Does ABA Therapy Cause Trauma or Not? Speech Therapist Speaks About Abusive ABA

Hey, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com, i'm a speech therapist. And today we'll talk about ABA Applied Behavioral Therapy Analysis. I come from an ABA background. That's how it started the whole journey of becoming a therapist myself, that was like 10 years ago. Now, a lot of what I'm telling you here is from my own experience, and I've had bad and good experiences. I've talked to parents and children, teenagers and adults who went through aba. I think I like you can take whatever it is from this video, and I'm going to slowly tell you about as a friend, as a therapist, and you can make up your own mind about this. Okay? So I've made several videos about ABA before you can go check it out and about the abusiveness of aba. Why I want to address this right now, again, is because I've been getting comments about how ABA sucks, how the methods that we use in agents of speech have some affiliation to aba. Because some of the stuff does work. That's why we're using it. Right? And we only use the things that work. The things that don't work, we just stop using it. So there is merit behind the methods and techniques. And to be very honest with you, and I'm just telling you, the whole notion of ABA is just behavioral psychology stuff works. And it really depends on how you're doing it and what you're using it for and what's the purpose behind it. So let's go drill down into the first thing, which is there are many different ways of doing therapy, not only in ABA and speech therapy and occupational therapy and whatever early intervention methods that you use, there will be individual differences between how one therapist does than another. Okay. And it comes down to how you feel about it as the parent and how you're seeing it. I'm going to talk about cultural differences first. Right? So in Asia, ABA is a lot more forgiving. And in terms of their. Their ways, how the therapist speaks the child, how they interact physically with the child, in Asia, we get a lot more leg room, right? We can hold them down. We can tell them to stop by pushing them back on the chairs softly. All right. And before parents start screaming or people who identify and identify themselves as autistic, they start screaming and shouting in the comment section. It's very important to know that the cultural aspects. All right, obvious. I'm going to state the obvious here, is that I'm a Chinese man and a white woman's industry. If you search online about, like, speech therapy, aba, you will most probably see a white woman. So the cultural difference, you have to keep in mind, if you're in Asia, how people do things are going to be different from, from American, British, whatever, right? The Western society. And I can tell you this because I started off, I can name drop where, where I worked before I worked at Autism Partnership. That's where I started everything in Hong Kong. And I do believe that the techniques there are great. I think I learned a lot. I think the reason why I was able to quickly pick up a lot of therapy techniques in speech therapy and that when I got my master's, I was doing better in terms of practical is because I had all the training I had in Autism Partnership, okay? And I'm name dropping it because I full heartedly endorse them. And a lot of times when I'm working in Southeast Asia, I refer to them and I tell my clients to go there when I cannot support them in the way that I want to. Okay? And it's very important for you to have that caveat in mind that like whatever that I talk about in terms of culture, you need to have that grain of salt. Because when we do the training, we do like comparisons between how this Autism Partnership is, is a trans nation, right? It's got places, it's got clinics in Hong Kong and Singapore and Philippines, you know, in Korea even, and then you have in USA and other countries, Canada and such. So you will see differences between how these therapists handle children. And a lot of the times what happens is that the Western society right now, a lot of the ways that are coming out, like there's labels such as ableism, right? Are we being friendly towards neurodivergent individuals, okay? These are all things you have to keep in mind because in Asia, we don't really think about much about that and we don't really know what it means a lot of times. So if you're saying that, oh, is it going to be abusive or not, you have to think first. Think about where are you located. If you're going to be in, I don't know, Malaysia or something and you go for therapy, you're going to think that's pretty mild. Because a lot of times, even for the tuition centers that teach typical developing children, they're going to scold them, they're going to reprimand them verbally and be a little more, quote, unquote fierce. That's the first thing I want you to keep in mind, okay? The things that you see, all right? And doesn't mean that ABA was abusive like that because, like, now society is shifting towards more of a. Even the term special needs is not even used anymore. It's like individual needs now. I forgot what it's called now. And I had this conversation. I had a consultation with a bunch of kindergarten teachers because I had to speak about my client. My client's parents were my client, basically. And I was teaching. I was coaching them on what to do. And basically he was running around and