Sunday Musings: On Asymmetry, Empathy, and the Curious Absence of Autistic Voice in ABA Research
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years reading about ABA—too much, probably. Not because I’m a convert (I’m not), and not because I think the literature will suddenly wake up and recognise its gaps (though I do check, occasionally, just in case). I read because I’m autistic, I’m an IEP case manager, and I’m tired of being told that the interventions imposed on people like me are evidence-based when the “evidence” seems to be gathered without us in the room.
Recently, I ran a search through ConsensusGPT—a tool that aggregates and summarises research findings across disciplines. I was curious: are there any ABA studies that take seriously the double empathy problem? That groundbreaking, deceptively simple idea: that autistic and non-autistic people struggle to understand one another not because one group lacks empathy, but because we’re speaking across fundamentally different relational logics. That mutual misattunement is the root—not a one-sided deficit. I wanted to see if the field of ABA had reckoned with this at all.
The answer, to my lack of surprise, was no.
There were papers on “compassionate ABA.” On more respectful, more individualised, more “trauma-informed” approaches. Some even tiptoed into the territory of lived experience—tentative nods to neurodiversity here and there. But not one of the studies cited the double empathy problem directly. Not one examined the role that neurotype plays in the practitioner-client relationship. Not one asked what it means for a largely neurotypical field to decide what counts as “appropriate” communication for autistic people.
And that absence is... telling.
It’s easy, sometimes, to gloss over absences in academic work. To assume they’re just oversights, or the result of disciplinary silos, or the slow pace of publishing. But this? This feels more structural. Because when the foundational philosophy of a field is built on shaping observable behaviour rather than understanding internal experience, the question of mutual understanding is always going to be inconvenient.
And so it is mostly ignored.
I don’t write this to accuse individual ABA practitioners of malice. I know many who care deeply. I work alongside some who are painfully aware of the systems they’re caught in. Especially in Title 1 schools like mine, where care and survival are often indistinguishable, the behaviourists from the community aren’t trying to erase their students—they’re trying to help them live. When a child flaps in front of a police officer, or scripts in a store aisle, or freezes in the face of a shouted question, the stakes are not academic. They are existential.
In those moments, the question isn’t “Should this child stim?” It’s “Will they survive this encounter?”
I’ve seen ABA used as armour—as strategy. Not to make someone more “normal,” but to help them pass through a hostile world mostly unscathed. There’s nothing shameful in that. The shame lies in the necessity of it.
But that isn’t what the literature says. Not really. The literature talks about reducing problematic behaviours, increasing communication, improving outcomes. It uses the language of objectivity and clinical detachment, all whilst ignoring the central asymmetry: that the people designing and delivering these interventions do not, by and large, share the experience of the people receiving them. And they do not appear especially interested in why that matters.
It would be one thing if this were just a technical issue. But it isn’t. It’s relational. It’s cultural. It’s epistemic.
Because if we took the double empathy problem seriously—if we accepted that autistic people have a valid and coherent way of experiencing and communicating—then we’d have to admit that many of the “target behaviours” ABA aims to extinguish are not dysfunctional. They are simply misunderstood. Misread through a neurotypical lens, then judged accordingly.
The flapping. The echolalia. The avoidance of eye contact. The monotone voice. The insistence on scripts. The silence.
To us, these are often methods of regulation, of sense-making, of self-preservation. But to the ABA practitioner operating without that framework, they become checkboxes on a treatment plan. Behaviours to reduce. Goals to meet. Evidence of “progress” when they vanish.
And so we disappear a little, too.
It would be dishonest to pretend that autistic researchers haven’t been saying this for years. We have. The neurodiversity movement has produced an enormous body of work interrogating the assumptions that undergird behavioural intervention. We’ve written about trauma. About masking. About internalised ableism. About the long-term consequences of being told that our natural modes of communication are “wrong.”
But somehow, none of that seems to make it into the mainstream ABA journals. Or into the training modules. Or into the self-congratulatory conference keynotes celebrating data-driven success.
Why?
Is it because our writing isn’t “rigorous” enough? (Read the footnotes. We’re holding our own.)
Is it because we’re “too emotional?” (Emotion is not a disqualifier. It’s data.)
Is it because we are not “objective?” (No one is.)
Or is it something else?
Maybe it’s about power.
Because to accept that autistic people are reliable narrators of our own experience would mean giving up control over the narrative. It would mean allowing ourselves to be seen not as subjects of intervention, but as partners in care—or better yet, as agents of our own lives.
And that threatens the structure of a field premised on doing to, not being with.
The most generous reading of all this is that the gap exists because paradigms shift slowly. Because behaviourism has held sway for a long time. Because training takes time to update, and research funding doesn’t reward relational nuance.
But I’m not sure generosity is the only lens. Because it’s not just that the double empathy problem hasn’t been integrated. It’s that the field doesn’t seem curious about it. Doesn’t seem to feel its absence.
And that lack of curiosity—that disinterest in the perspectives of those most impacted—is what I find hardest to sit with.
Because autistic people are curious. We are asking hard questions. We are writing long, nuanced essays. We are speaking out at great personal cost. And yet we remain largely outside the gates, peering in, while decisions are made about our lives by people who do not understand our ways of being, and do not seem to want to.
I’m not writing this to fix anything. Not today. I’m not proposing a new model, or a policy recommendation, or a roadmap for change. Sometimes, naming the shape of the silence is enough.
Sometimes, it’s just about asking:
Why does a field that claims to care about communication seem so uninterested in the foundational problem of mutual miscommunication?
Why do autistic voices remain peripheral in conversations about our own care?
Why is behaviour still being treated as something to correct, rather than something to understand?
Why is survival still conditional on suppression?
Why do I keep reading, hoping to find the words that tell me I’ve been heard—and instead find silence in their place?
I don’t know the answers. But I think the asking matters.
And I’ll keep asking.
Even if no one responds.
Yet.