It was difficult for me to “go along” with what they taught in Sunday school, and when they told us people who “don’t know God go to hell,” I took it literally.
Continue reading The Child Abuse People Don’t Talk About: Religious Indoctrination – The Trauma of Childhood Brainwashing
I am a 37-year-old Autistic Adult who has fairly intense sensory sensitivities (that can trigger disorientation, vertigo, migraines, nausea, and other stomach problems). However, I did not understand this crucial fact about myself for most of my life.
One might ask, “If things were so bad, why wasn’t your Autism identified earlier?”
When I was first diagnosed Autistic (more than seven years ago now), I had the same question, though now I know the answer -it was noticed and mislabeled. Continue reading From Shame to Self-Discovery: My Journey with Autism, Sensory Overload, the Pain of Behaviorism, and the Relief in Unexpected Places
Because some people might genuinely want to know my stance, I’m creating an “ABA/NeuroDivergent Conversion Therapy Master Post”. Please feel free to share this resource if you find it relevant.
Continue reading NeuroDivergent Rebel’s NeuroDivergent Conversion Therapy and ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis) Master Post
We know we are different. Before I knew I was in NeuroDivergent, my labels were: Stubborn, “Lazy, Rebellions, Difficult, Stupid, Flake, dumb.” Now, those have been replaced with Autistic and ADHD.
Continue reading Should I tell my child they are NeuroDivergent?
Growing up, especially in school, I was often scolded for “not paying attention” (regardless of whether I was actually paying attention or not). Continue reading My Autistic Experience With Eye-Contact: I don’t need to look at you to speak to you (or hear you)
People dropping in on this part of the story (today) often fail to recognize how much work it has taken to get to where we are now. It’s like skipping to page 100 in a book.
Continue reading Autistic Origin Stories: Lyric Rivera, and the NeuroDivergent Rebel Blog
We live in a society where people are expected to follow the dominant social and hierarchal norms, and those who cannot fall in line (or refuse to) are often mocked, scolded, medicalized, dehumanized, and punished for their inability to blend in. Continue reading Human Binaries: NeuroDivergent and Queer – Coloring Outside the Lines Will Be Punished
Parents are desperate to receive ABA for their children because they’ve been told its the only thing that will help, and providers claim that autistic kids who don’t have ABA won’t able to enter mainstream schools, and eventually may never be autonomous without ABA, these claims are made without evidence.
Something that far too many non-autistic people get wrong about Autistic People is thinking that we lack social skills when, in reality, we have social skills, but they’re not the same social skills non-autistics use.
Autistic People socialize (and play) Autistically. Continue reading If Not ABA, then What? Autistic People, Social Skills, and “Appropriate Play”- We socialize and play Autistically!
In my last piece, Alternatives to ABA: If not ABA… then WHAT? – ABA for “Problem Behaviors,” I shared how behavior can often indicate unmet needs and why squishing “inconvenient behaviors” also may extinguish communications to you that something is wrong.
In the piece’s opening, I mentioned several common ABA goals listed on Autism Speaks’ website (below), and in its closing, I asked my readers which of the items they wanted me to dive into next.
The first request I saw was to talk more about “helping Autistic People with learning self-care skills,” – so that is the topic I will cover today. Continue reading Alternatives to ABA: If not ABA… then WHAT? – Helping Autistic People With “Self-Care Skills”
