28 Thursday May 2020
Now that the annual conference for ABAInternational is past (whew!), Cusp Emergence is excited about upcoming webinars and online conferences (New Hampshire and FABA, I’m looking at you!). First up is a partnership with Connections-Behavior.com: We will look at trauma-informed behavior analysis in two parts, on June 1 and 15. Register here for this CEU opportunity!
18 Monday Nov 2019
Behavior Analysis, Aging, Trauma, and Supervision (or BATS, in honor of Dr. Janet Ellis).
This is the 18th article in a series on Trauma-Informed Behavior Analysis by Dr. Camille Kolu, BCBA-D. It includes something new that we have been asked about: Companion notes for students and supervisees working through this information with the support of their supervisor.
I heard Jon Baker give a great talk on advances in behavioral treatment of gerontology the other day at COABA. It made me think of my students at the University of Colorado Denver and our supervisees. (There was also a fantastic talk on supervision and feedback by the incomparable Ellie Kazemi, whose book on supervision is out now). When they ask about clients other than autism who have benefited from applied behavior analysis, my supervisees are usually excited to read stories in which ABA changed the lives of people with dementia, brain injury, medical needs, and more. For example, an article from Baker (2006) Continue reading
27 Friday Sep 2019
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This is the 17th article in a series on Trauma-Informed Behavior Analysis by Dr. Teresa Camille Kolu, Ph.D., BCBA-D.
What did you do when you saw this picture? Chances are you experienced some additional events beyond just “seeing it”. Did you jump? Experience an increase in your breathing rate? Use some choice verbal behavior? Avert your eyes? (And are you prepared to read on? Fair warning… there’s a snake coming up).
Seeing with fresh eyes
I noticed a couple of things about our culture, and fear responses, this past week.
My young daughter’s love for flap books—the kind where you pull back a piece of paper to reveal something—knows no bounds. So she was instantly drawn to a tattered old library copy (apparently she shares this love with lots of peers) of “Buzz Buzz, Baby”- with poorly rendered babies exploring “bugs”. Around the third page the baby pulls back a web flap to unveil, in the book’s words, “EEK! The itsy bitsy spider!”
Whenever I read the book to her I leave out the “Eek!”.
I think she can come up with that on her own, if she happens to, although chances are she’ll get it from me in a non-mindful moment. (In the 1980’s Cook and Mineka did a classic study in which infant monkeys “acquired” a persistent fear of snakes by watching their scared mothers encounter a snake).
Now that we’ve moved out to the country, we encounter our own “Itsy” (and many for whom that name is woefully inadequate) all the time. (I do recommend this thing called the BugZooka… it does work really well, if you like catch-and-release). Itsy and I go way back, and not necessarily in a good way, although I always appreciate her beauty. But I still want to be warned before you text me her picture, dad.
This summer, one tenacious spider (pictured, top) built a web, over and over, in a windy area outside the kitchen, where we see it numerous times daily. The first few (ok, few hundred) times I nearly jumped out of my skin. When I remembered in time, I was very careful to breathe and compose myself before walking to the sink with my daughter, where I’d point out the spider cheerfully and sing (with all the hand movements) the requisite song. Before long she was signing the song herself. Next I noticed myself no longer jumping when I saw the spider.
THEN… one windy morning Itsy was gone. Gone!
I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief.
I was surprised and curious to feel a strange emotion… like MISSING. I missed her! Was she alright? Would she come back? (She was. She did).
With painful awareness that this is temporary, I often marvel that my daughter’s eyes are not only young… they are unconditioned. They don’t have a lot of pairings with events like scary movies about this deep primate fear, being bitten, or seeing spiders while a parent jumps and screams. They are fresh, curious, hopeful eyes.