didn't want to listen at all, right? So we got on a call and I said, hey, man, don't allow your child to get off the chair and run off. And the lesson and the teacher, the special education assistant, individual needs assistant, so to speak, was like, oh, we. We can't touch the child waist down. It's just. It's not good. So for us in Asia, we can put our hand on their hips all day long. All right? And that's just the difference. If. If you have any idea about that or like you don't like it, whatever, so be it. It's okay. Because for me, for things to work, I need to get it done. A lot of times what happens is that parents and advocates, so to speak, they present a problem and not a solution. You tell me that I cannot prompt them physically as such. Right. Then how should I prompt them? Allow them to run off. Right. You do understand how behavioral psychology works, right? If you allow a child to do something, you are actually reinforcing them somehow. You are allowed to do that. It's the same as jaywalking. You allow someone to jaywalk, they're going to jaywalk. They're going to think it's fine unless you catch me. But then you never see someone cross. Like a train crossing when the fence goes down. You understand what I'm trying to say? If there wasn't a fence at the train crossing, and the train might be like two minutes away, people are going to rush over. I would much rather have a fence. And how you do, like, how you fence people, how you, like, stop children, how you physically prompt them will be different from person to person. And how the rapport between the therapist is with a child, that's the first point. And secondly, how it looks to other people. Okay? So when you are. Okay, this is my second point. Therapy is war in the beginning. Like, if you haven't done therapy or if you haven't tried, then you probably don't understand how much it takes to get a child to listen to you, Especially if they're on a spectrum or if they have other, like, needs or whatever. So I'm going to tell you, like, two stories. I'm going to move on. Okay? So the first story is my first ever client as an ABA therapist. That boy bit me. A lot of times he would bang his head onto me and I'll like, what are we going to do? We're not going to smack him back. That's just not. We do not what we do anymore. Because the reason is even if you smack or scold a child who is doing these activities, they don't understand that I am reprimanding them for the biting. And I remember my supervisor telling me who still works there, and he taught me a lot. And I'm gonna tell you here is that like in any type of therapy, when you're giving feedback, you want to stay at a neutral tone when it's something that's not good, and you want to have a good tone when it's really good. If you start shouting. Right? Right. Children do not address, do not understand why you're shouting. If they knew, they would have stopped in the beginning. If they cared, and I'll use this word with caution, if they cared about what the consequences were and how it made you feel, they wouldn't be in a situation where they're screaming, shouting, and biting you. If they truly understood, oh, I shouldn't be doing this because I hurt mom. If they really thought that in their mind, they wouldn't have done it. That's what I'm telling you. And because we cannot reason with non verbal children or children who are like, they're languagely delayed, we cannot go up to them and say, look, you bit me and I feel hurt, and that's not good. They don't register that what we did was that we reinforced and rewarded whenever there was an absence of that behavior. Which works a lot better if you have a dog, if you have a cat at home, you will understand, you will know that this works a lot better than trying to say no when it happens. Okay? The reason why is because we humans and all animals are wired towards gain economically. Right? And if we can, if we do something because it makes us feel good and we know we're not supposed to do it, but only we only get caught, like 50% of the time we're going to try, but if we don't do it and for extended period of time, I don't know when randomly someone's going to come and give me, like, money, I'm going to be a good citizen. So this is just human nature. It's not about whether it's a ABA technique or not. And I've talked about this before. You can search online. The rich men in Canada and Vancouver, they start to give positive tickets, rewarding tickets for people who jaywalk, and they cut jaywalking by 80%. All right, this is just backed by data, okay? I'm just telling you, it works on you. Don't even think about, like, of course it's going to work on autistic children and people. Okay? This is also part of aba. It's also part of what they do. And is that abusive? I don't think so. Okay. And then the second story is a child who came to me, and I'm not talking about ABA anymore. I'm using the principles of behavioral management on a child who is not on the spectrum. He has a genetic disorder. So what happens? He cannot talk because his oral model or oral muscles were very weak. So he would drool, he would bite on things. He would put his whole hand in his mouth for sensory reasons. And whenever, like, he got mad, he would thr things, and he goes, ah, just throws everything on the floor. So what happens is that the mother was very quick to be like, oh, no, what's wrong? Oh, baby, what do you want? I'll give you anything. Right? And