"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
What’s ABA theory? But anyway, spot on.
From a quick search, it’s basically a therapy where, instead of figuring out why the patient is upset, you train them like a dog. And not even the training where you do gentle redirection from bad behaviours. The kind where you whap the “patient” (ie victim) for being “abnormal” so they effectively become a nervous wreck who does as you please to avoid being hurt
Sounds like every conservative’s wet dream.
In a conservative and nothing about this sounds appealing to me.
Do you know any conservatives in real life or do you just have a notion of who they are from memes?
I see three possibilities:
One, you have a different definition of conservative than what is currently the general definition of that label in the US.
Two, you’re lying.
Three, you’re in a country other than the United States and therefore ‘conservative’ doesn’t mean the same thing in general to you.
Quick test: if you agree with or vote for any US Republican politician, you’re just lying. In any other case, there may be a misunderstanding.
Well, I know the policies they’ve been advocating for. You know like, taking away women’s bodily autonomy. Denying them reproductive healthcare. Taking away the rights and dehumanising anybody who doesn’t conform to their very narrow (and utterly unscientific) ideas of gender identity. Making healthcare unaffordable to the point where live expectancy in the richest country on earth is falling. Letting any idiot buy an assault rifle, leading to countless deaths and a population living in fear. An inhumane and deeply racist prison system. Letting police get away with open blatant murder. I could go on. So pardon me if I think that a “conservative” is a person who simply likes to make other people suffer.
So, I like everything in your post. I also sorta like guns, I also fully believe that something has to change as I’m tired of all the shootings, and of my 26 years alive, we’ve done nothing and there are only more shootings. But, you cannot buy an assault rifle in America. Legally anyway. For the average person. That’s already illegal. If you’re referring to the AR-15, that stands for armalite. The company that makes them.
But other than that, spot on. Especially when it comes to guns though, the people in that community refuse to take anyone talking like that seriously, so if we’re going to have change, in my opinion, you have to do so from another angle. The gun community in America is also massive, shockingly diverse, and only growing. Why do these people feel that they need to take safety into their own hands? I feel like that’s largely the question that needs to be answered there.
Also, I’ll finish this by saying, I own one shotgun, that I’ve had since I was 12 and I’ve never shot it. I’m not a crazy gun enthusiast, but, it is something many people I know take seriously. Oh, and I guess my general politics are reformed conservative? I was raised in the Midwest by conservative parents but every day I wake up more left leaning.
I know conservatives that believe this would be a good idea. I grew up with my parents arguing with family about taking me to ABA, but thankfully my parents had sense and didn’t. All of the family members that thought it would be a good idea are very conservative.
That sounds more like the reason why a person would need a therapist to begin with, rather than any kind of actual treatment.
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.
*therapy. Sounds like some sort of “Autism cure” by christians. Which would be as effective and tortuous as “Gay convertion therapy”
No, it’s not that. It’s a form of therapy that is highly controversial, and mostly stems from the observation that autistic humans can be brought to “behave” like “normal people” if they are sufficiently conditioned to do that. Yet, it is not founded in religious BS, but rather a result of behavioral approaches to psychology that have been very popular, especially in the US and Canada at least since the 60s (like many addiction-therapies and such). Behavioral therapies aren’t bad outright, but have spawned some questionable offspring (like all approaches in medicine tend to do). “Conversion camps” are such offspring. Regarding ABA: While many studies indicate that ABA does, in fact, bring autistic people to behave more like non-autistic people, that in itself is not evidence that the therapy is working. If depressive people behave like I want them to and get out of bed to clean the house because I hold a gun to their head, they are not “cured”. The same goes for this kind of therapy. There are merits to the principles of the approaches bundled under the term “ABA”, but the line between “helping Autistic people” and “torturing autistic people” is razor-thin. Unfortunately, many approaches that call themselves “ABA” are crossing that line, as do many therapists who deny people breaks or meals, or worse.
You know? Humans are cruel dumpster fires of bullshit once they think what they do is right and “for the best”.
Applied Behavior Analysis
so… like CBT, but you don’t enjoy the torture-part nearly as much?
It’s a branch of behaviorism but it is a distinct branch from CBT. CBT involves cognition and behavior analysts don’t work with thoughts, just behaviors. Like any therapy, it can be misused or it can be helpful, depending on your skill and sensitivity as a therapist. Behavior therapies are not about torture. They are therapies and aim to be helpful. Your mileage may vary though depending on what you want from therapy and how skillful your therapist is.
I think you got wooshed, cause I’m pretty sure the CBT being referred to is cock and ball torture.
Though maybe I got wooshed, I’m not 100% sure.
Sometimes you get wooshed I guess
Applied Behavior Analysis therapy.
That sounds like a euphemism for hitting people.
It does still allow for aversives, so… Kinda?