Yesterday we chanced upon something rather larger than even the biggest spider. It was this old girl… fat and long, with ring upon ring adorning her useful brown rattle. Depending on my readers, maybe you’ll be happy that instead of grabbing a hoe, I called a guy I read about in my new community’s online forum… apparently this guy LOVES snakes. “ANY snake’s worth my time”, he told me as he jumped in his truck. 35 minutes later he had driven up to our homestead, hooked it and taken it. Now it’s in a quite different rattlesnake heaven than the kind I had sort of planned to send it… blissing out in a protected wilderness area up near Fort Collins, I’m told.
As he removed our snake into a large vented box and curiously counted the rings (while remarking on how huge it was), the guy’s face was composed; he exuded a strange calm excitement. Normally, the fear response to snakes and spiders is part of our biology. Evolutionary biology has several theories why it’s present even in infancy, and why it might have behooved our ancestral mothers to experience more arousal and get out of there to protect their young in the presence of these critters. I can’t help but wonder what this guy’s history is like. Why does he love something that most of us are scared of?
Kids with traumatic histories
If you’re an educator going back to school, many of your kids are coming in with an avoidance response, or a “get out of there!” escape response, ready to go. Some of them will use these responses in the most annoying ways, dropping all their work on the floor or crawling under desks when you announce the quiz. But some of them have a special background you can’t see. For some, they will use these “fear responses” when they encounter “triggers” that you and I do not think of as scary.
Why is that?
Well, the things that were there when they experienced really bad situations are now “paired”, living together in their past, the same way I smelled an old lady yesterday wearing my own granny’s soap and got emotional thinking about my dear departed loved ones. Or the same way you hear a certain song from your high school dance and think about that year, or that person, or that kiss.
And that’s not all. Psychology explains in anxiety journals why, if you’re a person with an intense “fear” or phobia of spiders, not only do you spot them more quickly and tend to see them where your peers might see other things, like mushrooms or flowers faster in the SAME PICTURE—but to you, they also appear BIGGER.
What can we do about it?
How can we help students show up for their education and get all the learning opportunities they can… even when the school, teachers, and peers accidentally give them “fear related” stimuli all day long? (While psychology explains partly WHY these pairings happen, behavior analysis does too, especially if you read some relational frame theory, learn about respondent conditioning, and take a long-term functional analytic approach. Behavior analysis also goes a long way in helping the helpers undo some of the damage, teaching kids to approach adults and “unpair” adult attention from it’s previously bad parts: if I’m a student who has been through neglect abuse, my teacher coming over to me to praise my “good behavior” might not be a welcome stimulus at first… and my teacher’s praise, as well-intentioned as it may be, might not work).
Cusp Emergence University has been hard at work getting the new online training course ready for educators, and behavior analysts who work in education. We hope to help you to start answering these questions for yourself and your students and teams. On Monday, September 30, our course “Education and Trauma-Informed Behavior Analysis” opens to a 7 day sale (use the code EDTIBA10 for 10 percent off this CEU opportunity). We’re providing BCBA’s and BCBA-D’s with 3.5 continuing education credits, and 3 of those are in ethics.
Sign up now!
06 Friday Sep 2019
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This summer has been a busy one for Cusp Emergence. Dr. Kolu taught Ethics to University of Colorado Denver students, jumped back into work doing consultation to support businesses and BCBA’s to reach their behavior analytic goals, trained CASA volunteers and more. Next month we will be training Friends of Broomfield and (finally!) putting the finishing touches on the Education and Trauma Informed Behavior Analysis course by Cusp Emergence University.
In the meantime, we just learned about a great low-cost resource for parents! Paradigm Behavior has all kinds of great parent-oriented supports that also help behavior analysts and caregivers. This Monday they are having a sale on an informative webinar! REGISTER HERE:
https://paradigmbehavior.com/play-registration
You know who would also benefit from this? Foster and adoptive parents, preschool teachers, and church nursery staff would find this super helpful. Our trauma informed teams also love learning how to enrich “time in” with kids who are just learning to have fun with adults in carefree ways after a difficult early life.
