05/31/2026
One of the hardest things about being autistic is that once I see a pattern, I can't unsee it, especially when it comes to social justice issues.
Over time, I've realized that one of the hardest parts of advocacy is being willing to say out loud what many people sense but are afraid to acknowledge.
I think we need to get better at holding more than one truth at the same time.
I believe our current systems often traumatize children and families. I believe disabled children are harmed every day in educational, therapeutic, medical, and behavioral settings, often by people who genuinely care about them. I believe disabled people are routinely denied autonomy, communication, dignity, self-determination, and meaningful choice in the name of helping them. And I also believe that many of the professionals working within these systems are kind, compassionate people doing the best they can within structures they did not create.
Both things can be true.
But kindness alone is not enough.
One of the conclusions I have come to after years of working in education, special education, early intervention, advocacy, and disability spaces is that the problem is not simply that these systems are broken. Increasingly, I believe they are producing outcomes that are entirely predictable given the values they were built upon.
When a system prioritizes compliance over autonomy, behavior over communication, productivity over humanity, and institutional needs over individual needs, the outcomes we see should not surprise us. They are predictable consequences of the values embedded within the system itself.
This is part of why I believe we need to have more honest conversations about ABA. I think it is fair to ask why ABA is routinely referred to as a therapy when, at its core, it is a behavior intervention. I also think it is fair to ask why one approach has received such enormous amounts of funding, research dollars, insurance coverage, professional influence, and institutional support while developmental, relational, communication-centered approaches remain difficult or impossible for many families to access.
At the same time, I understand exactly why many families pursue ABA services.
In many communities, there are no meaningful alternatives. There may be no DIRFloortime® providers, no neurodiversity-affirming supports, no parent coaching, no developmental approaches, and no communication-centered interventions available. Even when alternatives do exist, they are often inaccessible financially because insurance does not cover them.
Families are frequently forced to choose from the options that exist, not the options they wish existed.
That reality did not emerge by accident.
Entire systems of funding, insurance reimbursement, research priorities, professional training programs, and public policy have been built around a single model.
And this is where I find myself asking a question that no one seems particularly interested in answering.
As a teacher—before I was an advocate, before I was a practitioner, before I started Rooted Beginnings—I was taught that all children learn differently.
We know this. We teach this. We train educators on this. We build entire educational frameworks around this understanding.
We recognize that children have different strengths, different interests, different communication styles, different sensory profiles, different ways of processing information, and different pathways to learning. We acknowledge this as a fundamental truth in education.
Yet somehow, when it comes to autistic children, we are often told that there is one intervention that should serve as the primary pathway to support.
If children learn differently, communicate differently, experience the world differently, and develop differently, why would we expect one intervention to meet the needs of every child?
More importantly, why have we built an entire system that functions as though it does?
That question is not an attack on individual practitioners. It is a question about systems. It is a question about funding. It is a question about power. It is a question about who gets to decide what counts as support and which approaches receive legitimacy, resources, insurance coverage, research dollars, and institutional backing.
Because when families are repeatedly told there is only one evidence-based option, I don't just wonder about the intervention itself. I wonder about all of the approaches, perspectives, and supports that never received the same opportunity to be funded, studied, promoted, reimbursed, or made accessible in the first place.
And I wonder what true choice would look like if families actually had access to a wide range of supports instead of being funneled toward a single industry.
When one approach receives the overwhelming majority of resources for decades, it becomes increasingly difficult for anything else to grow. Families are then told they have a choice, but a choice between one funded option and a dozen inaccessible ones is not meaningful choice at all.
Perhaps the hardest truth to hold is that harmful systems often depend on good people.
They depend on kind people, compassionate people, and people who genuinely want to help.
In fact, those people are often what allow harmful systems to continue functioning because their presence makes the system appear more humane than it actually is.
I know this because I lived it.
I spent years working inside systems where I watched professionals be pressured into practices that did not align with their values. I watched people compromise their integrity because they needed a paycheck, health insurance, supervision hours, job security, or simply because they could not imagine another way. I watched people recognize that something was wrong while feeling powerless to challenge it because the cost of speaking up felt too high.
And I understand that. We are all navigating systems that make survival difficult. Capitalism is unforgiving. Most people are simply trying to make it through the day.
But I also believe there comes a point where we have to decide what we are willing to participate in, what we are willing to normalize, and what we are willing to tolerate.
For me, there came a point where I could no longer reconcile what I was witnessing with my own values. I could no longer participate in systems that asked me to prioritize compliance over connection, behavior over communication, and institutional convenience over human dignity.
Leaving was not easy. It was not financially smart. It was not comfortable. It came with significant personal and professional costs.
But my integrity required it.
This is also one of the reasons I often find myself isolated from agencies, professional circles, organizations, and even some online communities.
Once you begin questioning the foundation itself rather than individual actors, people become uncomfortable. It is much easier to believe the problem is a few bad teachers, a few bad therapists, a few bad administrators, or a few bad districts.
It is much harder to consider the possibility that the outcomes we see are not the result of a handful of individuals failing, but the predictable result of systems functioning exactly as they were designed to function.
When you raise those questions, people often hear personal criticism. They hear blame. They hear judgment.
But my goal has never been to assign individual blame.
My goal has always been to ask larger questions about power, money, access, whose voices are centered, whose voices are ignored, and what happens when maintaining a system becomes more important than protecting the people within it.
The truth is that speaking this way has come with consequences. I have lost professional relationships. I have lost opportunities. I have lost access to spaces where it would have been easier to stay quiet.
But I reached a point where my commitment to disabled children, disabled adults, and the truth as I understand it became more important than belonging to spaces that required my silence.
Children are living with the consequences of these systems right now. Families are living with the consequences of these systems right now. Disabled adults are living with the consequences of these systems right now.
They deserve more than good intentions.
They deserve honesty. They deserve dignity. They deserve meaningful choice. They deserve autonomy. And they deserve people who are willing to imagine something beyond the systems we inherited.
Holding more than one truth means acknowledging that many people inside these systems genuinely care. It also means recognizing that caring, by itself, does not create change.
Change requires us to look honestly at the structures around us, even when doing so is uncomfortable.
For me, that discomfort is worth it because the people most impacted by these systems do not have the luxury of looking away.
