Category Archives: Interests

ABA, Autistic community, Interests, Liberation, Long Reads, Parents, Self-advocacy, Sensory Integration, Stimming, Teenage Liberation, Violence against us

Alternatives to ABA and behavioralism

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This is a first draft. (Yes, I’m trying to set something off here.) I’m especially looking for feedback from Autistics, especially ones who went through ABA or ABA-like programs in the school system. (I’m in my 50s. I went through a whole bunch of behavioralist, ABA-like experiences, including assessment, but this was before inclusion of autistic children was mandated as part of the U.S. school system’s requirements.) “Play nice”, don’t flame me or others, but please feel free to leave comments and feedback.

For Autistic students:

— You have a right to play alone.

— You have a right to your interests.

— You have a right to say “no”, and be taken seriously.

— You have a right to your stims.

— You have a right to not make eye contact.

— You have a right to move your body.

— You have right to sit where you want, and that’s yours.

— You have a right to learn.

— You have a right not to learn.

— You have a right to make mistakes.

— You have a right not to trust people.

— You have a right to interact with who you want.

— You have a right to make friends of your own choosing.

— You have a right to respect.

— You have a right to self-determination.

— You have a right to self-advocacy.

— If nobody understands what you’re asking for, find a way to tell them. (This may take some time.)

— If doing something hurts, try to find something that doesn’t hurt that works just as well. (It’s ok if you can’t.)

— If you make a mistake and people get mad, ask why in whatever way is safe, if possible. (It’s ok to make your own decisions.)

— People say and do things for reasons other than you might think. Observe, learn, and if possible, ask. (You have a right to not respond.)

For parents:

— Embrace the child who is front of you, not the one that you hoped for.

— Reject ABA, both at a therapist’s office or center, and at home. Being assessed and aggressed upon by teachers messed me up, but not as half as much as having compliance forced on me at home did.  (This was before ABA was formalized as school-age “intervention” under IDEA, otherwise they probably would’ve subjected me to that as well, and fucked me up even more.)

— Advocate for your child. Parent and teacher-led advocacy is one of the things that helped me break free – not from autism, but from people who kept trying to “fix” me. Presume competence.

— If your child has affirming teachers who they have rapport with – let your child know that you support those teachers, and that you disapprove of the ones that deny your child’s humanity.

— Interests aren’t talents or career paths, necessarily. They’re interests, which is enough on its own. (If they wind up being career paths or long-term pursuits, that’s fine too.)

— Never demand quiet hands. (This is part of what messed me up.) Suppressing stims, echolalia and interests is abusive. If you need a time out for yourself, take it.

— Aggressive behavior is happening for a reason. Center your child’s needs, not their behaviors.

— Read the section for teachers below; it’s relevant to parenting as well.

For teachers:

— Dump ABA, including the “good” ABA. ABA is conversion therapy for autistics. Torturing children for being trans or gay isn’t acceptable, torturing us for being autistic shouldn’t be, either.

— Allow students to find their own interests.

— Don’t suppress student’s stims.

— Explosive behavior (hitting, kicking) is communication and self-regulation. Find out what is being said.

— If students want to play alone, let them.

— Ask students about their interests, *gently*.

— Create a welcoming environment, full of things to explore and learn about.

— Create an environment that’s focused on learning.

— What you might think is important isn’t necessarily the same as what your students think is important.

— Don’t force gender expression. Let students express themselves in ways that work for them.

— If a student is swinging their arms, and not seriously injuring themselves: take a step back.

— No restraints! Restraints are violence.

— Every Autistic student is different.

— Every Autistic student is valid.

Interests, Sensory Integration, Stimming

sensory diet and musicianship

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no caps for this one, says the inner dgaf editor.

i’m making progress on how the fuck to even compose anything at all because computer.

it’s frustrating that this isn’t talked about more. i started working on this actively in 2011, because i kept wanting to stim every time my hands touched an instrument, loaded a DAW or thought about either.

it took diagnosing myself to even start to get to solutions for that. i’m learning things that are either embedded in the Autistic self-advocacy literature, or that otherwise require working with an occupational therapist.

some things i’ve figured out:

