I may make a longer post about the radio disability event tomorrow as I am rather shocked about something else now and feel like I want to discuss that instead, however the event went well and it turned out that not practicing my speech was a good choice.

What I wanted to talk about now is a little shocking event I just had on a Facebook group I joined a few days ago, a really large one set up for parents of autistic children and partners of autistic adults to ask questions to autistic people. I was really glad I found that place and was eager to share my views on how speaking to an autistic person ‘as specifically as possible’ may actually cause a misunderstanding and my views on masking based on copy and paste behaviour versus pragmatic masking. I did comment on a couple of posts and everything seemed ok and my explanation of masking based on copy and paste behaviour actually received several likes. However…

Today someone asked about what to do with a therapist who advised not to react to a child requests unless they look at the parent. And I thought that is what my mum used to do when I was six on the advice of a child psychologist who saw me once and said I’d grow out of ‘it’. I do understand that would be classified as ABA technique and I am not saying it was a good thing, but I’m also not saying it traumatised me. It was however something that I didn’t understand and it’s possible that it was what gave me the idea later that repeating behaviour without understanding its purpose is a good social strategy.

However, what mum was doing did not traumatise me.

I did state the above in my response and shortly after was challenged by an admin for promoting ABA! Absolutely shocking!

I did take that as an opportunity to practice to be polite while also expressing my views in an assertive way. Being a blogger who’s focusing on communication brings responsibilities on me!

Ok, I was probably slightly sarcastic, lol!

Anyway, I got muted at the end. We’ll see how this will go. Maybe it’s not a place for me? I have my blog and can express myself here, while the other lady has her Facebook group. Maybe she thinks I’m stealing her thunder? I did however heard over the years about numerous instances of autistic people being removed from autistic Facebook group for sharing their opinions. No one ever wanted to say the name of the group but I wonder now if it’s the same one.

Being an autistic advocate is definitely much more difficult than I thought!