And coming up, this fall we’ll register for the APBA (Association for Professional Behavior Analysts) convention coming to Denver 2020, attend COABA (Colorado Association for Behavior Analysts) on November 2, sign up for 4CABA (Four Corners Association for Behavior Analysis) that meets in Colorado Springs April 2020, and submit proposals for the May 2020 workshops at ABAI (Association for Behavior Analysis International) in DC. We’ll be back shortly to tell you all about the new courses we’re offering this fall. Contact us today if you’d like Cusp Emergence to tailor an online workshop or training for your team. Hope to see you soon at a local event or meet you at one of our webinars (CEU’s offered at all of our events)!
29 Tuesday Jan 2019
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Beauty and the Bug (in which we briefly explore trauma and non-neurotypical people, ask how to raise tender-hearted children, and see a bug portrait in pointillism)
This is the 15th article in a series on Trauma-Informed Behavior Analysis by Dr. Teresa Camille Kolu, Ph.D., BCBA-D.
How do we teach others to tend the needs of those who cannot express them (or for that matter, appreciate the lesson of loss, the tenderness of pain, the beauty in brokenness)? And how common is trauma in individuals with serious developmental disabilities? Many of us have not considered the relevance, let alone the prevalence. Is this because we can’t see it, don’t hear about it, or think that it is out of our scope to address? These questions occurred to me this week as I thought about a participant from a recent training I provided, who asked if the model of trauma-informed behavior analysis (about which I’ve been writing here) applied to individuals with intellectual differences (it does!). Even to us professionals in the field of behavior analysis, the complexity of and subtlety of trauma and behavior remains elusive.
This week my family lost a wonderful man. He and his wife tended to the needs of others (often before their own). Also this week, my reason for taking a work break turned three months old, and Imagine! (a nonprofit agency in my area) had its annual celebration. As I mulled over these questions about trauma and differences and on raising good people, a therapist friend posted Imagine’s video of one of their clients. I realized I had not blogged before specifically about treating challenging behavior in someone who is differently abled. I need to do that, lest one more reader think that this approach (trauma informed behavior analysis) is mainly useful for “vocal” clients, or those who can easily articulate their pain and past. Today, Shelly and her zany personality inspired me to do this.
Individuals with developmental and intellectual differences express or show their history and needs in different ways, and sometimes caregivers overlook the contributions and signs of trauma, neglect or even ongoing abuse. When we (especially behavior analysts) overlook these, we are not addressing the real reasons for challenging behavior, and we might miss the importance of connecting the person with critical mental health resources, or of offering a chance to heal past wounds. We know about functional communication training. But do we fully address subtle needs to communicate pain—both emotional and physical? And when someone lives in an environment or is exposed repeatedly to a situation or person that is aversive (even abusive!) do we teach them to effectively advocate for removal and communicate their discomfort, or do we merely try to reduce the “challenging behavior” that often accompanies the terrible situation? Do we recognize the signs of abuse in individuals who have few skills to communicate?
Too many times, I took a case where team members requested decreases in “challenging behaviors” in someone with diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer, or Spina Bifida, before the team had recognized that the main thing challenging about the behavior was that it was going on because the individual had NO dignified way out. A conversation with a peer last week revealed that without training in these issues, a behavior therapist or even the entire team might treat “suicidal ideation” as a “behavior to be decreased” rather than a serious problem to be solved. (Even when this “behavior” is partly a habit the person has learned to use as a tool to produce needed attention from others, a whole behavior analysis of the situation would consider the risks and possible outcomes of addressing it in different ways, and document and address the related needs to understand and address why this was happening.)
As Shelly and her team alluded to in the video, the very state of not being able to communicate one’s needs and preferences can be traumatic in itself, and can lead one to develop desperate behaviors that just get called “behaviors for reduction” in the individualized behavior plans of thousands of clients. Today there are no more excuses for not helping someone access and master a communication system that works for them. To be sure, not everyone has access to a Smart Home residence decked out with all the tools we saw on the video- but have you seen the article on an accessible app developed by the brother of a man with autism in Turkey (so that he could communicate needs and gain leisure skills using only his smartphone)?
