HOUSEKEEPING + CHALLENGES

1.     Please, keep the letters coming! If you want to be a part of our pen pal club, in which we write holiday letters to those in group homes and residential treatment centers, email me at [email protected]. The more the merrier! Ideally, this can continue throughout the entire year. No holidays necessary.

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2.     If you work with children or are a parent, we’d love to hear your experience in testing the Triple 20: for 20 minutes, at a distance of at least 20 feet, we suggest the adult engage in 20 minutes of silence. Kids need boredom and time to themselves to figure out how to use their time, free of parents/therapists scheduling every moment to “stimulate” them. Kids don’t need any more stimulation.

3.     Tell us all of the wild things you’ve spent money on in an effort to entertain your kids or your clients, only to find they were completely uninterested in it. We’d love to connect and share your pain. Email us using the email above!

The movie WALL-E could not be more eerily similar to how we operate currently, specifically in its opening scenes depicting filth hanging in the air and a sickening landscape strewn with waste. With a bouncy tune singing lyrics of adventure as a backdrop, the tongue-and-cheek premise appears to be that of our beloved earth suffering yet another incidence of grotesque human consumerism and selfishness. This is made evident in how we treat our planet and perversely control our impulses. The music then morphs into haunting echoes, leaving cute-as-a-button robot WALL-E strolling through an abandoned junkyard only to stumble upon the one living thing trash-laden earth has managed to preserve: a cockroach.

The screen then pans to overweight and likely diabetic adults floating around in bubbles of their own contamination. Because of an existence requiring minimal movement, or lifting so much as a sausage finger, the adults in the film seem intentionally portrayed as morbidly obese but also unbelievably stupid and selfish. Audiences can assume, then, that living in the 29th century (i.e., floating-bubble-utopia) is the projected consequence of excessive consumerism, corporate greed, and environmental neglect. This utopian dream, the delusion that earthlings in the film believe to be a planet, serves only the purpose of housing people consumed entirely by their own cravings and avoidance of life’s discomfort, creating an environment akin to our own in the 21st century. With physicality becoming less of a requirement for survival and free thought being not only ignored, but frequently punished, Americans have degenerated into diabetic slobs, largely incapable of moving or thinking, both unwilling and unequipped to handle even the most minor of tasks. In a recent statistic through cms.gov, our healthcare costs in 2022 alone were enough to wipe out the entire country’s student loan debt. We are, by a long shot, the highest spending country worldwide when it comes to healthcare. And, alas, still the sickest.

Almost depressing with the film’s similarity to modern day is the conception of robots as maids to lazy grownups. These clunky cyborgs are forever indebted to the slobs’ every beck and call, nearly identical to Americans requiring iPhones and devices for what should be routine responsibilities. Incapable of completing their day-to-day without the soothing comfort of glowing rectangles of various sizes and functions, we have grown dependent on technology while believing we’re advancing. I should have prefaced this by saying: technological and medicinal advances are undeniable, offering what many would consider to be life-changing services. It is because of these services we in the first-world have the ability to reach wider swaths of individuals in need. For reasons likely related to my career choice and interests, I can’t help but compare WALL-E’s plot to the storyline many of our clients with disabilities resonate with. Treated more like convenience chains with endless supplies of revenue, they’ve become no different than the sluggish population in WALL-E: slaves to the shallow whims and insatiable thirst of larger systems. These larger systems house clinicians who, unknowingly, are being taught only to play into the grubby hands of those who don’t see people as people, but as dollar signs and social currency tags. One child receiving Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for 30 hours a week, for example, makes an agency a cool six figures for what closely resembles babysitting.

The elites in the film, the ones drowning in a petri dish of their own plump sludge, generally seem happy, relaxed, and engaged. Yes, I said it: good ‘ole “HRE”. The notion of “happy, relaxed, and engaged” as a universal truth or social metric implies that learning cannot and should not take place unless the learner reaches their quota for happiness, relaxation, and engagement. This quota is apparently only determined by the adult, who in turn must believe they’re the arbiter of human contentment. Not only is this a wildly privileged view to take, as only the Western white parent and/or practitioner would find any of these concepts to be a priority, but it flies in the face of decades of research demonstrating our innate need for challenge and exploration. A child perfectly content and deliberately shielded from “heightened emotions”, the premise much of which of HRE rests on, will find themselves in similar destitution to the degenerates in Wall-E: buoyant in a pool of their own lethargy, with a sheer misconstruction of what true purpose is. To illustrate the potentially dangerous outcomes of teaching such a concept as HRE, we turn to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its evidence-based treatment. Because I’ve spoken about this so frequently, I’ll simply recap my multiple pieces in short: when we avoid a feared stimulus, the feared stimulus becomes more powerful as we become more sensitive. When we inevitably face our fears, then, we are shaped to crumble. Hammering people to be happy and relaxed, then, by virtue of dodging difficulty and anything that could lead to a feeling above mild irritation, is guaranteeing a lifetime of avoidant behavior. This keeps people miserable and gradually victimized by their own faulty rules, teaching zero skills other than, “what doesn’t kill me makes me weaker”.

