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2:39am June 5, 2012

fuckyeahstimming:

TheTayTalks - The REAL reason WHY aspies stim

This is a very different explanation of stimming than I’ve seen elsewhere. All this stuff about the ‘autistic world’ is interesting, but it’s not really something I can relate to. The ‘zoning out’ sounds like depersonalisation, and I am definitely learning that a lack of stimming can lead to that. 

That’s not why I stim either. But I’ve talked to both autistic and nonautistic people with that kind of inner world. I tried really hard at one point to build one and escape into it, but it didn’t work very well. 

As far as connections to reality. I’m overly connected to reality.  So much so that all of my intense efforts to escape it, ranging from high doses of drugs to acting like I lived in fantasy and didn’t notice reality in the hopes it’d become real, none of these things worked.  I’m firmly tethered to the real world. 

In fact on some levels I think I’m more firmly tethered than the average person.  Many things about my autism stem from having a far more direct connection to the senses that tell me what’s happening around me, than most people do.  In fact, my stimming often comes from my body finding ways to integrate all those sensations into a sort of physical awareness. 

I should stop for a second and mention something about stimming. There is no one explanation for it because it’s not one thing. The only reason all these things are called by the same name is because some nondisabled people decided that they were all happening for the same reason – to stimulate ourselves.  To me there is little to no connection between looking at sparkly things because you enjoy it, rocking back and forth to decrease stress or overload levels, flapping because you are happy or upset, waving your hands around to locate your body, and engaging in complex finger movements to regulate sensory information. (None of this has to be either voluntary or involuntary to serve a function.) But all of those things and more get called stimming.  To ever claim a single explanation, or to lump it all into one meaning, is to really not understand it. 

Anyway. I’m glad someone is explaining why they do this but to then leap into explaining it for the rest of us, it doesn’t work. 

ETA: Another thing people do with stimming is assume they can easily categorize it according to what sense it supposedly stimulates. Quite often it doesn’t work like that at all.