This is going to be, an emotional article

Molding Phases - Reversing the negative effects of ABA Therapy

We find our way through school, some of us prosper and some of us struggle. Those who are struggling and are incapable of being reached are often left behind. I am one of those strugglers and the therapy used to get through to me was ABA.. but it was incomplete and I had forgotten about the experience. The people performing ABA Therapy had the best of intentions for me, but the application of it left the wrong emotional imprint and I muted myself out of self-preservation since I perceived the environment I was within as hostile

More than three decades passed and the words of the therapy continued to trigger within me and the lack of continuity in my life left me in repetitive trauma and would influence my behavior until I developed a good enough self-awareness to empirically study and test my own life experience, all internally

We constantly talk about changing and there are a multitude of frameworks out there in order to proved guidance in how to change for the better.. and that is the narrative we follow. Changing the things we say is easy, but changing internal thought processes takes a different set of tools..

..is where the narrative of change would benefit us, as we humans glide through life not necessarily looking for connection, but looking for a way to cohabitate and collaborate with each other through bids for connection

An incorrect emotional imprint can make it nearly impossible to connect with anyone. As thought is the most private experience we can have. Turning thought into action, into behavior, is an expression of a very public thought, of which we have learned from each other ( think about that phrase for a moment )

My first social experience out of my house was emotionally devastating and it left a scare deeper than any other I had, previously. I found myself again, on Autistic Twitter, reading the very statements used to demonize me in the eyes of my caretakers were the exact signatures I found to re-align my empathy to how I really felt about myself. From a young age, I was separated, first naturally through being different and bullied and then intently by my caretakers because they internalized that I miss-behaved constantly

I was one of those Autistic Individuals that didn't mind getting loud and scaring people who upset me, away, because, well, it was uncomfortable. No, the police was never called on me, but I was threatened quite a couple times. Due to the incorrect emotional imprint from ABA Therapy with words such as Context, Behavior, Social Cues, Task, and so much more. I was essentially a modern day Huckleberry Finn in the way I spoke, but the negative emotional imprint was cultivated by my parents because they had unconsciously misconstrued the meaning of the words and the reverberations of the words in the echo-chamber I existed within triggered my mutism

My unrealized suffering was further compounded with a terrible reputation, which would permit everyone I came across to use less useful words with me. Teaching me Shit, Fuck, Ass, as if it was part of everyday life and those words would be woven into my psychology. It is kind of surreal when I have a deep faith inside of me and the words I use to articulate my feelings about it are all obscenities

I became self-aware of this behavior in myself and used Computer Science to rewrite a majority of my Operational English and it worked for a long time. However, the most common criticism I'd come across, would be that my language was to advanced for my peers. Like the smart kid in middle school talking about special relativity or free will. I contemplated the application of computer science to my behavior and made the appropriate adjustments when necessary, and it worked for a while

I started noticing limitations in the way I could interact with people. I would over exert myself and not know when to pull back. I would constantly apply myself and the only consistent behavior I would perform is the application of changing myself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.. ..until I stopped

I suddenly had life experience and a mountain of information to shift through. Thinking back to my high-school career, I sat with my counselor and listened to the importance of setting up a 5 year plan for my professional career path.. which seemed to be going no where at the time and I asked the hard question: Why?

Like most people, I looked within to see what I could offer the world in return for its continued co-habitation relative to my behavior and the functions I knew how to perform. I had example of good behavior and bad behavior, but what I couldn't reconcile thought-wise, was why would I be seeded with responding to things negatively whenever I engaged with an activity. What would happen if I forced a positive response?

In my early twenties, I went through an experience in my life that left me emotionally traumatized and through my desperation of wanting to have a single friendship. I allowed myself to be used as a tool for people to talk negatively and set me as negative example.. My life experience reinforced this perception time and time again, until I started asking questions. People were talking about me in a negative way, and when time came for them to be honest, they shared with me their honesty and it crushed me because the world view I was taught, yet again, was incorrect.. all thanks to the imperfect application of ABA Therapy and the scare from its emotional imprint I had completely forgotten about, but was constantly reminded of

The emotional imprint, or the impact of that ABA Therapy experience, would constantly reoccur in my life without warning and without causation. Completely disconnected in my mind from any one relationship, it would become stark reminder of warning, but it was actually meant as help

When in isolation, I found myself at ease with everything and was able to finally relax. Over time, as I got used to my isolation in my late twenties and early thirties, I could, for the first time in decades, feel my emotional state again. The last time I had felt this, was in my Middle School and High School days. It was liberating and it allowed me to emotionally connect with myself again and I started making naturally empathic decisions