Further, an individual’s purpose, operating off of HRE’s logic, becomes only that of communicating with others when something is needed or wanted. While communicating needs is a vital skill in various personal and professional contexts, the ability to do so does not only serve the purpose of getting what we want. This is about as shallow and infantile a perception as the baby who only understands human communication as screaming when they’re due for another jaunt at the titty bar. Communication, along with contacting our needs, is what builds communities, offers rich sharing of nostalgic memories, and shapes our perceptions of ourselves in a broader context. It offers language for us to define ourselves and our purpose and if our current behavior is aligned with our internal morals and guiding principles. It contours conversations into those of deep connection and indescribable belonging, a need arguably as important as food, water, and shelter. While I can understand a heightened need for comfort and belonging in times of particular distress, like the effects of pandemic lockdowns, I do contest that we continue to reteach ourselves basic social skills following a hefty 2-year period of makeshift interaction. Lastly, communication is crucial should we learn to recognize and express our emotions. Yes, those pesky little mental disturbances largely responsible for our changes in mood and overall quality of life… those are our responsibility and nobody else’s.

Prioritizing feelings, though, which HRE essentially is a conglomerate of, is broadly useless. Not to mention it has been studied for decades as being conducive to stunted mental health, towering anxiety, and consistent splintering in one’s ability to self-regulate. I’ll demonstrate through use of a treatment example for people with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). While introspection and challenging of faulty beliefs is paramount in therapeutic approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), excessive rumination of our feelings only tends to heighten current suffering. When we admire our symptoms as problems that cannot be fixed or, worse yet, essentialize them as a fundamental part of who we are, we see minimal hope or incentive to change our thinking and behavior. The depressed individual who centers entire conversations around their depressive symptoms, unfortunate circumstances, and chronically negative mood will be more apt to focus on these traits in future periods of distress, rather than opting for therapeutic intervention or solutions. Such intrusive thoughts, which can otherwise be categorized as “overthinking”, tend to become their own self-fulfilling prophecies; a person hellbent on thinking of themselves as failures unworthy of love will behave in ways that serve this albeit destructive illusion; they will avoid events in fear of failure, they will sabotage current relationships in anticipation of being hurt, and will generally be quite unpleasant to spend any time with.

If we view the prioritization of HRE as possessing similar qualities to those of anxious and depressed people, we see a reverse CBT, of sorts. Instead of challenging faulty thinking, we embrace it; after all, anything that occurs outside of happiness, relaxation, and engagement is to be avoided for fear of “precursor behaviors”. What does this teach, exactly? This is, in essence, my point: HRE is not for the client, but to serve a “televisable” purpose of contrived utopia, similar to corporate honchos in WALL-E capitalizing on our propensity for laziness. It is for practitioners’ social benefit, as there are few professional decisions easier than those of printing an HRE sticker for your laptop and immediately being granted access to a community of “compassionate thinkers” who are “trauma-informed”.

And, unfortunately, these practitioners will know next to nothing as it relates to others because their time is largely spent focusing inward. Further, the pushing of HRE-ALL-DAY robs children and adults of the opportunity to experience any form of uncomfortable effort. This kind of uncomfortable effort, the kind we only come to appreciate in retrospect, may be considered “too triggering” for those aligned with HRE, as any “precursor” sign of distress is apparently to be immediately reinforced by means of allowing avoidance. Yes, it is imperative we allow choice and even escape depending on the circumstances. But what occurs when escape is not possible, and we are forced to comply with a macabre series of demands we find repugnant, useless, or *gasp* triggering? HRE is known for taking the painfully “slow” route to tolerance training, spending upwards of 2 months for some children just to teach them to respond to the word “no”. While certain cases certainly call for such painstaking pace, these are skills that could likely be taught in a fraction of the time should practitioners focus more on progress versus their own feelings. Ahhh, feelings… there’s that word again. Are we catching my drift, yet?

If not, let me sum this up as succinctly as possible. Clinicians who have been taught to believe that comfort is of utmost importance will inadvertently prioritize their own comfort over all else. This is evident in mainly all of HRE application; the clinician who is fearful of a child’s negative reaction will arrange the environment so as not to trigger so much as a whine, engineering a sanitized world identical to WALL-E’s utopia; its population is sluggish, fragile, devoid of motivation or meaning, and whose greatest thrills come from a vibrant rectangle attached to their hand. Sound familiar, yet?

