Nothing Prepared Me For This
Honestly, moving abroad was never part of the plan. Not even close. I always imagined my career unfolding the way it started, rooted in the United States, in a field I had spent over a decade building my understanding of. Then I met my husband, who had been living and working in the UAE for seven years before starting his own business here. We got married in the US and made the move together. Marriage brought me here, and I have not looked back.
But starting over professionally? That was a different story.
Before we even landed, I spent months trying to get ahead of it. I researched the ABA landscape in the UAE, talked to BCBAs already working here, and did everything I could to prepare. I had a job lined up before we arrived, which felt like a win. I let myself think it might be easier than people warned me it would be.
But then I got here.
Nothing Prepared Me For This
The information came so fast and from every direction. The alphabet soup of governing bodies I had never heard of: the DOH, ADEK, DHA, MOE, and others. I also learned that the QABA exists here, which is essentially the equivalent of the BACB. That was its own learning curve. And then there were the schools, each one operating differently with its own structure and expectations in ways I had never encountered back in the States.
And I had to absorb it all while doing the actual work.
Rebuilding a Practice
One of the first things I noticed was the clinical freedom. In the States, so much of what a BCBA can do is shaped by what an insurance company will approve. Reauthorizations, assessments, service hours, productivity hours — all of it filtered through a payer. Here I could use my clinical judgment without that interference. It was freeing and honestly a little disorienting at first. I had spent years operating within those constraints and suddenly they were gone.
Then the real shock hit. In the States, ABA is medical. Insurance covers it and while that system has its own frustrations, the baseline understanding is clear: ABA belongs in the medical space. Here, insurance does not cover ABA. Families are paying entirely out of pocket. And beyond the funding piece, some people perceive ABA as falling under mental health, which it does not. It is a science and that distinction matters more than people might realize. Navigating that gap was exhausting. It meant constantly having to reorient myself and figure out how to operate within a system that understood ABA differently than everything I had been trained in.
What made it all harder was that there was no clean adjustment period. I had to play the catch-up game. What I knew going in only got me so far and the rest I had to learn on the ground. There was no single moment where everything clicked into place. I just kept moving and eventually I got there.
"A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying." — B.F. Skinner
What It Taught Me
The more time I spent in the UAE talking to BCBAs, professionals, and families, the more I realized the same thing kept coming up. ABA is still being recognized here. Many people have never heard of it. Others know it only through a narrow lens tied exclusively to autism without any awareness of the broader science behind it. That gap was hard to ignore.
The more I sat with that, the more something shifted in me. Delivering services was only part of the work. The other part was helping people understand what ABA actually is and what it can offer — not just in a clinical setting but in everyday life. ABA is not just a clinical tool. It is a science that explains behavior and it applies far beyond any one diagnosis.
That realization is what pushed me to start talking about it, because someone has to. I found that I genuinely love being in those conversations, talking about what this field is, why it matters, and what it can do for people. The need for education and awareness here made it clear that this is something I want to keep doing.
Starting over was hard. I would not sugarcoat it. But it reminded me of something I have always believed: all behavior tells a story. This chapter of mine just happened to be one of the harder ones to read.