For a few months now most of Tony’s community safety walks have been handled entirely by me acting as his habilitative therapist. Using differential reinforcement and a parental enforced consequence for pushing (the non clocked in parent would tell Tony that any pushing would result in him loosing kindle privileges for 2 minutes when we got home) pushing has been entirely eliminated for walks with me over the past two months. Some walks we are changing up to 100% of the route with a combination of changes. We are also making novel route combinations where we splice together multiple routes, and we are starting to give denials for higher value items to Tony. As his more concerning behaviors have continued to decrease on these walks and his tolerance for changes has increased, I have also dramatically faded reinforcement for directional changes to where only two reinforcers are being given for this randomly per walk.
Today was our first opportunity in nearly 4 months to do a community safety walk overlap with RBT M (where I am accompanying as the parental support and not being paid as a therapist), one of Tony’s ABA RBT’s. We have done three overlapping walks with Casandra in the last couple of weeks, and while Tony has generalized cooperation with the level of changes he will make for me and the same level of behavior reduction with her, I wasn’t sure if he would do the same for RBT M, with whom he has worked for slightly less than a year.
By and large he did.
We changed 95% of the route. He was given two denials, one of medium value (where he was told we couldn’t continue walking after he asked to do so) and one of high value. He tried to push through me on the medium value denial, but calmly accepted when RBT M told him he couldn’t walk around a certain park he likes to walk around twice on both directions for this route. Six months ago, a denial for that would have resulted in multiple minutes of sustained pushing and screaming. No pushing, no fuss- literally my heart sings. He tried to run off on the first change RBT M asked him to do after the first denial he was given where he was told we had to turn around and walk home…but other than that he cooperated with her fully and only two changes were randomly reinforced.
Me trying to get a picture of him and I both…he kept trying to move out of the frame, and gave a verbal yeah that he was trying to do that, but then he decided he’d just go for sticking out his tongue. Truly it is a joy to have more of these light hearted moments with him on these walks.
Because for the last two months when I walk with him there hasn’t been any pushing, sometimes I will put an earbud into one ear only so that I can listen to music on our walks. This has become a way I help nurture myself along this journey. Some of my music choices might not be yours…I like a lot of things. But, these are some of my favorite albums or songs that I have been listening to on these walks the last few months:
Ghost’s Impera…while I like the whole album, “Darkness at the heart of My Love” is my favorite song from the album. A note to my religious friends, this band will upset you…but I find their message resonates with me, as a person who has a less comfortable relationship with organized religion.
Doja Cat’s Planet Her…I love this album, but I literally can’t sing some of these songs out loud because of a certain word usage.
Motionless in White, Scoring the End of the World…but “Masterpiece” is my favorite song off of this one.
Sometimes I just pick a band (like Def Leppard, Pale Waves, 5 Seconds of Summer, Thirty Seconds to Mars, etc) or a song I really like and let Spotify’s algorithm just run with it and surprise me. I was listening to Spotify’s auto generated Def Leppard mix the other night, and it threw in Billy Squire’s “The Stroke” and it just made my night, because I haven’t thought of that song in a while but I totally love it! Some songs lately I’ve been liking to start off with are Latto’s “Big Energy” (the Mariah re-mix because definitely her inclusion in that makes it even better), Stela Cole’s “I Shot Cupid” or “No Man’s Land,” Selena Gomez’s “Wolves,” Sia’s “Unstoppable,” Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” (don’t judge!), and Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie.” … and I could go on but I need to wrap this up.
I do know. I’m musically all over the place when it comes to my tastes, but I like what I like and sometimes while my heart may be singing about the progress, it helps my soul to take a few deep breaths that I can listen to someone else sing for a bit on some of these walks now.
