlled--and especially to keep them unaware that they are being moved along a path to change that will lead them to serve>
66/ "interests that are to their disadvantage. The usual outcome of thought-reform processes is that a person or group gains almost limitless control over the subjects for varying periods of time."
This is the result of COERCIVE PERSUASION. It differs from your friends trying to
This is the result of COERCIVE PERSUASION. It differs from your friends trying to
67/ persuade you into a reasonable belief because the new belief system is not in their best interests, is likely to harm you, and comes packaged with a lot of other horrific nonsense you wouldn't normally be okay with.
68/ Swooping in to save the day like ABA claims it will do during a vulnerable time for autism parents is predatory to the parents and their kids. No mention of the criticism against ABA. No mention of potential negative outcomes. ABA makes informed consent impossible like a cult
69/ Cults prey upon vulnerable people going through a hard time, offer them the world, and then demand purity and compliance with the system they've created. ABA does this.
70/ Margaret Singer created this tool, the continuum of influence, to help determine the effective material differences between education, indoctrination, advertising, and thought reform. cultrecover.com/sites/default/…
71/ Going by the collection of experiences of autistic people in ABA, I've determined that it meets the qualifications for thought reform in nearly every way listed. The only exception is that it doesn't train kids to serve a single leader, which is a point where I actually have>
72/ some political criticism of Singer. I write more about this in my book, but even by Singer's very centrist definitions ABA meets most of the qualifications for being a cult on par with Synanon. I disagree w her assessment that all cults need a singular living leader.
73/ an example of predatory culty recruitment for ABA, targeting families in vulnerable positions.
