Coping Methods: Directed Stimming

Right, in my first post in the series I talked about one specific stim that I have: Nail biting.

In this post I will generalise a little more, and I’ll try to explain how I deal with my stimming.

I have several stims. Most (if not all – I’m not sure) autistics have one or more stims. They are the repetitive stereotypical movements that lead people to such misconceptions as: “Autistics? They’re the ones who bang their heads on the walls, yeah?” And no. We’re not. Not as a rule anyway.

Stims and stimming is short and slang-esque for stimulation. Now why might a person want or need stimulation? Because something needs to be let out, something needs to be vented, or repressed, or controlled. It can be any number of things. For many autistics that I’m aware of, it’s often a sensory thing. And it certainly is for me, too. But it is also a way to let out stress, which doesn’t have anything to do with sensory input and overload.

Stimming is often about giving yourself a sensory stimulus to “drown out” another stimulus that is causing discomfort and that you cannot simply remove.

The most effective stim is the stim that’s in the same category as the one that’s causing discomfort. Thus, if a sound is overloading me, I’ll need a sound to drown it out. If I can’t make any sounds, I’ll need a more intense form of stimming with a different sense. The function of the stim is to pull my attention away from what’s causing discomfort to something that’s not.

For me the examples are as follows:

When there are sounds around me that trigger a stim, my natural/automatic stim will be small grunts.

When there is stuff on my body (clothes, sticky food residue, dirt, sweat, blood) that feels not right, it triggers a tactile stim in the shape of usually fiddling with my earlobes. The effect of this stim can be magnified by wearing earrings, but they can also be a major drawback on the days that they bother me. There’s no system to this, so it’s a gamble, and I usually go without. Tactile stuff can also trigger my nail biting.

When I have been touched by another person. And it doesn’t matter who this is, friend, stranger, family, my natural stim will be to bite my nails or vibrate a leg. Though there is another effect of this that I’ll also get into later.

And then there’s my constant stim, which is in effect at almost all times, because it works both for tactile sensations and for my internal stress which are by far my two most sensitive issues. The constant stim is: Tension. Bodily tension and pressure.

I always sit on one of my legs, curling it up under me. Or I wrap my legs and feet really tight around the chair legs or table legs where I’m seated. Or I wring my hands and fingers inside the sleeves of my shirts (they tend to get very worn, very quickly), I crack my toes and ankles by stemming them against the floor, the wall, each other. And I like certain clothing articles to be really fucking uncomfortably tight at times.

It is constant. And I really mean constant. I do it when I sleep, too. I’m obviously not awake to observe it, but I sleep like the dead, ie. I do not move around at all, while I’m asleep, so the position I fall asleep in, will be the one I wake up in. And I cannot fall asleep without tension/pressure. This means, of course, that sometimes when I was careful with my position, I wake up with intense pain in some of my joints, because they’ve been positioned really badly all night.

Some achieve the needed pressure by using those extra heavy blankets/covers. 10 kilos is a standard weight of such a one. It is apparently a great help for a lot of autistics. I, having been undiagnosed for most of my life, have simply developed a method to get that pressure/tension without a weighty blanket on top of me. I always wrap myself very tightly in the covers. I prefer wintertime to summertime, because my summertime covers are as thin as the sheets. They have to be, because I wrap myself completely in them, and that gets hot in summer. I wrap myself up completely. Head to toe. I fold it around my head, so only my face is free. I fold my hands in it so my wrists are positioned at an angle that would make most people gasp in pain, and the same with my ankles and feet. I’m hypermobile, and my joints aren’t doing great – there’s a reason for this somewhere in these paragraphs >.<

This constant pressure and tension keeps me in my body. It keeps my awareness in the physical world and with my physical presence. I’ll get back to why this is important in a different post later on. The pressure also gives me something to focus on, when my brain is acting up and being uncooperative.

Those are my major stims.

There are several minor ones, but as they don’t show up consistently, I won’t bother listing them.

It is very often the stimming that makes an autie identifiable to others. It is also very often the stimming that makes others very reluctant to work with us. Not because our stims annoy them specifically (though some might), but because our stims make it really terribly obvious that we’re odd. Which we are – there’s no denying it.

And so I have developed what I have decided to term Directed Stimming. I have been lucky enough to be able to exert some level of control over my stims. Not that I can choose not to stim – I could try, but that would have consequences like my stress levels heading straight through the roof – but that I can to a certain degree choose which stim to use. And this has turned out to be very, very good.

The most effective stim will always be the one dealing with the sense that is being overloaded. And for me that is usually either audio or tactile perceptions. On top of that there’s the stimming needed to deal with what my brain does to itself – stressing itself out – and then I need a stim to let that out as well. So that’s three main sources (sound, touch and internal) for stimming, because those are my three most vulnerable senses. That also means that stims that deal with these senses are the most effective ones, and that gives me some possibilities when it comes to tactile stimming – unfortunately, not everything works equally well.

A basic rule of thumb is: the more intense the sensation the better it works as a stim.

That means that it’s a lot more efficient to scream my lungs out than make little grunt-y sounds. But screaming my lungs out tend to not get me the best kinds of attention, so I try to manage with little grunts COMBINED with a tactile stim. It usually works.

I haven’t seriously screamed my lungs out in over a year. Almost two years even. So this actually works, but it took me a long time to work out what my need was and what actually helped. See another thing that helps is to sing REALLY LOUD. And hey, I’m a trained singer, so that’s not entirely awful to listen to, I’m told, but it’s just not always viable to get to work on one of Mozart’s famous soprano arias. Really not. Hence, grunts and some tactile stimming.

