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People who can’t say no, can’t say yes meaningfully. […] Making the best of a bad situation isn’t consent.
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when you’re working for rewards, not getting them is a punishment
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Successfully modifying a behavior is not the same as understanding why someone was doing something, and it is not the same as meeting their needs.
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[…] ‘compliance’ as if it were the answer.
Just follow this beautifully laid out plan replete with measurable goals with neat little timeframes and clearly named people assigned to each intervention, and all will be right with the world!
what must someone give up of their own desires, wants and most intimate beliefs in order to give in?
While non-compliance isn’t an easy answer anymore than compliance is […] Non-compliance saved my life. And not because I did brilliant things instead of what people were instructing me to do. I absolutely did quite the opposite of that.
But I got to keep my fire and my sense of self while doing an array of stupid and risky things, and what that meant was that when it came time for me to get a little smarter about living, I had the energy and drive left to do something about it.
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[…] It relies on continuous extrinsic motivation, which means conditioning the person it’s being done to to comply with a lot of things that they’re actively unwilling to do for several hours a week over and over. It means making them do things that make no sense to them, over and over for many hours a week. That’s dangerous. It’s especially dangerous for people with disabilities who have complex communication needs.
It’s dangerous to make a kid do things that make no sense to them over and over and over while relying on extrinsic reinforcement. That teaches them that people in positions of power can do whatever they want to them, and that they have no right to protest or understand or influence things. It leaves people subject to it very, very vulnerable to abuse. Extreme conditioned obedience is dangerous, and it’s the most persistently reinforced behavior in it. It’s generalized to other environments, and does not go away once therapy ends.
Autism: Explorations 