Unfortunately how to circumvent autistic masking is not well understood. The outer-layer of myself behaving one way and the inner-layer behaving another way, over time I would teach my inner-layer to temper itself and gain control over my outer-layer and the apparatuses I used to emerge from my autistic masking was a set of levers and controls to make alterations and adjustments to my behaviors. It became constant for me to pull on these levers and perform trial and error to see what was deemed good behavior and what was deemed bad behavior. I established boundaries and put myself into a box and put a label on it. The then I made a second box and put a label on that one, and a third, fourth, and fifth box.. ..all with labels

Overtime I discovered that every-time I exerted a force on my outer-layer (autistic masking), more genuine thought would be concisely articulated for others to interact with. Some bad, some good. It wasn't pretty, like a baby crying out.. I was using words to make sense of the world in a very emotional way to turn my language to an exacting frequency that would stabilize me to talk/interact with Nureo Divergent and Nuero Typical minds, unilaterally

James Clear's Atomic Habits was the first book I read that described the process I had discovered in myself, to circumvent my autistic masking (outer-layer) and I quickly discovered that the core difference between myself and others is that I've normalized submissive social behavior in myself rather than promoting empathic actions. I was always charismatic, but I could never maintain a charismatic state for a long period of time because I had absolutely zero example of how to develop continuity with people

Through my software, I developed healthy habits, completely unregulated. My peers would compliment my code and I would respond with silence because I didn't know how to take a compliment. They'd eventually want me to leave the team and I'd be confused as to why, they always thought my code contributions were worth complements. It didn't occur to me, that my lack of response was something they had issue with. They didn't know how I thought about them..

.. that is where I started developing continuity

It was about this time where I knew I needed to take time off, but due to my inability to communicate effectively, I was in a financial position which limited my ability to take long periods of time off from work. Therefore I had to work. I resolved to get better at connecting with my colleagues, but before I could. I did a self assessment of my own emotional state to figure out my own emotional needs and what I discovered is that every human on this planet is emotionally driven and that we all have the capacity to feel the same way about something. Not only are we capable of unilateral empathy we're capable of connecting with each other using a minimum set of words and actions. The problem which occured with my ABA Thearpy is that, the community I was apart of tried to hold me accountable for my behavior when my behavior wasn't even wrong to begin with. Which spawned the trama loop that went on for decades. People would hold me accountable and I would spirl at the slightest offence and eventually, even my caretakers gave up

Here is how I reversed the trauma from ABA Therapy

I started rebuilding my perception with the following axioms

• All animals are naturally driven to cohabitate
• What differentiates Humans from Animals is our ability to make a very complex set of sounds
• Our big brain provides the ability to comprehend complex patterns
• We share information as a hive-mind and depend on each other, even when divided
• We developed written language to store information for longer periods of time
• Understanding our own Emotional Intelligence is essential to properly sorting information

My experience quickly turned into empirical observations and I started to sort my life's experience into buckets of actionable habits, regaining control of my behavior and reasserting my command over my own body. I quickly discovered I could alter my own behavior through trigging a different set of habits rather than shutting down. Through triggering these different habit sets, I discovered that people reacted differently, and slowly I, I discovered that the people around me responded to me positively. Some excited, some perplexed, as my stoicism was well known.. I suddenly showed, an emotion.. and it was correctly interpreted

People gasped and I've convinced myself that it wasn't about me, even though the timing was exact to indicate it was. Still, it was a notable event. I amended to my perception, the following axioms

• Most people react and interact to a thing immediately
• Those of us who had a negative experience with that thing, become uncertain with how to react/interact immediately
• Those of us who are unprepared for an experience, often react in a manor which could foster discontinuity
• Most people are quick to point this out
• Those of us naturally become more forward thinking in our responses
• Neuro Divergent and Neuro Typical Individuals who think fast, burnout
• Thinking & moving to fast will make us fall forward from our own inertia

I spent years struggling, trying to find the right timing on how to activate my different behaviors in a socially compliant way that didn't erode my identity. As my self awareness increased, I added the following axioms

• People are self-aware of their own behavior and all have the same capacity for change
• We all use levers and buttons to effect change in our own behavior
• Truistic people are commonly nicer to you
• Tempered people are commonly kinder to you
• Uncomfortable people feel as though they have to interact with you, but don't know how to
• I get to choose the intensity of every emotional connection I make with someone

This is how I reversed negative effects of ABA Therapy in my life. Not through repetition or re-exposure and hoping for the best, but through hard and meticulous effort because you have to command yourself to activate.. even when you don't want to

Taking small incremental steps, is how we improve the quality of life for everyone on our planet

Once you commit to "it", pursue it, improve it, mold yourself for it. Don't apologize for being autistic