Safety Skills and Peace of Mind

I know ABA therapy (Applied Behavioral Analysis) gets a bad rap in some circles.

Actually, “bad rap” might be underselling it. Depending on where you look, ABA is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the devil himself. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

When Eli was first diagnosed with ASD, I didn’t know much about ABA other than the fact that people seemed to have some very strong opinions about it.

So I did what I always do – I researched. I read the books. I listened to the podcasts.  I watched the videos of people sharing their experiences. I tried really hard to understand all of the criticisms.

And honestly? Some of it made sense.

At least, I could understood where they were coming from with concerns about teaching blind compliance. I understood why some people felt therapies had historically focused more on making autistic children look and act “normal” rather than helping them navigate the world safely and confidently.

Those concerns deserved to be heard.  But at the end of the day, I am not raising a theory. I am raising brothers (and questioning everything). So, I can only speak to our experiences – but I’m going to try to do it in a less sterile way…

When I thought about ABA, I wasn’t thinking about Eli’s inability to make eye contact or getting him to sit still or trying to make him look or act less autistic.

I thought about safety.  Period.

I thought about a little boy who struggled to understand other people’s feelings and intentions. A little boy who often couldn’t identify what he was feeling either. And that scared the living hell out of me.  

Because I know when you can’t accurately read a situation, you can easily misjudge it and unknowingly introduce yourself to risk.  When you can’t identify your own emotions, it’s hard to advocate for yourself.  It’s hard to ask for help.  It’s hard to recognize when something doesn’t feel right.  THAT, is terrifying.

Eli experiences the world through a lens that looks very different from mine & (statistically speaking) yours.

Before ABA, he might’ve be able to tell you he felt bad. Or sad. Or yucky. But that was often where the emotional vocabulary ended. Anxiety, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment, overwhelm, fear, anger—all of those feelings could show up as one giant emotional explosion.  And they often did!

And if you’ve ever known a toddler and tried to solve their problems when you hadn’t learned their gibberish yet, you can imagine how hard that made things.

One of the biggest gifts ABA gave Eli was helping him better understand the world he lived in and the people he encountered in it.

Not perfectly. Not consistently. Not even close some days.

Take this past school year, for example. Eli saw a group of boys messing around and “pantsing” each other. Everybody was laughing. Everybody seemed to be having fun.

Eli’s interpretation of that situation was pretty straightforward:

Pantsing makes people laugh. Making people laugh makes friends. So – Eli pantsed an innocent bystander…

Now, before you laugh too hard, let me save you some suspense and tell you that this story escalated way beyond what any reasonable person would expect.

The other child went home and told his parents. That part didn’t bother me. In fact, I pray my kids  always feel comfortable coming to me when something’s worth talking about.

The problem comes when those parents decide to file a criminal complaint for assault against my 12-year-old son who is genuinely trying to make a friend.  The fact that they filed the complaint wasn’t really the problem – it was that the situation escalated to that point in the first place.

That entire story is probably worth its own blog post someday—preferably over margaritas—but suffice it to say that after meetings with the school and the Germantown Police Department, the complaint was dropped because Eli’s actions, when viewed in the context of his disabilities, did not meet the legal definition of assault under Tennessee law.

The point is this:

Eli wasn’t being malicious. He wasn’t trying to humiliate another child. He wasn’t intentionally or knowingly causing anyone harm.

He simply interpreted the situation differently.

And that’s the part people didn’t always understand.  ABA doesn’t magically eliminate the possibility of situations like that happening.  What it does is give him language.

Language for emotions. Language for social situations. Language for understanding that the feeling in his body might be anxiety instead of anger. Language for recognizing that someone joking with him might not be making fun of him.

And unfortunately, language for understanding that someone being overly friendly wasn’t always someone who should be trusted.

Those aren’t compliance skills.

Those are life skills. Those are safety skills.

As Eli got older, those skills mattered more to me than almost anything else.

I don’t need Eli to blend into the world.  I need him to understand it well enough to be safe in it.

The goal is not to make him less autistic.  The goal is always to help him understand himself and the people around him well enough to move through the world more safely and confidently.

For our family, ABA is one of the tools that helps him do that.

And the peace of mind that brought me? That is pretty hard to put a price on.

Nickel for the Jar: I don’t need my child to blend into the world. I need him to understand it well enough to navigate it safely.