Softness Before Speech: On Safety, Resonance, and the Violence of Forcing Language

Softness Before Speech: How Safety, Not Compliance, Gives Language Back Its Pulse

A lyrical essay on safety, language, and resistance—exploring how Delahooke’s “felt safety” and my own “softness” reveal what ABA cannot: that for gestalt minds, speech blooms only when the body is free to feel safe.

Prologue: Before Technique, the Tremor

“Over the years I have sat with parents, teachers, therapists, administrators … discussing how to help children with challenging behaviors. Inevitably, the well-intentioned professionals move the conversation quickly toward techniques, behavior plans, and reinforcement contingencies. But these plans should come only after we ask a fundamental and vital question: Are the child’s brain and body experiencing safety? And if not, how do we first help the child to feel safe?”
— Mona Delahooke, Beyond Behaviors (2019)

I read those lines and felt the hum of recognition—the same low signal that has carried through every work of mine, from Holistic Language Instruction to The Shape of Language. Delahooke writes from a clinical vantage, but the melody beneath her words is the one I know best. She speaks of safety as the precondition for connection; I speak of softness. Both of us, in our own dialects, are naming the same frequency—the state in which the body can risk communication, the nervous system can stop defending itself long enough to listen.

Before technique, there must be tremor. Before language, there must be safety. What Delahooke calls felt safety, I have lived as the delicate coherence that allows a gestalt language processor—someone like me—to access the bridge between resonance and articulation. When that bridge collapses under threat, the archive of language remains intact but unreachable, sealed behind static. The words don’t disappear; the system simply can’t find its way back to them.

For me, that softness was not aesthetic—it was the technology of survival. When I was met with gentleness, language bloomed. When I was met with control, it receded. My nervous system is both the instrument and the player; the more it’s forced to perform, the less it can create. Delahooke’s insight is simple, but it overturns a century of behavioural conditioning: connection cannot be engineered through control. It can only be cultivated through safety.

The False Order of Technique

Professionals, Delahooke observes, rush to solutions—techniques, behaviour plans, contingencies—as though distress were a puzzle to be solved rather than a signal to be understood. I have sat in those rooms too: the laminated charts, the talk of “replacement behaviours,” the confident language of compliance. The system loves its checklists; it loves the illusion that a child’s complexity can be managed through data.

I remember my first encounter with ABA-Verbal Behaviour, though at the time I didn’t know its name. I was institutionalised, medicated, and terrified—my language locked somewhere beneath the static. Every word was a calculation, every silence a risk. It took more than a month to learn the right string of English phrases that would open the door to my own release. The goal, as they saw it, was simple: get me to speak. But the language they demanded was not mine. It was performance, mimicry shaped by fear—words stripped of resonance, gestures severed from feeling. My nervous system was never asked what it needed, only what it could produce under pressure.

For gestalt processors, that logic is violence in miniature. It demands speech before safety, output before attunement, sequence before resonance. It forces a nervous system already under strain to perform disconnection as if it were progress. What Delahooke names as felt safety—and I name as softness—is treated as distraction, indulgence, or non-compliance. Yet without that softness, the bridge between feeling and language simply cannot hold.

The Physiology of Softness

Polyvagal theory gives us a vocabulary for what our bodies already know. Safety is not a cognitive decision but a physiological state. When the nervous system senses threat—through tone, demand, unpredictability—it retreats into protection. The cortex quiets; the body narrows its focus to survival. Speech, memory, and creativity dim. When safety returns, so does language.

For a GLP, this oscillation is profound. Our language is stored as living memory—phrases, tones, and cadences bound to emotion. To access that memory, the nervous system must feel regulated enough to reopen the archive. Softness, then, is not indulgence. It is method. It is the means by which access to stored language becomes possible again. When I soften—when I am met with warmth rather than analysis—my scripts return not as rote repetition but as resonance, threads I can weave anew.

In this way, softness is a form of literacy. It’s how we read the world through tone before text. Behaviourism flattens this process into compliance, but the nervous system knows better. Safety is syntax. Regulation is grammar. Without them, language disintegrates into noise.

Prizant’s Inheritance — From Echo to Coherence

When Barry Prizant published his 1983 paper Language Acquisition and Communicative Behavior in Autism: Toward an Understanding of the Whole of It, he, too, was listening for softness. He recognised that what others dismissed as “meaningless repetition” was often an intelligent echo—a remembered phrase serving as self-regulation, communication, or rehearsal. He turned the lens from pathology to process, from behaviour to being.

Prizant refused to mistake form for intent. His insight—that gestalt utterances carry meaning in another key—parallels Delahooke’s insistence that safety underpins all behaviour. Both understood that expression cannot be coerced. Where Prizant found coherence in the echo, Delahooke finds safety in the silence. They are speaking the same language across disciplines: that human development is relational, not mechanical.

Their work points toward an ethics of listening—a refusal to demand fluency before belonging. It reminds us that language pathways are not hierarchies but ecologies. The analytic and the gestalt are not stages to be mastered in sequence but parallel routes toward meaning. Behaviourism, by contrast, can only imagine ascent: the staircase, the ladder, the linear march from “non-vocal” to “vocal.” It cannot fathom the spiral.

