Self-Administered ABA Therapy
When I was diagnosed with autism at age 47, my clinician told me that my reports of my childhood, teen years, and much of my adulthood were me doing ABA therapy on myself so that I could fake being neurotypical. This included the bad parts of ABA, too. Not the treats or the slaps, sure. But all of the more lasting mental abuse, the installment of a neurotypical monitor in my head who was always watching and telling me what I was doing wrong and what the newly updated (updated on a daily basis) list of things I needed to watch out for were.
Here are some of the things I taught myself to believe:
1. Make sure you don’t talk for more than a minute or two about anything you care about.
2. Keep eye contact for as long as the other person does, but no longer than that.
3. Wait for there to be an opening in the conversation (a silence, a pause) before you say what you have to say.
4. Keep track of who has talked the most in the conversation and make sure that person isn’t you.
5. Let other people guide the conversation.
6. Ask other people more questions than they ask you and let them talk for longer than you do.
7. Don’t ask nosy questions. Nosy questions are questions about their parents, their body, or their grades in school (this list got a lot longer as I aged).
8. Don’t tell people the truth. No matter how much they say they want you to tell the truth, they do not want you to tell the truth. Not about if these jeans make their pants look fat, if their boyfriend is abusive, or if God is real.
9. Take care to look at your face before you leave the house or before any occasion between when you eat and when people might look at you. Check for food between your teeth, anything on your face, your eyebrows looking wrong, etc.
10. Keep your face in a neutral expression at all times, or do a neutral to happy expression as much as possible. Do not show emotions on your face and do not let people think you are mad or bored or uninterested. Looking like that is rude.
11. Make a smile face for photos whenever people take a picture, whether you want them to take a picture or not.
12. If people offer to help you “look better,” always agree and follow their suggestions to the letter. It might not be perfect, but will definitely be better than anything you can figure out for yourself.