A note before the post: Elaina is one of those insiders who is still in her process of healing from what she took on. This isn't meant as a personal attack, but it is an expression of her opinions and experiences relating to the behavioral program we were involved in during our elementary school years. I repete, this is not a personal attack. No names are used, and no personal insults are intended.
Elaina's words below.
OK everyone, it’s Elaina and I’m talking about the behavior crap we were in in elementary school. I’m not naming anybody, or accusing anyone, but I’m telling what I remember about the program, and going on kind of a rant because Maria said it was time people saw how we felt about everything. So, yeah, here’s what I wrote.
“Tell me when you’re ready to calm down,” I can still remember her saying. Yeah, like I was going to calm down with no help to speak of, not that I would accept help from these people. They weren’t safe. Lots of people weren’t safe. If these people were, they’d not have taken me out of my classroom, with the kids who were my own age. They wouldn’t have put me in a separate room all the time, away from everybody around my grade. But they had. They didn’t care, I knew that already. So I wouldn’t calm down, not when they demanded so much of everything else from me.
“I’d rather die than lie about what I feel,” I told myself over and over in that room. “I’d rather die than lie about how I feel, because they’re not going to take this from me, even if I have to show it on the inside of my own head.”
I wasn’t aware of the others back then. I still thought I was Maria, because I didn’t pick out a name for myself, and hadn’t fully separated from her yet. But I knew what I needed to do to stay healthy in my own head, so I didn’t lie about what I felt, not even when they thought I was calm enough to sit down and draw what I’d just done as being wrong, and what they wanted out of me as being right. We grew out of what put us in there in the first place. They didn’t really help us at all, and if anything they made us worse. I took on the idea, stupid as it was, that I had to act exactly like one of the staff members of that program in order to get out. Dumb, right?
Yeah, we may have had fun, but where was I when that was going on? I mean, everybody knows the only reason we were put in there in the first place was because we were honest about what we felt and didn’t put a ton of words on it like the other kids. So? How is that a bad thing? I don’t remember them even once asking why we did what we did either. They had a token system to control our behavior, but they never once asked us, why are you doing that? That’s what ABA does though, which is why we started calling it that in the first place. But I don’t know what ABA was doing in a place like this…
This was coming from a mental health system, of all things, so you’d think they’d look past a behavior right? No, I guess not, if they can treat kids like they treated us. I know they weren’t physically abusive, and didn’t throw insults at us or anything, but what they did do is still abusive in our eyes, because they didn’t look into why we did what we did, and they didn’t help us use the stuff we learned later on to calm ourselves when it was needed. I probably wouldn’t have let us go that far though, they just weren’t safe to do that kind of breathing thing with after the things they pulled, and everyone who wanted to do breathing stuff was already hidden from the outside, but to just give up like that? They’re the professionals, for god’s sakes! Ok I know they don’t know everything, but they’re the people who work with the kids, they’re the ones who’re supposed to be there to help, to stop problems like the ones we’re dealing with now from getting to the point where they stop someone from having a life! Is it in their job description to ignore what someone feels and just change behavior? Is it really, when they’ve got kids depending on what they’re doing to learn things they’re going to need for the rest of their lives?
I remember one time, I know it happened more than once though, where Maria got frustrated in class. I don’t remember what she was frustrated over, but she quit talking and hunched over in her chair. Some adult must not have liked that because the next thing I know, I’m trying to come out to get Maria out of harm’s way as one of the behavioral staff, that’s what I’ll call them for now, comes into the room to remove us. Sometimes, at this part, Maria came out and tried to run back to the classroom. Eventually I took the idea of just go with what they want to shut them up and would go with them to their special room, where they held us until we agreed to sit down in their stupid plastic chair and draw like a little kid, then to apologize for something that wasn’t even wrong. Can you see the problem yet? They were only doing things based on how we acted, not based on how our mind and emotions were doing.