that is actually another problem, because if we don't address it and if we don't reward him for the good behavior and we actually reward a bad behavior, that in turn creates problems. And why. Where am I going with this? Look, abusive or not, things need to work, okay? And it's how you do it. What I told the mother was like, what you're doing right now is actually gonna be like, you're gonna. You're gonna have this behavior come back over and over again. And how we deal with it is that we need to use some behavioral management techniques that, you know, isn't. Speech therapy, isn't occupational therapy, isn't anything. It's just behavioral psychology. You want to ignore those things when they are, like, smashing up things and, like, throwing things on the floor. You want to stay in a neutral tone. Some people will say, oh, you're being abusive. You're not, like, taking care of the feelings. Oh, you. You should hug them and say, oh, it's all right. It's all right. It's not all right. You're talking about a child who is not on the spectrum. And they're doing that for a reason. And if we are going to talk about, like, the reason behind disruptive behaviors, that's Another two hour talk and there, there are loads of people online and loads of people not online that are a lot more, a lot more professional about this kind of stuff. We call it functional analysis. So you can check it out if you want to. What I'm trying to get to is that there are different ways of addressing something. Okay? The abusive parts of this is my second point of the whole video. The abusive part of ABA is that people say ABA want to shape and get rid of neurodivergent behaviors. And that's the term that people use. My first response to that is, okay, if we're trying to mask that behavior and we're trying to reinforce and reward behaviors that make them suppress their own self, first of all, we all do that. Isn't that exactly what school is about? Isn't that exactly what working in this society is about? I wished that I could play games every day, every hour, but is that a suitable response and a behavior in an office setting even though I want to play and the act of someone telling me not to do it is that suppressing my emotions and my own individual needs? As a person who wants to play computer games, I want to be some stimulated by clicking button. And if I have nothing to do during work, shouldn't I be able to play? But the society doesn't work like that, okay? And if you allow that and give special treatment to children or people on the spectrum, then that's also positive discrimination. That's my point. First of all, getting philosophical here, okay? My second point is, okay, what is the point of therapy? What's the point of aba? What's the point of anything doing intervention, right? Is that we're trying to habilitate a person into society. So it's different from rehabilitate. Rehabilitate means to you were once able to live in a society and be able to take care of yourself. I have to rehabilitate you into a situation. Whereas a child who has zero, like a blank sheet of paper, I have to habilitate him or her into the society. All right? So a lot of things that we do are habilitating a person. So the first thing is when we're doing toilet training, we're habilitating that person. Okay? We're not going to mask someone's need to go to the toilet in their own time and need. If they want to pee all with their, their, their pants, we're going to intervene, all right? And then you're going to say ming. No, that's not. What I mean is, oh, if they want to stim. They should be able to stim. Yeah. And it's masking their. Their sensory need to. To stim. And my response about the computer games is, addresses that, first of all. The second thing is, look, there are things that are appropriate and inappropriate, okay? And we all learn this through just interacting with people. And the biggest problem with children on the spectrum, I would say problem, because it really is a problem, it creates chaos, is that they don't understand how other people perceive, feel, and everyone should be at least on equal footing. If I use this machine, then I use it my way. An autistic child might come over and say, no, you must press this first. They also, they. I don't want to say asen day. But then children and people on the spectrum will also go out of their way to tell people how they want the world to be like. And so we have to have a point where we meet. Yeah. So up to this point, this still makes sense. If that's the point that we're coming into, then whatever the child is trying to do should be appropriate to a situation where other people feel is fair. So that's where the line is. And some people will say, oh, you're not allowing them to stim. That's masking their autistic characteristics. Yes. But also, if I was doing some sort of therapy with a. With a child and you were in the room with me as a parent. Right. Or you're a professional. Looking at how I work, I suddenly start picking my nose because it's itchy. I suddenly start scratching my groin because it's itchy. I suddenly start shaking my legs. And the shaking my legs, I really did do it in the beginning. I didn't know about that. And it's something that my supervisor told me. Dude, you're shaking your legs right in front of the parents. What's going on? I didn't know about it. It was a sensory thing for me. It really is. And whenever I was nervous, I would do it, even