Tragically, many of my clients went through abuse and neglect and need someone to write careful and informed behavior plans that teach them skills they did not have at the time, like articulating emotional and physical pain, advocating for their needs, and requesting to be removed from a serious adverse situation. Just as important, these clients need an informed analyst who designs ways that these skills will persist when the client moves environments, as I found when a former client kept being exposed to new team after new team that didn’t read the plan and failed to recognize the communicative intent of the behaviors, and the medical component to the “challenges” the team demanded to be decreased. This calls for TIBA or trauma informed behavior analysis (if the team is not already using it).
So it’s not enough for our clients to learn these skills one time. The people who make up the audience, the environment, must respond enough to maintain them. If I ask for help and you respond no, why would I ask again? Remember the lessons of the family whose school team actually discouraged them from using “saying no” as a goal for their adolescent girl with autism, arguing that they didn’t have the resources to deal with her protesting all day long. Actually, the opposite is more likely to be true—that when our “no” is respected (listened to the first time), its use will be more limited to situations in which the person really “needs” it.
So back to my original questions. How do we raise little ones who are likely to grow up to appreciate and shape the voice of the voiceless, who honor the needs of people in ugly situations, who see the beauty in what others view as broken or beyond repair? How do we insure people will have the internal resources to value what isn’t immediately perceived as “valuable” by the culture? Maybe it starts when they are little, in modeling ways we can accord dignity to the frail, the elderly, the dirty. We cultivate tenderness as we show them we appreciate the spiderweb (AND the spider), the weed and its flower, the worm (thanks, mom and dad, Nicolette Sowder of wilderchild, and my very first client who taught me that not being able to talk is not the same as not having anything to say- click here to learn about Rett Syndrome).
Thanks to mom and dad, I still notice bugs and their beauty. I thought this one was wonderful when I looked closely, so I spent even more time to study and draw him. I thought he became even more beautiful as I continued to look. Maybe you can see his beauty too.
Colorado Potato Beetle by Camille Kolu (c) 2018
P.S. There is so much trauma in our schools today, whether you work with students who are “typically developing/ neurotypical” or those with intellectual, developmental and physical differences. Don’t miss the next course from Cusp Emergence University on trauma informed behavior analysis in the educational setting (complete with CEU’s including one for ethics).
Some references and resources
Articles on prevalence of assault and ACES in individuals with developmental differences:
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/14/2/87.short
http://www.cfp.ca/content/52/11/1410.short
Read about Imagine! Smart Homes: https://imaginecolorado.org/services/imagine-smarthomes
Read about the man who developed an app for his brother: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-47001068/how-brotherly-love-led-to-an-app-to-help-thousands-of-autistic-children
Get the full TIBA (trauma informed behavior analysis series): https://cuspemergence.com/tiba-series/
13 Tuesday Nov 2018
Need training for your team in trauma-informed behavior analysis? Cusp Emergence University has launched!
Come check out the site, sign up for one of Dr. Kolu’s courses, or just have a look around.
While we’re beta testing, save 15% on 3 CEU’s in a 2.5 hour continuing education course (Introduction to the Ethics of Trauma-Informed Behavior Analysis).
This course is for intermediate audiences interested in learning more about the ethics of trauma-informed behavior analysis, or using behavior analysis to provide responsible, evidence-based and sensitive support to individuals whose backgrounds include early or serious adverse experiences. Take this course to prepare your practice and team and plan for the increased risks associated with this population. BACB certificants receive your certificate upon completion of the course, which includes quiz questions to help keep you engaged. Course includes 2 ethics CEU’s.
DISCLAIMER: Dr. Camille Kolu of Cusp Emergence is a Behavior Analysis Certification Board (BACB) approved ACE provider. Advertisements for new continuing education opportunities (per the board requirements) will often be placed here. Check cuspemergenceuniversity.com for the full details, to enroll in courses, or to learn more about the continuing education opportunities provided. The BACB does not endorse any individual courses.
Come back to the tab Cusp Emergence University, or check out CuspEmergenceUniversity.com any time for updates on courses in development.
