"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

  • db0OPM
    30•3 months ago

    *therapy. Sounds like some sort of “Autism cure” by christians. Which would be as effective and tortuous as “Gay convertion therapy”

    • @SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
      8•3 months ago

      I’m going to disagree with the other comment and claim that you’ve made a very good observation. Even though conversion therapies and ABA may somewhat differ in their methods, the both of them are born from the basis of wanting to use operant conditioning on humans, and ignore everything else that we’ve learned about the psychology and neurology of humans that explain why it’s a dogshit idea.

    • @EmptySlimeEnglish
      8•3 months ago

      Some people think it’s some kind of autism cure. It’s just understanding the reasons behind behaviors in order to increase behaviors that are desirable and decrease behaviors that are undesirable. Problems could arise from what ends up being defined as undesirable behavior and how that reinforcement is done but that’s true of basically anything with the goal of changing behaviors.

      My wife is autistic and studied it herself because it helped her understand all the “social bullshit” as she called it.

      • @Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
        9•3 months ago

        Approaching it from the point of view of the autistic person trying to understand the traditional social interaction behaviors, to mimic them by choice for their own profit, sounds beneficial. Approaching it from a goal of forcing the autistic person to behave according to traditional social interactions for the benefit of others and the profit of the therapist, does not.

        • @EmptySlimeEnglish
          7•3 months ago

          Pretty much yeah. That’s the problem and how it can become a very bad thing. Same as really any method that seeks to shape behaviors. Are you targeting this behavior because it actually causes distress and interferes with the autistic person’s enjoyment of life? Or are you just trying to breed conformity for the sake of conformity?