Unfortunately, like I mentioned above, when I replace stimming for the ‘correct’ sense with stimming for a different sense it needs to be stronger, so a slight foot tap will not help when it’s sound I’m dealing with. So that’s when I’ll be pulling, tugging, folding and pinching my earlobes till they hurt. Or picking at my skin elsewhere on the body. I have really, really bad skin on my nose, because I tend to rub it – very hard, and I am literally wearing the skin off my nose at time when it’s really bad. The one I usually fall back upon, though is the one that causes the most pain: nail biting.

Because yes pain is actually sometimes necessary to drown out the sensory overload. Sometimes pain is the only thing that’ll keep me grounded and mentally present inside my body.

So, as you can see, sometimes the need for a stim calls for a very strong stim in the first place, replacing the optimal stim with another increases the needed effect of it, and so Directed Stimming, comes at a cost.

If I could make do with vibrating a leg, it would often be great, but too often this causes movement via the table or the floor so the entire room can feel the vibrations. And to most people that’s annoying, and so I direct my stim in another direction. Little noises are mostly also an annoyance to others, and so they’re out of the question except when I’m alone. As it turns out, cracking my joints (and my ankles and toes crack VERY loudly) can also make people seriously unsettled, so that’s ruled out. So usually I am left with two-three stims that are at all useful in the company of others namely ear fiddling, nose rubbing and nail biting.

And they need to be pretty damn intense if they are to be at all useful. So you can imagine how my ears, nose and fingers look after a stressful day/week. Pretty damn awful. That is the price I pay for insisting upon entering environments where I cannot freely stim as I need to. And it hurts. My nails are awful, as I wrote about in the previous post, and my ear lobes and nose are very often very red, from all the abuse they’ve had to take.

Directed stimming is both a boon and a curse. On one hand it means I can for instance go to the movies and not annoy the entire audience and get myself thrown out. It means I can be in a workplace that is not entirely autie-friendly and still manage to not scare anyone off. It also means, unfortunately, that people have a tendency to start expecting this effort of me, and frankly… the pain and extra stress and the extra need for sleep is very often not something they see.

Just the other day I attended the farewell-do of a colleague of mine. It was during work-hours, so thankfully it didn’t add extra hours to my schedule. The food was terrific, but there were 22(!) people there. And all the chatting made me really want to scream, so instead I made for little sounds – I could fake them being yum sounds because of the food – and wrapping my feet really badly around the chair. I could hardly walk up the stairs afterwards. I lasted an hour.

People commented that it was good to see me enjoying myself. But I hadn’t enjoyed myself. I had enjoyed the food, and I had laughed at the funny speeches. Sure. But enjoyed myself? No. People asked whether I wasn’t glad I attended it. I wasn’t even able to lie and say sure. And when evening rolled around I was ready for bed at 7. Three hours earlier than normal, because I’d done one hour of being in the company of others. I hadn’t even socialised. I hadn’t conversed with anyone other than to gush over the delicious food. But the sound was a cacophony to me, and people touched me. AUGH! Well, only one person did. But that was a LOT! And it was only my back and right arm, but shit…

I did not enjoy myself, because it cost me way more than it was actually worth. And I am still undecided as to whether I’m glad I attended. I’m leaning towards no, though, because my nose? My nails? My ears? My joints? They aren’t glad. At all. The retiring colleague, though, she was glad I attended, and that makes me glad. So in a kind of sort of indirect way – I suppose I’m glad. But my stims went completely off the charts, as they always do in these situations. And that’s why it’s such a curse.

As long as I can switch to a less obvious and less annoying (for others) stim, I’ll try to do it. And I suppose people will also expect me to do it. But the cost is that the replacement stim will be so much worse, and people won’t notice it, because I deliberately chose one they won’t notice.

And this? Is a pretty good example of what the demand to appear normal does to someone like me. It not only stresses me out. It actively physically harms me, because I have to damage my body in order to not have my “abnormality” be too uncomfortably obvious for all those “normals” out there.

So please, people. Next time you see an autie stimming – don’t ask them to stop it. A few of us might be able to stop the particular stim you noticed, but you can be damn sure that it will just have been replaced by another, and that the price will be far beyond what you’ll ever notice about us.

I developed this Directed Stimming as a consequence of being asked to stop doing certain things. Ironically, the one stim my father has given me the most flak for is my nail biting, which is one of the two stims (the other is the body tension-thing) I have never, ever been able to direct away from. I was late-diagnosed, so I never had an explanation for why I needed these stims. I didn’t even know they were called stims. Directed Stimming was a coping method to avoid too much disapproval.

However, this has backfired somewhat, as people now expect me to use it. And I am still trying to learn that I should only use this coping method when it is for my own sake. This is something I can argue sensible usage of if I really wanna go eat at a restaurant or go to the movies. Directed Stimming is essentially a possibility for having something resembling a life for me. And I have to keep reminding myself that I should not be using it for the sakes of others, say to not annoy my colleagues with a stim. No, I should be given a workstation that doesn’t trigger a need for stimming, because the price for not only dealing with whatever triggers the need for stimming as well as the additional cost of Directed Stimming is simply too high to be paid for all of the full work-days of the entire full work-week.

So while this is a very, very useful tool, it should be used with great care. And I’m still learning that part of it. Self-care is not my strongest suit.