"Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."
Ohey, familiar. Lately getting that particular bit of equivocation from my own abusive "family" who've been threatening everything from having me jailed to having me "institutionalized," calling the cops on me to evict me without notice, physical intimidation... Turns out "no" is a grievous offense to such people. The whole "children as property" thing is vile, absurd that some clearly think giving birth yields the ultimate entitlement, to an entire person and their life. I wonder if not getting diagnosed is a 'blessing in disguise' :| Tried for a decade or two to tell BioMom I thought I was 'on the spectrum' but always just got bullied out of ever seeing a doc. "There is NOTHING wrong with you!!" she'd say, every time. So now I'm a wreck 'cause two people screwed and entitled themselves to getting by with this crap (and more besides). I hope that person manages better.
...Could really use help escaping before I become a data point, actually :-\
I'd try to avoid getting an official diagnosis until you are free - Autism CAN be used as a way to deem a person incompentent and unable to handle their own living situation, causing a guardian to be assigned power of attourney and control over finances
Source: I have Autism and thankfully am lucky my mother isn't insane as she has effective power of attourney
I mean, this is dicey, being online, being (presumably) a young woman. So it might be tough finding support online. But check local anarchist groups in your area. If you’re seriously in that kind of trouble, it might be worth getting out, maybe even with a friends’ family you trust. But if things are dire…do what you can to find a safer place to be.
From a quick search, it's basically a therapy where, instead of figuring out why the patient is upset, you train them like a dog. And not even the training where you do gentle redirection from bad behaviours. The kind where you whap the "patient" (ie victim) for being "abnormal" so they effectively become a nervous wreck who does as you please to avoid being hurt
Note that even what we pejoratively call "training like a dog" is so obsolete that I've seen/read more than one dog trainer get a bit offended for comparing their profession to ABA. Ultimately, the problem with ABA is that it assumes that the object to be worked with isn't a subject worthy of being considered sentient, or of being capable of accurately expressing their needs or preferences, or that their mental processes are either too obscure or too wrong to even begin to take them into consideration, but rather that it's just a very simple organism that you have to punish or reward until it learns to pretend to appear "human enough" in your eyes.
You'd think we would have shelved it already when we already know a lot in the differences in the mental processes of autistic people.
Some people think it's some kind of autism cure. It's just understanding the reasons behind behaviors in order to increase behaviors that are desirable and decrease behaviors that are undesirable. Problems could arise from what ends up being defined as undesirable behavior and how that reinforcement is done but that's true of basically anything with the goal of changing behaviors.
My wife is autistic and studied it herself because it helped her understand all the "social bullshit" as she called it.
I'm going to disagree with the other comment and claim that you've made a very good observation. Even though conversion therapies and ABA may somewhat differ in their methods, the both of them are born from the basis of wanting to use operant conditioning on humans, and ignore everything else that we've learned about the psychology and neurology of humans that explain why it's a dogshit idea.
The others have pretty much answered about it, but specifically, it's a very intense, very personal therapy, with some sessions lasting up to 8 hours. It's typically one-on-one with the therapist, who will be observing every behavior and rewarding behaviors that are desired. I haven't heard of any that do it around here, but I am sure some therapists 'punish' for behaviors that they do not want to see again.
As was noted in the other replies, it can be extremely demeaning to reduce a person to their behaviors alone, and a great abyss lies next to the feet of any therapist that easily conceals abusive or immoral practices... and those feet are on a slippery slope of scree.
“And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum
All too often, people who identify as an authority do so because they think of people as owned things. An ugly situation somewhat ameliorated by Celine's Second Law "Effective communication is only possible among equals."
"If you don't respect the privileges I think I ought to have in my position in the social hierarchy, I won't respect the rights I might be willing to grant to someone in your position in the social hierarchy."