How Positive Behaviour Support silences and occupies the body
In this ‘AGAINST PBS & ABA’ campaign blog, NdC’s Development Lead, Kay Louise Aldred, explores how behaviourist approaches like PBS can become a system that silences and occupies the body, enforcing compliance over wellbeing.
To say that the body is silenced and occupied is to describe how systems of power and control, override or erase a person's natural, intuitive, and embodied ways of being and knowing. Especially when those ways fall outside of what's considered ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ by dominant cultural standards.
Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) is widely marketed as an evidence-based approach to supporting people, particularly Autistic people or those with a learning disability. But beneath its surface, PBS often functions as a tool of control and possession, one that polices and suppresses the natural rhythms, impulses, and needs of Neurodivergent and disabled bodies. Rather than offering true support, PBS can become a system that silences and occupies the body, enforcing compliance over wellbeing.
Suppressing natural movement and biological needs
Many PBS frameworks aim to ‘reduce’ behaviours labelled disruptive or ‘challenging’, such as rocking, hand-flapping, spinning, or pacing. These are often defined as ‘maladaptive’ or ‘difficult’ rather than understood as critical self-regulatory behaviours that help Neurodivergent people manage overwhelming environments. These movements, known as stimming, are not arbitrary. They serve a biological and emotional function, helping people calm their nervous systems, focus, and self-soothe.
PBS plans frequently target these natural responses for elimination without acknowledging what happens when a body is prevented from meeting its own sensory or movement needs. When PBS suppresses stimming or other movement-based coping mechanisms, it denies people access to their tools for emotional regulation, imposing neurotypical standards of external ‘acceptable’ behaviour.
Silencing the body
Silencing the body means discouraging or preventing someone from expressing their physical, emotional, or sensory needs through their body. This can happen in subtle or overt ways:
Telling someone not to stim (e.g., flap, rock, spin), even though it helps them self-regulate
Ignoring or dismissing pain, fatigue, or emotional distress because it’s not communicated in neurotypical ways
Punishing or correcting natural and adaptive fight-or-flight survival responses like leaving a room, crying, or resisting touch
When the body is silenced, people are taught, explicitly or implicitly, that their instincts can’t be trusted and that their physical experiences and ways of communicating are wrong. This creates internalised shame and gaslighting and a disconnect from self.
Occupying the body
Occupation of the body means embedding externally decided, imposed and controlled behavioural norms to reshape how a person moves, expresses, and exists in their own body. In brief, it means controlling how they interact in the world. This can happen by:
Replacing a person’s natural bodily rhythms and cycles with imposed routines or behavioural expectations
Valuing compliance over consent or comfort
Using behavioural systems like PBS to enforce norms of stillness, obedience, and self-abandonment
Framing neurotypical behaviour as the ideal and forcing neurodivergent people to mask or change their natural ways of moving, sensing, or responding
To occupy the body is to turn it into a project to be controlled, something to be managed and manipulated, rather than respected.
Together, silencing and occupying the body disconnect people from their instinct and authentic essence, reinforce power imbalances, and erase the deep wisdom and intelligence of embodied experience, especially in Neurodivergent and disabled communities.
Silencing Intuition, Instinct, and Interoception
PBS can also override vital internal signals like hunger, thirst, pain, and fatigue, signals governed by interoception (the sense of the body's internal state). For Neurodivergent individuals, these cues may already be muted, misinterpreted, or delayed. When a behaviour support plan dismisses a person’s ‘non-compliance’ with an activity, without recognising the potential interoceptive cause, like a headache or other physical pain, dehydration or hunger, or emotional overwhelm, it teaches people to ignore their bodies.
Worse still, PBS can encourage staff to redirect or discourage instinctive responses like withdrawal, avoidance, or refusal, responses that may stem from a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn nervous system survival response. When someone tries to escape a situation because they feel unsafe or out of their capacity, that is not a ‘challenging behaviour’, it is a fundamental act of self-protection. PBS often reframes this as a problem to be corrected, rather than a message to be heard and understood.
Denying Sensory Needs: Vestibular and Proprioceptive Systems
Our bodies are constantly processing sensory information, including through the vestibular (balance and spatial orientation) and proprioceptive (body awareness) systems. Neurodivergent individuals often seek movement like spinning, jumping, or pressure-based activities to meet these sensory needs. But PBS plans may limit or offer conditional access to these experiences, treating them as ‘reinforcers’, rewards that must be earned, rather than essential components of wellbeing.
This framing can turn natural sensory seeking into currency, implying that one must behave a certain way to ‘deserve’ access to one’s own body. Imagine being denied the ability to stretch or move in a certain way unless you followed an imposed script of ‘appropriate’ behaviour. Over time, this denial of an individual’s autonomy trains them to mistrust their sensory instincts and eventually to dissociate.
From Support to Surveillance
While PBS may not be introduced with the following intention, in practice, it can resemble a form of behavioural surveillance that prioritises conformity over autonomy. PBS teaches people to perform a prescribed normality, often at the cost of suppressing vital forms of expression, communication, and self-regulation. In doing so, it silences the body, erasing the wisdom of instinct, the necessity of movement, and the right to self-determine needs and care.
Moving Toward Liberation-Based Support
We need to ask: who defines ‘normality’, and which behaviours and bodies are acceptable? Who benefits from a system that rewards uniformity and values conformity?
If support is to be truly person-centred, it must honour the full humanity of all people, including Neurodivergent people, and their movement, impulses, and embodied ways of being in the world.
Liberatory alternatives to PBS focus on co-regulation, meeting embodied and sensory needs, trauma-informed care, and deep listening. They validate the diverse ways humans know and express, including embodied ways of knowing and expressing, affirming that everybody has a wise ‘knowing’ body and that the goal of support is not control, but connection, safety, and respect.