to this day, and I had to unlearn it. Some people bite their fingernails, some people pull the hair. Some people scratch here, scratch there. Some people stutter. These are all things that will happen. It's like whenever you get heightened, that's what's going to happen. All right? And it's just more pronounced in children who are on the spectrum. And so when that happens, a lot of times the abusive ABA is like, no, you should stop it, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But if you truly look into the theory and you've seen how speech Therapy is speech therapy, and also ABA therapy is done. Is that we're trying to teach a replacement behavior. We're never trying to stop that need. The need of that can be mitigated and be put into something else. And that's the distinction between, like, abusive or not. Talking about me doing random, weird stuff in front of parents. I've done that before, and I'm telling you, it really did hurt when people saw if I was professional or not. Actually, when I was wearing a T shirt. It also hurt my how parents saw me, and at one time a colleague was like, ming, you gotta wear a shirt or a lab coat. Like, someone told me, oh, why should I listen to this Chinese guy wearing a T shirt on ig? And I was like, dude, that's abusive. By today's standards, that's abusive. You're trying to mask my own individuality by telling me not to wear certain things. And you're not looking into if I'm doing my work or not. At the end of the day, what we're trying to help with, people and children on the spectrum is so that they habilitate into society the way that other people feel comfortable with giving stuff to them. Okay? And this is my third point. All things that you need, your child needs comes from other people. If there was. There was a world where we didn't need to ask for things from people, ask for help from people, then we don't need to learn any of these skills. I'm being very real with you, okay? The reason why we talk about all this is because later on, when you pass away. When I pass away, we're all going to pass away, man. There's just one day we're not here, and what is left are the children that you and I gave birth to, the students, the clients that I had, and they need to be good enough by themselves to go out there and ask for things. They need to ask for opening a bank account, being able to ask for money from other people through work. They need to be able to ask for people to give them permission to buy a house. They need to know language so that they can read up contracts. They need to know language so that they can talk to other people, understand what they mean. There's the surface level meaning. There's the deeper meaning. There's humor. You don't know how to laugh. Oh, you don't get our inside jokes, then probably you won't be in our inner circle either. So it also ties down to social identity. If they don't understand how a culture works. No one's going to think that they're belong to a certain group. And that may or may not be important, but it certainly is when they want to have a choice, to have a sense of belonging. Okay, so the last part I want to talk about is some examples of children who went through ABA that I've heard from that. Actually, I've never heard anyone go through ABA and tell me that it's abusive. I've heard that it's bad. And I don't want to name drop. Some of the clinics that I've heard and seen them work. I don't even want to talk about their names because I don't want to give them air time. And I also don't like to black mouth. But what I can tell you is that some of the goals are not good. Some of the ways that they deal with children are not good. I'll give you some example. Okay, so one of my clients, she is now an adult, and when she used to get aba, the ABA person would hit her hand physically. Now that's abusive, right? Another client I had in Hong Kong, he used to go to this center. The center is no good, but they're all over the world. And he goes like, I looked at the file and one of the goals was that the client will be able to crawl on the floor, on the belly for five meters. And I'm like, what kind of goal is that? Are we going to the army here? What's going on? And then I asked the therapist, I'm like, what's this goal about? And then she was like, oh, it's gross motor skills and play skills. And this is also where it becomes a little bit fishy and questionable. Is that okay? If you're doing gross motor stuff, why don't you work with a physiotherapist? If you're doing fine motor stuff, why don't you work with an occupational therapist? And what I'm thinking is that there are bad actors who think they're doing a good job. And the only reason they're doing a bad job is because they don't have enough training, practical knowledge, and someone who taught them a way that is the most comfortable for everyone. So when this is the case, right, you have to start to think to yourself, how do I find these good actors and good therapists in the world? And it's actually quite hard to do, especially if you're. And in Southeast Asia and arguably the whole of Asia, arguably in places that are slightly less developed. And I would venture to say that Sometimes even in the Western world, this happens as well. All right, the two teenagers and the adult that told me about the aba, they were thankful about it because it taught them how to talk, it taught them how to regulate their behavior, and it also taught