Or, OR, hear me out-- we've heard the first hand accounts of others who have undergone ABA, or seen videos of sessions, or otherwise done our research, and our visceral disgust with the practice is due to a skill allistic people seem to severely lack called EMPATHY.

I teach a lot of students with Autism and other neurodivergencies. I'm very open to this and see it as a fun challenge to make our sessions accessible. But what I CAN'T cope with is the trauma responses and anxiety I see in people diagnosed early. You can't learn when you're in a state of blind panic and assume you'll be punished for the tiniest thing. Quite often our students don't believe that we will support them or put their accommodations in place, and some won't even bother arranging them.

As a black undiagnosed autistic female my life was learning how to mask to fit into society to give me the best chance due to my race I had to smile and be polite, be soft spoken, hold myself correctly, not do weird things to make me stand out- if not my mother harshly corrected me. Never hit me but harshly verbally scolded me and constantly told me how appearance matters.

It's wild that they diagnosed you with NVLD and SPD and not autism. If you add those two up there's not much left out from the autism criteria.

I experienced behaviorism in the wild. I didn’t even know how much ptsd I had from the grade school teacher who had me sit on my flappy hands until I was saying how I don’t want my kids to be told not to flap and demonstrated the idea of them being told to sit on their hands. I burst into tears. Suddenly I was 7 and vulnerable all over again. 🥺