The Unfit Frame of ABA-Verbal Behaviour

ABA-Verbal Behaviour represents the full entrenchment of analytic supremacy. It is built on the Skinnerian fantasy that language can be reduced to stimulus, response, and reinforcement. But language is not a chain—it is a field. It arises not from control but from attunement, not from reward but from relation.

In recent years, behaviourist scholars have turned their attention to GLP and Natural Language Acquisition (NLA), not to understand them but to delegitimise them. Papers such as Hutchins, Knox, & Fletcher (2024) and Beals (2024)—each the subject of a deep dive here on the AutSide—claim that GLP lacks empirical foundation, that its stages are “unsupported by evidence,” and that it risks misleading practitioners. Others, in Reflections on Gestalt Language Processing (Hutchins et al., 2024), warn of “ideas and clinical strategies that lack theoretical and empirical support.”

Yet these critiques are rhetorical, not scientific. They do not disprove the existence of gestalt language pathways; they merely declare them implausible. Their evidence is absence: “no gold-standard trials exist.” But of course they don’t. To impose a randomised controlled trial upon developing GLP speakers would itself be an act of harm—a denial of the safety that language requires to flourish. They conflate ethics with inadequacy, pretending that the absence of unethical data is evidence of nonexistence.

This is how epistemic violence disguises itself as rigour. The behaviourist can only validate what can be measured under their own instruments; what resists measurement is dismissed as myth. Softness, resonance, and relational attunement are inconvenient variables—they cannot be tokened, charted, or reinforced. So the denial persists: if it cannot be quantified, it is not real.

But lived bodies tell another story. We—the gestalt processors, the pattern-thinkers, the children who spoke in scripts before we were taught to break them apart—exist. Our experiences do not vanish because the data refuse to look. The gold standard of behaviourism is, in truth, pyrite: gleaming with certainty but empty of life.

ABA-VB’s insistence on observable proof ignores the most observable truth of all: that a child forced to perform disconnection will eventually stop trusting their own signal. The harm is subtle but cumulative. It teaches the body that resonance is wrong, that communication must sound like compliance to be valid. It replaces curiosity with correction, safety with surveillance. It confuses stillness for success.

Softness as Method

Softness, by contrast, begins where control ends. It asks not what can we make this child do, but what conditions must exist for this child’s voice to emerge? It moves at the pace of regulation, not reward. It is disciplined listening—the kind that slows time until meaning can breathe.

In my classroom, I have seen what happens when we create that kind of space. A student who had spoken only in scripts began writing stories once we shifted from data collection to co-regulation. Another, long considered “non-verbal,” began humming her sentences before speaking them. There were no token boards, no reinforcers—only safety, rhythm, and trust. The language that emerged was not trained; it was remembered.

Softness does not oppose rigour. It is rigour—the rigorous practice of attunement. It demands that we remain present even when progress cannot be charted, that we trust the process of the nervous system unfolding in its own time. To work in softness is to honour process over product, relationship over outcome. It is to believe that connection, not compliance, is the measure of success.

A Different Measure of Progress

Behavioural systems worship the quantifiable: number of utterances, rate of initiation, reduction of “problem behaviours.” But for GLPs, the most meaningful growth happens in subtler registers—eye contact softening, tone shifting, breathing synchronising. These are the preludes to language, the body’s way of saying, I am ready to connect again.

Progress, in this frame, is coherence. It is the return of resonance after rupture. A child scripting from safety is already fluent—they are speaking in the key of trust. What matters is not the novelty of the words but the aliveness of the rhythm behind them.

In education, this calls for a new literacy standard—one that values pattern, memory, and emotional cadence as legitimate forms of language development. To teach gestalt processors through analytic drill is to teach them away from themselves. To teach through softness is to meet them where language actually lives—in the nervous system, in the breath, in the shared hum between bodies.

Epilogue — The Soft Revolution

Delahooke’s question—“Are the child’s brain and body experiencing safety?”—remains the axis around which all authentic pedagogy must turn. For gestalt minds, safety is language. Without it, words are merely sound.

I think of Prizant listening to the child who echoed back entire television shows, refusing to call it nonsense. I think of Delahooke listening beneath behaviour to the physiology of fear. And I think of myself—learning to speak again through writing, through rhythm, through the long slow cultivation of softness.

The behaviourists still publish their rebuttals. They caution the public against “unverified methods,” as though kindness were a pseudoscience. They warn that there is no evidence for GLP, as though existence itself required permission. But we are here—gestalt thinkers, pattern readers, resonance keepers—speaking softly into a world that still confuses volume with truth.

Softness is not the absence of strength. It is strength remembered in its natural form: relational, rhythmic, alive. It is the discipline of listening to what cannot be coerced.

The revolution will not be televised or peer-reviewed. It will happen quietly, in classrooms and therapy rooms and homes where someone finally chooses to wait—to breathe—to listen.

Because for us, language has never been a product. It has always been a pulse. And the world will only hear it when it learns to soften enough to listen.