How to Help ASD Children with Self Injuring Behaviours

We're going to talk about self injuring behaviors in this video. The stuff that I talk about is what we've tried with clients and this may or may not work on your end. I'm just sharing what worked for us. Okay. So usually speaking, we have a few ways of dealing with self injurious behaviors. Obviously self injurious behavior is something that we should intervene because it's for. For the health. Basically the first thing is to do to understand the trigger, okay, the reason behind why the self injuring behaviors happen. And this is something that you need to do something what we call functional analysis. Like a lot of ABA therapy people talk about. We also have a course all about this called Behavioral Management Workshop. You can go to ww.agentsofspeech.com course. The link is also in the description below. Go put in your email and you can watch that. So you have to understand the trigger. You have to know why it's happening. Okay, let me just give you an example. So back in the day when I first became a therapist, quite some time ago Now, I think nine or 10 years ago, there was a client that I heard of and I saw before as well, it was that her legs were permanently tiptoed. And why was that? Was because she had sensory need of tiptoeing. She liked tiptoeing. She liked the sensation. All right. And so it was because the intervention wasn't done quick enough. So her bone structure kind of changed forever. I'm not saying that all tiptoed autistic people or children are going to have. It will form bone structure after a while. It depends on how long they've been doing the intensity and stuff. Right. But understanding that we could have done a lot more things to help prevent that from happening. So you have to understand the trigger. If it's something to do with stimming like sensory seeking activities, then think about how to deal with those, which I'll talk about later on in this video as well. And also think about, okay, those self injurious behaviors sometimes is because of frustration, right? They need an outlet for frustration release. Is it because there's some rigidities that they don't like someone crossing the boundaries and therefore they get angry and therefore they have to hurt themselves because they're not supposed to hurt other people or, or they can't express themselves properly and they don't have a coping mechanism as well. I've had this adult student before and she would hurt or bang herself and bite herself whenever someone does something outside of what she wants Right. So someone suddenly just cuts in line instead of asking nicely. She would get very angry and actually bite herself because she can't really express at that time because the anxiety is high. It's going against her rules. And so this happens as well. So you have to understand the trigger now after you know the reason behind it, right. Then you have to think about how to stop and prevent this behavior. So any behavior that is able to occur, meaning whatever behavior that is left like to its own devices, it's going to keep on happening. Okay. By doing the behavior itself is already rewarding enough and somewhat of a vicious cycle. The more you do it, the more it becomes a habit. The more it becomes a habit, the harder it is to get rid of. Okay? So once you know the triggers, you know how to stop and prevent this behavior because you see it happening and then you can stop it. Right? But obviously if the behavior is happening without you around, you can't do anything. Stopping and preventing a behavior is very important. And that's why a lot of times when we're dealing with like self injuring behaviors and is better to find a male person like myself. That's why I've had a lot more experiences dealing with this kind of stuff. Because literally when I was working, interning, I would say at mental retardation school, that's what they call it. Don't go woo woo on, on the name. They call it Mr. School where I'm from. And basically they would call on the microphone on the PA system and say, hey, someone's like doing this and that and a male staff come and help out and that's usually me. So when that happens, you have to hold them and not allow them to attack themselves. Right. And obviously if you stop them from attacking themselves, they're going to attack you. So I have to be very careful there as well. All right? So I don't know what else to say. I'm not going to say to restrain or do whatever to children, but try your best to stop them from doing it. Okay. Once you're able to stop them from doing whatever, you need to teach a replacement behavior. And I can say this on the Internet very freely. You use replacement behavior. It's so easy to say, so hard to do. And this usually takes a very long time. All right. I'm talking about the fastest I've seen this happen is like six months. All right. It might be a lifelong goal. And some adult students that we had, basically we had to teach language in a way that they can express themselves. For the example of the adult autistic woman who would bite herself and, you know, hit herself on the head and stuff. We had to teach her that. Actually. You could write it down, right? We could write it down and file a complaint, right? We can tell someone else there's nothing else we can do for now. And she has to accept that. It takes a lot of therapy. And we can go back to the other extreme where it might be just, I say just because it's a lot less severe. It's a theory old. Who's on the spectrum who would like hit you to get what he wants? Well, you just teach him to use like a gesture and instantly give whatever that he asked in the very first place. And then you won't have that attacking behavior. So the replacement behavior can be very easy and also can be very hard. Most of the time replacement behavior is actually language itself and communication itself. But most of the time it's very hard to establish. So that's why it takes a very long time. It's about understanding the trigger, stopping and preventing that from happening, thinking if there's an easier way for the kid or the adult to get what he or she wants. And the last part is if that autistic child is above six years or even four sometimes if their language is able to give them a basis, right. What you can do now is you can start thinking about doing some role playing and you can add some cognitive behavioral approaches to what you're doing right now on top of the therapy. So I see a lot of parents will say, hey, I need to do some sort of social stories or whatever and they're trying to teach it to a two or three year old. The efficacy or so to speak, is it going to work or not? I would say is very low. The chance of it is very low. So a lot of times what we need to do is to wait until the language catches up. And the bulk of the therapy is to teach communication, right? And when they hit a certain point where we can start doing these role playing, these cognitive behavioral approaches, which is basically teaching them, hey, this behavior is not cool. The reason is because X, Y and z, right? And if you do, this will happen to you and the people around you. And this will, if you keep on doing this, you will lose out on these things, right? If you do this replacement behavior, you will gain in this XY z way and it's a lot easier socially speaking. And you will gain X, Y and Z, so on, so forth. So I cannot give you like a total example, but I can remember back in the day, when we're doing this role play about kicking someone else's trolley car, it's as specific as that because, like, sometimes when a child went to the supermarket, someone took the trolley that they wanted. Apparently there was a difference that all of us couldn't tell. Obviously it was important to him. But at the same time, whenever someone did that to him, take his trolley that he wanted to select, he would kick that other person's trolley until, like, they would give it up. So we taught him, like, if you do that, you might get complained, people might tell you off, you might get a fine, you might get kicked out of the supermarket. We did role plays about that, but actually all he had to do was ask nicely. It's like, excuse me, could I please have this trolley? Because you're a kid, it's easier to ask these questions. Can I please have this trolley? It means a lot to me. Like, I really like this part of the trolley. This one, I can put this type of coin inside or whatever and, you know, like, it. It worked out. But obviously you need to do these building blocks for a lot of different behaviors because it's not just you do it one for one specific occasion and then they will be able to generalize to other things in. In his life or her life. Okay, so anyways, that's the end of this video. If you haven't, please go to wwagents of speech.com course. Those are all the free courses that we used to sell for money. That's how we used to make money. And now it's all free. It's on the platform. Go enter email and learn over there. All right? Totally free, no catches. Okay. Anyways, I hope you have a good one and I'll see you in the next video very soon.