  • i have to stim. a lot. if i’m not stimming, it’s usually a sign that i’m getting overwhelmed and shutting down.
  • i don’t have a single dominant mode of thinking. i’m visual-auditory-kinesthetic-analytical-sort-of-verbal.
  • bright colors help integrate sensory diet into my work. two recent examples are below.
Moog Grandmother
A photo of the Moog Grandmother synthesizer. Source: https://www.pmtonline.co.uk/yoma_press/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/moog-grandmother.jpg
A photograph of the Komplete Kontrol MK2 keyboard controller.
A photograph of the Komplete Kontrol MK2 keyboard controller. https://s3.amazonaws.com/factmag-images/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/komplete-kontrol-mk2-screens.jpg
  • music pulls together multiple interests of mine, and they exist both independently and inter-dependently. i have to honor all of those interests, or things like “i need to buy all the drum machines” or “why do i love this hardware even though it doesn’t work for me as a producer” or “arrgh, i’ll just watch steven universe instead” start happening. this is a daily thing for me. it actively interferes with my ability to work, if i don’t integrate it.
  • there’s also subtle (and obvious) forms of stigma with liking things that have loud colors and note guides, especially among serious and professional musicians and producers. it can get viewed as being amateurish or unprofessional or corny, and i have to watch out for that sort of negative self-talk as well, because i’m undermining myself as a creative worker when i buy into it.

unsurprisingly, this leaves little energy for anything else, if left unchecked. so then, i’m either in sloth mode, starting to melt down more, or really, really bitchy. which affects my ability to interact with other people, neurotypicals and some neurodivergent non-autistics especially.

the “hidden curriculum” for interacting with neurotypicals comes up regularly, but what doesn’t get covered as much is what gets hidden from us, about us. all the more if you’re undiagnosed, or your diagnosis was suppressed. like i said earlier, i had no way to know until i did a lot of digging. it’s frustrating.

i’m relieved to be getting real answers though, even if it’s meant piecing together things on my own (and working to not get upset over the lack of good ‘by us, for us” materials that aren’t neurotypical-centric or patently false). i’m getting there.

Interests, Parents, Passing/Masking, Stimming

Stimming and the Arts

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I love being a writer and musician, but there’s definitely a part of the arts for me that’s like “Can I just flap my hands and ball up my fists rather than banging on a drum? Can I just perseverate and be happily echolalic rather than learning repertoire or keeping a writing schedule?”

I’ve known for a while that I was using “acceptable stims” as a way of masking/passing – I wasn’t able to articulate (or was afraid to admit) what I was covering up, but I knew it was something. I didn’t have a full sensory diet. More like cupcakes and the occasional burrito. It was a stop gap.

I think about this a lot, both in relation to masking stims – as in, finding “socially acceptable” ways to stim, like tapping, drumming, flexing (I’m just stretching!), hair twirling, and so on, as well as in terms of how a lot of my tools and practices as a musician get in the way of self-regulating. Which in turn, makes it hard to make shit. Context shifting is a huge pain in the ass. It basically doesn’t work for me, I have to be in mode A (music) or mode B (software). Writing is better, because I can write drafts in a text editor, or by hand. I can hand-write parts as well, but it’s time consuming. Everything from music software to the instruments themselves messes me up. It’s frustrating. (Yes, I’m a trained musician, it’s not about that.)

There’s something almost ABA-like in the ways my stims got funneled into “acceptable things”. So much of what I “learned” from childhood onward was about suppressing them, or channeling them into something that was viewed as “productive”, like writing, music and drawing. When the stuffed animals (which were as some part of myself that I’m just now starting to get back) were taken away, and the light didn’t stay on all night any more, and stacking small stones became replaced with rosin and bow — something got lost, and in its place, a small corner of my mind held back something that almost feels like electrical current when it now finally flows through my arms and balled-up fists.

This is why I get a more than a little testy when people start playing “Well, you don’t have the *real* autism” games on people. Not only would I suggest getting a time machine and seeing what my shouty, stimmy, dinner-table-fleeing childhood was actually like – I’d also suggest being around for all the times when everything fell apart in adulthood and I was full-on melting down. When you’re done with that, I can walk you through my also-meltdown-laden pathway to getting reassessed this year.

I honestly fear for the autistic kids, teens and adults who have these sorts of parents lording over them, posting pictures of them to “show how autistic they are” (as if you could tell how someone’s neurology manifests from looking at a portrait photo) and wasting some portion of their day to climb into people’s mentions on social media and heckle them about how self-advocacy is somehow harmful, misleading and delusional, when that’s flatly not true.