That’s the classic idea of ABA right there, totally ignore the mind and emotions for the sake of behavioral change, and that’s strait up crap! We weren’t actually calm, we’d just dissociated in the form of me being born and learning, really quickly, to suppress everything we felt so we could go back to a normal school day! And some people actually think that helped us! If it actually helped us like they say it did, do you think we’d be having the crap we do now, which includes the same problem that somehow landed us in the behavioral program in the first place? Do you honestly believe that we would have had breakdowns in high school like we did if that excuse for help had done its supposed job? No! No, I wouldn’t be here, no, we wouldn’t be as hurt as we are now, and no, we wouldn’t have to deal with people still doing the same thing they did in the behavior program as far as basically abandoning us when we’re upset, if we’d learned what we were supposed to learn, when we were supposed to learn it!
This doesn’t even begin to cover the fear I felt when they, meaning the other adults who were working with us, just called in the behavioral staff without trying to solve the problems themselves. I guess I’ll get into that in another post, but let’s just say this for now, it really messed me up. It showed me that they either were just doing what they’d been told to do, or that they didn’t care about our wellbeing, and no, I’m not thinking that because I *want* to, I’m thinking that because, to put it bluntly, thinking about it any other way, with all the proof pointing where it’s pointing, would be a lie to myself. It doesn’t matter how good someone’s intentions are, taking someone out of the classroom for something like not talking, or getting frustrated with the work, isn’t going to help anyone involved, accept for maybe the teacher because it gets that oh so annoying kid out of their way, unless the person being moved actually wants a break. To the behavioral staff who took me out of my classroom, and I’m saying *my* because of what you did, and said, to cause my birth in the first place, I didn’t want a break, so don’t expect that the crap you’ve done to me and probably a lot of other kids who didn’t want that break won’t have some kind of effect on all of us when we grow up, even if it’s not like the one it had on Maria. I shouldn’t have to be here right now, I shouldn’t have to be suffering right now, but guess what? Because of what you were involved in when dealing with us, I am, and a lot of others are too.
You may not work with us anymore, but the results of what you’ve done, we’re just starting to recover from, and I’m only just realizing that I don’t need to lie anymore to keep you happy. No, it doesn’t matter to me, or anyone else in the system, how good your intentions were, because you know exactly what went on from 2008 to 2011…you were there making it happen, and if you had actually been looking at what was really going on, you would have seen no change where it actually mattered. I have nothing against you all in a personal way, but your actions toward me and Maria were so far from helpful to the situations we’d get into in the classroom that I have to wonder what was going through your heads when you did them, and I have to question the effectiveness of your methods as far as actually helping people with the reasons under their behavior. Clearly what you made happen from 2008 to 2011 hasn’t helped us at all because if it had we wouldn’t be making these kinds of posts about it or trying to call it out like the mental neglect that it is. If you ever get to a point in your lives where you can look back at everything you’ve done, I hope how you handled the behavior of me and probably a lot of other kids comes back to you, and I hope you wonder how you could have treated it differently. I’m not angry with the aids, teachers, and whoever else were only doing what they were asked to do outside of the behavioral staff group, I’m angry at those who asked them to do it, and those same people who refused to hear our side of the story even though we were the ones they were trying to, supposedly, help. If their methods were really scientifically proven to help kids with whatever *cause* of an issue they were dealing with, why did I see nothing in the form of causes being dealt with, and a whole lot of behavior change methods being used? Probably because, to the behavioral staff of that excuse for a so-called mental health program, observable change was all that counted…now if that isn’t science being twisted to fit some disgustingly degrading theory, I don’t know what is.
I feel sorry for the other kids who were with us in that program, if their experience was anything like ours. I hope that someday, programs that use inadequate methods that only change behavior will be a thing of the past. I can tell you this much from my own future plans, if I ever end up being a parent, I would never, ever, ever put my kid in a program like that unless it dealt with causes of behavior and not just behavior itself. That kind of thing, just doesn’t work for me. Oh, and as far as people saying, “But you had fun in that program,” yeah we might have, but I was only there for the parts where nobody cared about what was going on under our behavior, and right now I’m not ready to get those memories because I’m still trying to deal with this part of it all. Your intentions are good, but I’m just not ready.