Part 2: Hope, Motivation & ASD

by Julie Gordon, MSW, LCSW

“It’s been so long since I have seen you! Let’s go have coffee together tomorrow and catch up. And if you talk to me for 20 minutes, then you can take a break and scroll Instagram for a while by yourself,” said no friend ever. If we want to increase the likelihood that we will work toward meeting our goals, we need our experience to be reinforced, internally or externally. When we are positively reinforced, something is added to our experience to make us want to keep working toward our goal. When we are negatively reinforced, something is taken away from our experience to make us want to keep working toward our goal.

Why do we focus so much on external reinforcement to motivate in the field of ASD and special education?

Working for tokens, electronics, money, “being in the green” and even a vague “good job” can be a quick and effective way to provide reinforcement for specific types of remediation goals. These goals are generally related to sustaining attention for instruction and task completion.

While external reinforcement is effective for the short term, it may not be lasting for the long term. It can also have unintended consequences: passivity without self-advocacy, words without meaning, performance without comprehension and compliance without thought.

When we are internally or automatically reinforced, the motivation to do something can come from basic human needs like eating to satisfy hunger or from psychological needs like learning to cook for independence. Human beings have an innate desire for autonomy, to relate to others and for the personal joy of overcoming a challenge. This drive gives us a reason to “bother” when faced with novel and tough experiences because we know that the experience will lead to accomplishing our end goals and desires. This is the heart of intrinsic motivation.

If we reinforce social, emotional and cognitive goals with tangible items, the external reinforcement ceases to become effective, eventually losing its inherent value to the individual. In this case, the individual may only engage for the external reward and not because they desire to or enjoy it. A greater therapeutic concern is when the reinforcement borders on bribery. If your friend bribed you to go out for coffee, the experience will neither be positive nor meaningful.

Therefore, when the treatment goals are related to executive functioning for problem-solving, social communication, informational processing and coping skills, internal reinforcement would be the natural, logical consequence. While we sometimes seek outside appraisal on many things, our healthy sense of self-worth comes from our own experiences. Intrinsic motivation is necessary for our well-being, skills generalization and lasting outcomes on goals.

As we learn to navigate the world, we are in a constant state of trial and error. We explore this first with our parents and then try to elaborate on what we learned in our own way. We seek to find what works for us and what doesn’t. We are not trained with a set of right and wrong answers; life is too complicated and nuanced to teach every possible scenario. Therapy is only as good as its ability to empower an individual with the tools they need to master a foundation of dynamic skills that can carry them through most situations.

Developing the motivation to try new things, meet new people and take on obstacles requires feelings of competence that can only come from experiences of personal success or overcoming failure. Further, those experiences need to be reinforced intrinsically and encoded into our episodic memory so that we are more confident in taking on opportunities as they come no matter the setting, person or topic.

There is hope. With the help of a qualified clinician, create small developmental goals that increase competence in dynamic, executive functioning skills instead of focusing on passive compliance within static activities. Then, the clinician can help adjust reinforcement schedules from external to internal. The individual with ASD will gain broader skills that are naturally generalized because the personal experiences are internalized, recalled and applied in a meaningful way. When you feel competent, you are motivated to be better from within.

Julie Gordon has been in the field of ASD for 19 years. She is the owner of The Hope Source and Heart SOS as well as the founder of Dynamic Minds Academy.

Heart of the Spectrum Outpatient Services Coming to Indianapolis & Terre Haute asdheartsos.com