If this is you? Let your child be a child, for fuck’s sake. I know you’re frightened for them, but don’t mourn for us, either. If that’s incomprehensible to you: you need autistic friends in your life.

ABA, Clinical things - meh, Conversion Therapy (Is Evil), Interests, Music, Queer/Trans, Writing

Autism, ABA and The Arts — Childhood Memories

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A mind-bendingly difficult thing from my past that i’m coming to terms with:

I might have been screened for and possibly diagnosed with autism back in grade school, or some sort of gifted + autistic, although that was before “doubly exceptional aspie” was a thing (early 1970s).

I went through the Very-Concerned-Teacher-to-shrink-to-non-staff-specialist gauntlet for a while. I definitely was being assessed for cross-gender behavior; pattern matching games and a “mind in the eyes” test was part of that.

That’s mostly sorted for me now, or sorted enough that I’m slowly moving from being floored by it to acceptance and integration of what happened.

What’s still too raw to talk about in much detail: realizing that writing and music was the communication vector that might have kept me from getting aggressively ABA’d or institutionalized in some way or another, right at the moment when modern “child autism” was starting to be acted upon (as in, ABAing autistic children). So, it’s a toss-up as to what would’ve happened, had I not lucked into writing and music as “ok, well, you’re ‘creative and sensitive'” as a result. Things went from “You’re a problem. *sounds alarm*” to “You’re innately talented, so of course you’re that way”, quickly, come fifth grade (homeroom teacher) and seventh grade, partially. I never was labeled as “gifted” within the school system, but writing and later, music was how I found my way to forms of support that were actually supportive, rather than more aggressive interventions, both informally and formally.

It also was a way to express myself creatively in a classroom setting, rather than *stacks small stones away from the other kids* or *runs into the closet, overwhelmed*. In other words, I was “learning how to behave”, so the early negative reinforcement machinations of ABA-like things wound themselves down. This unfortunately did *nothing* to stop students themselves from aggressing against me, but it did change the classroom dynamics, including the times where I was flunking out, in a class where I had tested beyond grade level or otherwise was capable of doing the work. The right-wing “take” on this is to attribute this to laziness, but…well, no, actually.

Same goes for my family — if my parents were presented with a diagnosis of autism, or as was starting to get phased out, schizophrenia as a clinical “who even knows” place-holder for autism (this all happened in the early 1970s), it’s very possible that my parents took one look at the school system and attempted to intervene on their own instead, because that was my family, back then. (This was before my father’s drinking, and the subsequent bullying and aggression kicked in.)

So when my active interest in spinning and stacking games shifted to reading the dictionary and their encyclopedia set, then once encouraged, to writing and music, it was tolerated, and accepted, both in my family and at school. “Narrowly escaping a worse fate” is my best guess and operative assumption, for now.

Autism, Film, Interests, Music, Perseverating, Pop music

Persevering in the Arts, Perseverating with the Arts, Ah Yes, The Persevering-Perseverating Arts

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I’m trained in writing and music, both via self-motivation and formally, but I have an active interest in film as well. I grew up watching classic comedies, Neil Simon and Costa-Gravas. I may not have got all the political references in the latter (I was in grade school, and they don’t teach about Greek politics or US counter-insurgencies in South America in the ever-conservative US school system, for some reason /sarcasm), but the feel of his films stuck with me. I’ve thought about becoming a filmmaker at various points in my life, have made short films, and at one point, had a screenplay in the beginnings of an option process; I know the industry moderately well. The times I’ve thought about designing games, one of my inspirations has been Peter Watkins. I have a whole list of Fassbinder films to go through. Film is not one of my primary disciplines (that would be writing and music), but it’s an active part of my creative process.

Even with all that, and professional training in two directly related disciplines, separating out “film theory” from “I just want to watch the first Avengers movie over and over, leave me alone”, or distinguishing my classical music and composition training from “I want to listen to the same Tune-Yards album over and over. Stop bugging me” can be hard at times. It’s a challenge to allow time and room for all of the above, rather than turning my perseverating over a given work into a negative, in artistic terms. “I’m not being disciplined, I need to stop.”

Usually what happens if I try this punitive approach, is that I’ll keep thinking about the work I’m perseverating over until I give in. Once I do so, I can feel the stress drop off of me. It can be frustrating to go through a creative process around what looks like a block, but in fact, is just “I just want to watch or listen to <thing> over and over again”. If that’s part of the artistic process (which it can be), I’ve learned (after many years) to let that be what it is. If not, not.

