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Trigger Warning: ABA, ableism, institutionalized child abuse

[Image Description: A bright red door with a brass knob and a faded mail slit. To its left, there is a long, dark windowpane with some decoration and smudges. The door itself has chips in its paint and markings on it, despite the bright color. It is closed, possibly locked.]

When I first became an ABA Therapist, I was thrilled. I was actually going to use my psych degree, get paid more than minimum wage, and above all, make a positive difference in Autistic children's lives. Or at least, that's what I thought.

Now I look back, and the year I spent working in ABA is my single greatest regret.

When I left, it wasn't a decision I made overnight. It was a long, difficult process, full of denial and confusion. I don't enjoy talking about it because I did so many wrong things that affected kids' lives, and I don't want to offer any excuses for myself. But I do want you to get a sense of what the process was like, in case anyone reading this happens to be in the same position.

Before I go any further, I want to say that I'm so grateful for the Autistic community for sharing about their lives and their experiences. I'd probably still be working in ABA right now if it wasn't for their tireless efforts to call out ableism, which helped me recognize it in my own life and in my work. Listening to their voices and their traumatic experiences of ABA is what made me quit, and none of these critiques of ABA are my own. I learned everything from Autistic people, and I'm going to link to many of their writings and videos that influenced my decision to quit.

Since ABA affects Autistic people's lives first and foremost, their voices are the most important part of this discussion, and it's essential that you listen to what they're saying.

And of course, the links in this post are only just a small sample of all the invaluable information that exists within the Autistic community – you can learn so much more by continuing to seek out Autistic writers and speakers. Before you continue reading, I recommend checking out this FAQ page about Autism by Autistic Hoya and this video by Amythest Schaber, because there is already so much misinformation about what Autism even is. And there is no better expert on Autism than someone who actually is Autistic.

I also want to recognize that many forms of therapy for Autistic kids are called "ABA," but not all would actually be considered traditional ABA and thus they may be less problematic than the forms I'm going to discuss in this post. Many times, a therapy is labeled ABA simply to get covered by insurance. This is why it can get confusing to discuss ABA since the term is used to encompass a broad variety of teaching methods. Please understand that when I'm talking about ABA in this post, I'm speaking from my own personal experience of it. This page is a good summary of the kind of ABA I did (though I never worked at that place specifically), which included Discrete Trial Training (DTT), Natural Environment Training (NET), and errorless teaching.

When I began working as an ABA Therapist, I had barely even heard of ABA before, and it was a bit counterintuitive to me. I googled it, and I found pages and pages of glowing reports from families about how much ABA helped their Autistic children. I saw that Autism Speaks, the largest and most well-known advocacy group about Autism in the US, supported ABA. I saw that ABA was an evidence-based practice built on scientific research, and that it was the most widespread treatment for Autistic kids in America. People billed as "Autism experts" highly recommended it. I walked away feeling mostly great about the work I was doing.

However, I also got my first small exposure to other, more critical perspectives. I didn't know how to interact with the non-speaking kids I worked with, and this prompted me to do some cursory research about Autistic people's experiences. I ended up finding Ido Kedar's wonderful book about his experiences as a non-speaking Autistic, and he taught me that the ability to talk indicated nothing about a person's intelligence. Ido openly criticized ABA for not realizing this simple fact, among other things, and he often writes in his blog about how much he was underestimated by his ABA team (such as this post). His experiences left me with some doubts about the field, but one negative view was far too easy to push aside in favor of all the positivity surrounding ABA.

And that's largely what I did for the next several months. I took some of Ido's criticisms to heart in that I worried