ABA and Stimming

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For me stimming distracts me. When I'm rocking and hand flapping I do nothing else. I find it a distraction, not something that helps. My stimming though sounds more prolonged and sustained than yours, so that might be the reason. But lightly tapping your feet, which is common behaviour, is I don't think akin to more pronounced stimming. I think for those of us who stim heavily, it really is a big problem. Not just something that helps. It affects my concentration and acts as an intrusion when I'm trying to focus.

I want to stop my stimming, not indulge in it. But I can't, and have been doing since I was a toddler. I sometimes wonder that ABA might have helped when I was a toddler to stop doing it. I sometimes think I might not be still doing it today as a mid-twenties man. When frankly such behaviour only scares people. It's disrupted my education, I think more than anything else. I learned that when I was in college - it's not just a quiet environment I need. It's also my concentration for other things that needs to improve, and my stimming needs to stop.

Last edited by Acedia on 13 Mar 2014, 12:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

BigSister thank you for what you said, that was very nice.

I hadn't thought about the contradiction, but now that people are bringing it up, it's obvious. The occupational therapists are very much in support of self regulation through activity including stimming. It might be interesting to hear your friend's take on working as part of a team with OTs who approach children trying to help with sensory integration.

I can't post much because of time constraints, but given that ABA is one of my obsessions, I just want to say that I think that it is a misconception that ABA doesn't take into account thoughts/feelings. Pure behaviourism is outdated and current forms of behaviourism do incorporate the presence of thoughts/feelings. First, I would tell your ABA therapist to read some of Albert Bandura's literature about the role of cognitions in behavioural approaches. I remember opening an ABA textbook a year ago and right in the first chapter, it said that thoughts and feelings ARE considered to be behaviours and are inferred from "overt" behaviours (i.e. the directly observable ones) during the treatment. So I wonder how much literature your therapist has really been exposed to.

Second, it is very true that stimming is a necessary emotional outlet and a form of expression for people with ASD. If the stimming is actually distracting, then you can either redirect it into less distracting forms or have the child take stimming/processing breaks (which we NEED to learn well). Behavioural methods are perfectly well designed to assess whether stimming is distracting or not. And if it's not, then there is no need to change it, period. If the therapist thinks it's "stigmatizing" and makes people react undesirably to your child, well, being Black was also once very stigmatizing and made people react undesirably to you. The more the society becomes exposed to a diversity of behaviours, the more accepting it will (hopefully) become.

My wife and I did the ABA training a couple of years ago and the syllabus relies on research conducted in the early 1970s. Worse still the video was digitised from a VHS published in 1978. Claiming ABA is evidence based research is one thing but it's clearly not current as ABA appears to have poor replicability.

On the issue of stimming, perceptions of stimming in the 1970s was far worse than today (hence the unfavourable tag). My mother was a special ed teacher back in the 1970s and she told me that adults with autism who stimmed in public were asked to leave shops or restaurants and even charged by the police for disturbing the peace.

For me, that includes "being conscious" and "being happy". I know I'm not the only one who's like that. I would venture to suggest that consciousness and happiness are not things we should be eliminating in anyone.

Yeah, I was going to say the same thing.
Something being a symptom of a disability doesn't automatically make it a problem.

Stimming (a word I really do not like, but will not go into the reason for that now) may be more than just a symptom. It is serving some kind of practical function function, therefore obviously should not be repressed. However there may be ways to work with stimming, not stopping it but consciously using it as a tool, especially with autistic children, that may be beneficial, and even for an adult.

People who are not autistic use this device of repetitive body movements, too. I see it quite a bit. It is just not done so obviously. All kinds of people do it, and in one religion I know of it is even employed consciously as a device for the transformation and stablization of the mind.

I agree Littlebee. My stims are beneficial in a quantity of ways.