Alexithymia and catastrophizing can make this even more complicated. Like a lot of artists, my work is part of, and reflective of, my emotional process, and that can spill over into practical decision-making. “Do I want to start a band that has some elements in common with Tune-Yards because that’s where the songs are leading me to, is that because I’m perseverating, or is it because I have a fascination with drum machines and hand percussion, both? Do I need to drum more? Do I need to get better at programming drum machines? If I’m going to do this, how am I going to find musicians again? How are we going to organize ourselves? I hope it’s not like the other times where I tried to “lead” and wound up just making a mess of things. OK, I’m starting to feel like a huge ball of emotional twine here. I need to rest.”

So which is it? The answer is: yes. *All* of these things, they’re all valid, I’m just struggling with unentangling them. Meanwhile, the “arts professional” part of me is thinking: “Avengers, pop songs, whatever gets me through. Fuck, though, I’m not writing songs. I’m not practicing. I’m writing this blog, and I’m reading fiction, even though it’s a struggle at times, but that’s about it.” This may sound like i’m unfocused, but it’s more the opposite: I’m *very* focused, in multiple directions, constantly. From all of that, one primary focus emerges, most times, and that becomes the all-consuming focus, with all the rest of it being a sort of constellation surrounding it.

Or I just watch “Winter Soldier” again.

Further, something I’m working on will end on its own, and leave me creatively empty. A piece is completed and released, or I reach a creative plateau in my process. when that happens, sometimes i go on to the next piece after a break – but sometimes, an entire discipline or sub-discipline is dead to me. I’m grateful for it having gotten me to where I am, but done is done. Months or years later: it all comes flooding back, and that’s where I am at for a while.

Avengers. Pop songs. Even though I think Marvel’s storylines are jingoistic and simplistic, and I can’t stand how Disney is jamming viewer’s psyches into the equivalent of a press mould, young and old alike. Just like I’ve been playing “Nikki Nack” for weeks now, even though I think Merrill Garbus’ race politics are self-serving and very “White lady gets religion about racism 101, after years of living in Oakland, imagine that”. On a loop, over and over again. “I’m the real thing, real thing, real thing. *be boop, be boop* There will be always something you can lean your weight into. I will be always something you can rely on.”

I’m crying now. (No, you’re crying.)

It’s a complicated process. Not just complicated like “being a working artist can be complicated”, not just complicated like “being an adult autistic can be complicated”, it’s both of those things, and they’re in a sort of dance with each other. It requires a gentle hand – forcing things one way or the other, won’t work. (I’ve tried; I’ve gone through and applied several artistic self-books, from the most “baby steps” to the most “your creative discipline is all that matters, push everything out of your mind and body”, and come up with my own processes, over years. No matter what I do, both remain.) I’m autistic, I’m a working artist, I’m autistic and a working artist. Period.

Trusting the process can definitely help, but that’s not going to be of much assistance when the deadline looms or the dress rehearsal is about to happen, so to speak. I find that the demands of the creative workplace – which can be as much about labor as any other form of work, and work’s demands as well, from an editor’s or conductor’s perspective – sometimes are just on two different paths. nobody cares that I want to watch everything Fassbinder ever made. A deadline’s a deadline.

Aside: I shudder to think what it’s like for an autistic child or teen who doesn’t get the kinds of flexible support that I did, because without it, I would’ve been lost. I lucked into good teachers, who encouraged me to write, and supported me in that, as well as not being on me to “toughen up”. I also had several truly awful teachers, who did things like trying to force eye contact, or who literally assaulted me for not following some minor rule. It happens.

I hope the programs that are out there which provide a means to channel interests into a creative discipline (or any other discipline) are accounting for this, because there’s nothing more distracting than not knowing how to live with both impulses, creative and perseverating, when they sometimes compete with each other. (I also think that forcing 40 hours a week of aversion therapy on autistic youth is a form of torture, but that’s its own topic.)

I suspect the impulse here from allistic teachers and support staff will be to suppress one or the other, or just give up – don’t do either of those things! Allow space for both. Even as an adult, I’m pretty antsy, if not fighting being mildly combative, if I don’t allow space for both. Not having a proper outlet in both cases to just be myself would’ve wrecked me, I’m convinced.