It is perfectly understandable, even laudable for a parent to want to help their child overcome adversity. A parent who ignores the stress of their child would be negligent.
There is a great divide at the moment between many NT parents of autistic kids and the autistic adults who lived through the various treatments, therapies, diets, special education and interventions that were embarked upon with good intentions.
Let me explain a little about what we mean by masking. Many allistic people think they know what masking is, in fact they often say to us "Oh I do that, I wear masks. I don't act the same at work as I do with my mates..."
That's not masking. Masking is far deeper than knowing to mind your Ps & Qs when the vicar or the boss is around. It's a fundamental shift in character which is extremely draining to sustain and is totally alien to our inherent nature.
I'll try to illustrate with a thought experiment. Often we'll say that being autistic can feel like being a foreigner in your own home country.
If you moved to a different country you might learn the language, make an effort to understand the customs and the social structure of their society. You could fit in reasonably well, have a job, a life, maybe even marry a local and have kids there.
You would make mistakes. You would sometimes use the wrong words, maybe offend someone by mistake because you didn't understand the customs or the social order as well as a local, but generally people would forgive you because you're foreign and you'll learn better for next time.
That is not masking. That's the dream life most autistic people wish they had. To do the best we can to fit in to a foreign culture and learn it's ways and be accepted. Being forgiven for our differences, maybe even appreciated for our different perspective.
Now let's take it a step further. This time you wake up in a foreign country with no idea how you got there or where you came from. You have amnesia, but you know this isn't where you belong. You have have to go unnoticed because foreigners are not welcome there. You must learn the language, the customs, the history of the place. You must perfect your accent and your backstory so that nobody you meet will suspect you are not one of them and you must do this all day at work, whenever you meet anyone in the street, whenever you socialise, go to church - everything. If you don't manage to convince people you will be an outcast for no fault of your own - you didn't choose to come to this intolerant, xenophobic place, but you don't know where you came from to return there.
That is masking. Hiding your true nature by pretending to be someone you are not - a foreigner who doesn't understand much of what is going on around them, but who has learned how to get by without drawing attention.
True ABA (and all it's "benign" derivatives) trains children to mask their true selves at severe cost to their well being. Pretending to be something you are not is tremendously exhausting mentally and emotionally. Holding our tongues when we have something to say, trying not to laugh when we find something funny, keeping still when we need to stim to calm ourselves or stimulate our thoughts, in case someone should stare at us and think us weird.
What you appear to be describing - teaching your child about cause and effect, how their actions could bring about adverse reactions is not remotely related to ABA. ABA is not concerned with explaining why, nor does it care about the child's need to express it's own natural identity in safe ways. It merely seeks to change. Success is measured by how "normal" the child appears, not by how happy they are, nor their use of their potential. It is a therapy for parents who don't want their children to look out of place, not for parents who want their autistic children to live happy, fulfilled lives. ABA does not seek to manage unhelpful behaviours, it seeks to alter the child.
There's an increasing number of "schools" and "programmes" describing themselves as using ABA who do nothing of the sort. They claim to offer ABA because it gets funding, whether from private insurers or government funds, depending on where you live. These have varied from positive programmes which seek to help kids by helping them learn how some behaviours could lead to them being hurt without trying to alter their nature, to full-on military style bootcamps. If they call it ABA they get paid, and since it is so under regulated they get away with it.
This is a good thing if it's a system that work like the first example, but such entities are rare. If you found one of these then you were very fortunate, and your daughter even more so.
There is no such thing as good or kind ABA and no loving parent would subject their child to it if they understood the consequences. Unfortunately many are unwilling to listen to the voices of autistic adults who were just the same as their kids not so long ago.
You have shown willingness to listen and I hope we've helped you to understand that ABA is not what you and your daughter have experienced. I am both relieved and happy that turned out to be the case after the initial shock at your earlier post.
True acceptance of autism and neurodiversity requires working to change the world into a place more tolerant of difference, not erasing the differences, which you seem to appreciate.
