gingerautie:

candidlyautistic:

First you need to ask you if you actually want to stop. If you don’t want to, just tell her it is something you don’t want to work on that at the moment.

If you do, well, the rubber band thing is a pretty common suggestion for modifying behaviors, but it is essentially out of the ABA playbook that pretends to be cognitive behavioral therapy.

You can do the exact same thing without the rubber band, and just use actual cognitive behavioral therapy.

Essentially the way it works is that you recognize a thought or action, you process the thought or action, you change the thought or action.

The great thing about this is that it doesn’t matter if you succeed or fail – the more you do it, the more you will notice the rocking so the more you interrupt it, so the more you recognize it, so on and so forth.

So it might work like this

You are rocking.

You notice / recognize you are rocking.

You you think to yourself “I would like to stop rocking”.

You stop rocking.

One of the really important things about this is that whether you use CBT or the rubber band it does not matter how long you interrupt the rocking for. It is not a failure if you only stop rocking for half a second or a second or two or five minutes or five hours.

All that matters is that you stopped.

In any event, you can also replace the rubber band with literally any action. You draw a circle with your on your knee with your finger, you can boop your nose, you can hum, you stand on your head.

If you are okay with ABA tactics and using them on yourself, instead of you using an aversive system like the rubber band you can use CBT and follow it with a reward.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using that sort of conditioning on yourself as long as you know what ABA is, know the ethical issues, and are doing it by your choice for yourself.

Finally, you can also tell your therapist that you like the idea of interrupting the rocking, but not the rubber band and ask her if she has any suggestions that don’t use incentives or aversives, that you would like suggestions for a neutral action to help interrupt the rocking without associating it with anything good or bad. Your therapist will know you better than me, so they may have some ideas I’ve not thought about.

I personally prefer CBT, though sometimes I will use a physical action like tapping my knee with my finger with a long three count because it requires me to stop doing the action or thought I want to change, and replace it with with a thought and an action.

At first, it only interrupts my thought or action while I am tapping and counting. But it does get you there in the end, and it isn’t any slower than outright ABA in my opinion.

I know that is along read, but I hope it helps you get some

This is horrifying. The rubber band snapping thing is a good substitute for self-harm, because it doesn’t actually injure. 

but telling you that you should hurt yourself when you do something you don’t want to do is awful. Do they recommend this for people in therapy who have negative thoughts they’re trying to get rid of?

Would they tell someone to hurt themselves as punishment for having self-defeating thoughts or something?

Your therapist is telling you to hurt yourself. Even it’s just a minor pain, that’s what they’re telling you to do. They’re telling you to hurt yourself for behaviours that aren’t harmful. That’s horrifying.

Substituting eg. banging your head against a wall or cutting for snapping a rubber band is a good idea – you’re switching a serious harm for minor pain. Substituting harmless behaviours for hurting yourself is an awful idea.

Your therapist is telling you to self-harm. They are not a good therapist, and are telling you to behave in harmful ways.