There is an important step forward, though, despite us being in a cesspool of our own whining and viscous decadence. It is the concept that tribes in the Yucatan refer to as “acomedido”, or the joy that comes with helping other people voluntarily and for our own moral reasons. Acomedido teaches many of the skills child therapists aim to teach, but does so in a truly natural environment that sees “giving back” as the thread holding together a community’s fabric. Expensive toys and stimulating environments, decorated floor to ceiling in “teachable moments”, are replaced with opportunities for children to cook, scavenge their own food, assist their parents after a long day’s work, and create their own magic in extensive periods of boredom. Parents are not tasked with being project or entertainment coordinators, but are instead relied upon to teach functional skills that shape children into contributing members of family and society. Yes, Mom and Dad, allow this to serve as your hall pass; scheduling endless activities at museums and carnivals and therapies is unnecessary.

When we teach the beauty in altruism, and to help individuals understand themselves amongst a greater community, we offer the ultimate, “generalizable”, teachable moment: that of finding greater joy in service than in self-indulgence. We adopt perspective-taking, but not through silly role-plays and use of pseudo-functional communication that rarely occurs in real-life situations. Instead of lining rooms with number games and artificial stimulation, families in the Yucatan help children learn to recognize the needs of others. They direct their attention towards an adult visibly exhausted from the day’s work, or they instruct an elder sibling to console a hurt child. Children eagerly stand by, watching with eyes wide as Mom and Dad go about their typical day, versus Mom and Dad attending activities they otherwise wouldn’t have gone to if not for having children. Instead of arranging life and schedules around children, these families arrange their children around their way of life. In doing so, they leverage their child’s interests and natural motivations, in tandem with refining a keen sense of awareness of the self, the self’s emotions, and how these converge with the needs of those in their surroundings. One would be hard-pressed to find a token board or stash of Goldfish as “reinforcers” in nearly any community outside of the West. Is this not the eventual goal of therapy? Or are we so inclined to teach people with disabilities that their existence rests on shallow phrases like “safe hands”, “more please”, or “quiet mouth”?

The premise of acomedido could provide a much-needed pragmatic approach to people with autism, considering many generally lack the ability to take the perspective of others. What if, instead of drilling the same question about “hOw Do ThEy fEeL iN tHiS piCtuRe?” or using primary colors as yardsticks for emotions (i.e., “The Zones of Regulation”), we teach them to identify glaring signs and symptoms of people struggling? What if we exposed them to opportunities to wheel others in their wheelchairs, to help people carry groceries in, or to give their items away if they no longer use them? Call me old-fashioned, but I believe this carries with it far more meaning than a child who is taught to be chronically relaxed.

Mayans believe that a child who misbehaves is a child who needs more responsibilities, and I couldn’t agree more. Our culture and style of parenting in the West draws from recurrent schedules of activities perfectly calibrated to a child’s delicate emotions, concluding that any negativity felt must be the fault of the adult who provoked the child versus the child being a little shit. With so little expected of children and with adults proclaiming to be their “allies” instead of their authorities, it should come as no surprise that anxiety-related disorders, emotional disturbances, and behavioral problems continue to increase. For the most part, behavior analysis is common sense. This is an opinion I receive the most flack for, particularly by young and idealistic behavior analysts who believe the application of our science is remotely scientific. In raw honesty, 95% of cases of children with behavior problems, whether with or without disabilities, do not require behavior services. They require good parenting. And perhaps this is where our field has gone haywire in better understanding long-term goals: we believe we know more than the parent, all while claiming that discipline is traumatic and tears are indicative of severe emotional upset. If this doesn’t scream incompetence, I’m unsure what it will take.

Children and adults with disabilities often do not require elegant behavior plans and binders chock-full of programs that only aim to mutter phrases of rote memorization. Flow charts, visuals, and obscene money spent on lamination and Velcro and printer ink are not necessities, much like a sing-songy voice and an adorable schedule is not a pre-requisite for learning. We have to ask ourselves: how did children for the last 200 years manage to learn anything of value without a rotating menu of iPads and Chromebooks? Conversely, how did their parents manage to straighten their unruly behavior without token boards, timers, and schedules packed to the gills with useless, time-wasting activities? And, in all of this, what can we claim the children have actually learned? Our modern society may actually benefit from contrived opportunities to feel the ache of boredom, the type that forces an individual to make chalk out of rocks and fortresses in the sky only visible to our own mind. This not only promotes creativity and collaboration with peers, but helps our children remain aware of their surroundings--- and the people in it. Should a child complain of boredom, I’d suggest either ignoring it or offering chores that contribute to the household. They do not need another game for their Nintendo Switch, and they certainly don’t require participation in another form of therapy. They need to acknowledge something greater than their own damn happiness.

While the ending of WALL-E is ostensibly uplifting, there is the recognition that there’s a long way to go in not only restoring Earth, but bettering it. The “fitless humans”, who have lived for decades not moving a muscle, suddenly see vitality in things like planting, farming, and exercising what their bodies were built for. We are, in essence, built to move.

Can therapeutic fields contact a similar, daunting hope?

Only if we take a step away from it long enough to recognize how we’ve bastardized it.

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