Trauma

YOU are enough. YOU are worthy of love. I love you and I hope you love you too.

If you aren’t able to understand the other person’s reality, then what reason is there to choose the explanation that hurts? You’re only hurting yourself that way.

Don’t believe everything you think. It’s just a thought, an untested hypothesis, until you’ve tested its validity.

Trauma – stub – I believe the definition would be damage

Emotional trauma is pain we cause ourselves via our thoughts.
To recover we need to choose to heal our thoughts.
To make a choice, we have to understand what choice is.

Physical trauma is pain created by outside sources.

ABA is a Tool

If you have been traumatized by ABA, please know I love you and hope you can love you too.

And like most tools, it can be used to build up, or tear down.

ABA has frequently been misused to teach neurodivergent children to mask – squashing their authentic self and thus traumatizing them.

Atomic Habits is basically the layman’s guide to using ABA to build the life they want.

If your child does not LOVE going to ABA or seeing their BT/BI, then something is wrong.

ABA is supposed to be individualized, so if they aren’t customizing, it isn’t being used properly.

We use ABA to support acquiring self-regulation skills, self-advocacy skills, coping tools and communication skills.

We do not use ABA to teach compliance or masking – we don’t ask for eye contact, but we do point out that when someone is facing away or hasn’t gotten our attention, then it’s hard to hear, and if we don’t hear, we can’t reply.

The number one thing they do is catch the kiddo doing well and praising that. Which helped me realize how terrible I was at it. It felt really weird and kinda fake at first, but I’m much more comfortable now and it feels really good.

What helps

Cognitive reappraisal:

Cognitive appraisal – Wikipedia – recommended by Heather Brown

EMDR:

What is EMDR? – EMDR Institute – EYE MOVEMENT DESENSITIZATION AND REPROCESSING THERAPY

Workbook:

The Neurodivergent Friendly Workbook of DBT Skills: Wise, Sonny Jane: 9798799480684: Amazon.com: Books

Asking for and accepting help.

Think about how good it feels to help others – by accepting help you can allow the people who care about you enjoy that feeling.