They love the perfect lie of suppression of the truth. They’ll turn the blame on the suffering, or on the parents of the suffering, but never turn their finger to their own actions and say, “I’ve really done the children I work with a lot of damage by treating them as I have.”
They’ll most likely try to say that our story is a lie. They’ll try to say that we’re wrong in our memories, that we’re looking for attention, maybe even that we’re mentally ill for thinking that our childhood was anything but happy. They refuse to see the person behind the behavior as a human being, just like them. In our case, their focus was not on helping us, but on killing off behaviors that seemingly had no use to us. In short, the only thing they cared about was their fat check.
Who is this ‘they’ we’re talking about? If you want to know, read on.
According to records, we had unwanted behavior that needed to be controlled and suppressed as a young child, like throwing our body on the floor while screaming and thrashing. What the records never addressed, and what we were never shown, were ways of dealing with the situations that led to the behavior. The things that were meant to help us instead caused us more pain, and did more harm than good. Behavioral “interventions” caused our behaviors, after a certain point. It’s really that simple, when you look past all the complex language so-called scientific people slap on barbaric practices in an effort to pass them off as the right thing to do. Though we never got Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, the behavioral interventions we had forced on us might as well have been a watered down version of the same badly, badly misused ideas. In this article, I’ll expose, in graphic detail, the things that were forced on us in an effort to change how we expressed ourselves, related to others of our same age, and interacted with the world. While our ordeal with behavioral interventions was nowhere near as bad as what others have been put through, it’s still something that must be exposed for the disgusting thing that it is.
*talk of abuse details*
When we were in pre-school, we were more of a whole. Empathy had taken its fair share of that unity by that time in our lives, but we still retained at least some vague shadow of oneness before the behavioral abuse started. Not even we have access to all the memories of behavioral abuse, but we remember how we were left in a room reserved for storing jim equipment, while screaming, crying and clearly upset, until we learned that no one would come to comfort us. Even that memory is incomplete, because we don’t know if there were in fact efforts to comfort us, but based on the way we remember feeling in the room, we don’t think that idea was even given a thought. This part of our life is hard to piece together, but as we go through our history and recover our memories in an aware state, we realize, by this point, that this is when our empathy really began to be suppressed and dissociation became a full-time activity.
The cost of empathy was high enough without behavioral abuse, but the unreality of the people inflicting such abuse while simultaneously smiling and talking cheerfully was once again overwhelming. Though we don’t know who formed from what trauma, at least during this period in our life, in the process of writing this article we are remembering how strongly we received things from others outside of the system and how afraid we were when this happened. We are realizing just how bad the situation really was, but even if we didn’t have writing and skills to deal with an eye-opening part of our life, we would have realized to some extent how deep the imprint ran in our mind. When we were in middle school, it was this memory that drove us to seek healing from trauma in the first place, and this memory that stuck around and reminded us that there was, indeed, pain in our past. But before we knew on a cognitive level what the situation really was, behaviors communicated this truth. Sadly, nobody saw the behaviors for what they were and tried, as always seems to be the case, to silence valuable messages they didn’t want getting out to the world.
Just as was done in pre-school, our elementary school teachers and those who worked with them assumed that our behaviors meant nothing. Instead of trying to help us, with the help of our parents they placed us in a behavioral intervention program of some kind. In that program, when we had a behavior, their first reaction was not to try calming us, but to tell us we needed to calm ourselves. When that failed to quiet us, we were removed from the room. At no point were our views even seen as valid, let alone taken into account. Our behaviors were treated as only something that needed to be controlled, and though they claimed to have taught us coping skills, we never received such information and were never helped to implement the information we looked up on our own time. The responses to many of our communications were punishment, much like ABA. Likewise, the responses to desired behaviors were reward, much like ABA. The shame this produced, however, was masked by the overwhelming need to obey, conform, and keep silent, and even when we spoke out we were rebuked as though we’d shared an unsharable piece of information.
We must not forget the outright silliness of their punishments at times. As we have mentioned before, and as is stated on many documents, our body is blind and has been since birth. When we’d have emotional reactions to things and not know what to do with them, and so erupt in behaviors, their response was to remove us from the room, keep us in a room of their own until we suppressed what we felt to at least try to calm ourselves, then have us draw, in visual modalities, what we’d done as being “wrong,” and what they wanted us to do as “right.”
The amount of toxic shame this alone caused us is enough to make any professional question their actions. I, Maria, am convinced that this is why they didn’t want to hear our protests. They didn’t want to see our pain, because they would have to deal with their own internal conflict over their actions towards, most likely, many other people who were close to us in body age. It doesn’t make what they did right. It was wrong on every level, and we can all attest to that. Realizing this about the people who call themselves “educaters” and “helping forces” may, someday, give us a foundation for healing this wound. The first step is here, in the writing of this article. The effects of this kind of shame, conditioning, and silencing will one day be undone. We will not rest until that happens.
At this very moment, we are too broken over this trauma to have any clear emotional understanding of why the abusers did what they did. Some of us have a better understanding than others. Some of us feel badly for them; others want to see them dead; others want to see them pay, and so on. I, Maria, would like to see them pay for what they’ve done to all of us. The pain that tore us from one another didn’t just affect me, it affected everyone involved. I’d like to see no one put through this emotional abuse known as behavioral intervention. There are ways of doing this kind of thing without shame and torment. I’d like to see those ways around, a lot more.
We were lucky to escape the behavior program when we were in the seventh grade. However, the memories are still raw and impact some of us, to the point where we are afraid of picking up a drawing tool. This should not be the case. We should not feel shame around being ourselves, or around dealing with something we can’t control as well as others. In our case, behavioral “intervention” taught us to do exactly that. There is a reason for every behavior, and instead of seeing that fact, the people who claimed to help us tried to suppress even the smallest hint of it. The continued low level shaming we experience in our current schooling is enough for us to say that we’re done putting up with it, that we want our life back, and that we will stop at nothing but harm to get that point across and stop this abuse called therapy.
The future is at stake.