them why they're not. They're supposed not to do something and gave them a reason to why they're supposed to learn language and stay calm and so on. And one of them, the adult, she actually came out of all that therapy and didn't even get potty trained. And so when she came up as a client a few years ago, my first thing to do was to do toilet training, even though I'm a speech therapist. And I used my knowledge from before to help her, and it did work. She did get toilet trained, and she was 30. That's pretty cool. So if you want to learn about the techniques, you can just go to www.agentsofspeech.com course we have a whole toilet training workshop in there, and we literally just use that method. Anyways, the last point I want to drive home is that I've actually talked about this before, is that there's bad actors in every industry, all right? And the definition of abusive shouldn't be thrown around so easily. I think that in every type of, I believe, right, any industry, there will be people who don't do a good job. That's just for full stop. If you cherry pick and say they are all bad people, right, they are all abusive, and the bad reviews get out and people say, oh, this type is not useful, I think that's very dangerous. Why? Because in terms of therapy or teaching someone anything or doing anything, to be honest, we shouldn't be set into one style because one style doesn't always work on each individual. First of all, obviously, the planning, the roadmap, the goals are going to be similar. But when you execute it, we have to look into the child's, like, personal boundaries, needs, or whatever. And the biggest problem about abusiveness, so to speak, is that when therapists don't look into what the child is comfortable with tonight and they go too far and believe my nine. I'm saying this like a lot of children who come to me in the first session or two, they're gonna cry their eyes out, they're gonna bawl out, they're gonna be super unhappy. And that's a normal type of. It's just like that. Especially if you bring a child to a strange location with a guy trying to play with him or her and the your mom's gone and it's very stressful. They're trying to get you to talk, they're trying to get you do gestures or whatnot. They're trying to introduce play. Instead of letting them watch cartoons or eat a piece of chocolate, they're going to cry because they don't know any better. And what we have to discern is the fine line between. Are we having a tug of control between the child and you, the teacher, or is it that we're literally just. We're forgetting about all the boundaries, all the, is he comfortable about this or not? Are we going the right way? There's a fine line between that and it takes a lot of experience, it takes a lot of thought, and it takes a lot of trial and error in order to get to a point where we're thinking, oh, this is working, we should stick to it, or, hey, this is totally no good. He's like crying like crazy. Won't even let me, like, slightly get closer to him. We should think about something else. So I hope I have answered some of the questions from my end, and it's just from my experience. All right. And this is a little less organized than how I usually speak as a recorded video. But I wanted to give you my two cents about this again, because it's getting more and more that people will come out on a comment or send us an email or whatever and say, hey, whatever you're talking about is ABA and ABA is abusive, full stop. And I feel like that's overgeneralization, that's unfair. Just because of that, you don't, don't give this a chance. It might work for a child. And a lot of the things that we do actually are based on a behavioral psychology, which is shared across all therapy, because we're all doing things at the behavioral level. We're not doing things that are cognitive level, which is like basically talk therapy. But we can't talk to children who are delayed or not are non verbal. That's just impossible. And I would certainly not talk about medical and biological intervention that I am not an expert in. So whatever we do on a behavioral level is gonna have the same principles as aba. Just remember that. All right? And by the way, ABA has a lot more research. They pump a lot more money into getting the data right than a lot of the other therapies. Okay, I'm just gonna put it out there. You can comment all you want, but if you try to look at the publications, there's a lot of things going on there. And this sparks another discussion as to like how. How did I have so much money? What's going on? Who's pumping money? Whatever. The thing is, you need to have subjects, right, who are willing to consent to do these kind of things. So to a certain extent, people are voting by their wallets and people are voting by going to the therapy. Anyone would have a bad review, by the way, like even us. And you don't have to listen to me at all. I'm just a guy on the Internet. But if you do want to learn more about parent education for home therapy and stuff, you can do it with us or without us. And if you do, you can go to agents of Speech.com course. There's a whole bunch of parent courses that we use to sell for money is now for free. Just go there, watch it, join our community, answer the three questions when you're prompted, and we'll let you in. Okay, that's all for today's video. It's slightly longer and I hope to see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.