on the question of stim and what is to be done about it...

On another board I was asked about “stim” by a newbie parent, and thought I would post my response here also.

Stimming is psyche shorthand for self-stimulating activity, those actions which are often poorly understood by ehavioral “experts” and other “professionals” whose main connection with autism is not personal, but merely an esoteric activity conducted from some ivory tower. When an autie flaps their hands, or flicks their fingers, or taps, or performs any similar repetitive, stereotypic activity, that is a stim. When they repeat the same sound over and again, or make odd noises, that is a verbal stim. When they wave things infront of their eyes, or will look at flashing or shining lights, that is a visual stim. For all we know when auties continue to mouth things or lick things, that may be a taste stim.

Stims serve a very real function in auties, and these people should never be forced to stop stimming. Many if not all auties have very real processing problems, where the damage that is in their brain sort of cross wires their senses. It has been well documented that many auties have acute or even hyper senses. They can hear the buzzing of fluorescent lights as a loud drone. They can smell things that nt’s automatically block out. Their sense of touch is much more sensitive than us “normals”. The world around us is full of sights and sounds and smells and textures that form a riot, a cacophony of sensory input that would overwhelm any of us if our brains didn’t automatically filter them out. (remember the classic experiment where you slice an orange and the smell pervades the room, but after a few minutes, unless you are focusing on the orange, you cease to smell it?)

Stiiming is a pressure release to this riot of input. When an autie begins to feel overwhelmed by all the things around them bombarding them, each little bit demanding attention, they will stim to block all of it out. They will focus on the sight of their hand waving, or their feel of their hand rubbing the wall or tapping the desk, and it allows them to push everything else away so that they can focus on what they wish to focus on again.

Stimming is a pressure valve for auties, and just like a cooker with a faulty valve, if we do not allow them to vent this, they will head for an explosion, which we call meltdown. This is not the only source of meltdowns, but it is a source.

And if we stop and think about it, why is it that we expect them to cease stimming? For their benefit? Obviously not, if we think about the mechanism of stim and what it really is. No, we expect them to stop because we view it as “not normal”. We expect them to stop because we do not want to allow them to be autisitc, we want them to be “normal”.

But we do not force ourselves to stop stimming.

If you twirl your hair when you are nervous, that is a stim. If you pace when you are on the phone, you are stimming. If you tap your hands while sitting in an interview, or hum in an absent minded way when you work, or even crack your knuckles, you are a stimmer. In reality, nearly all of us stim, and we do not force ourselves to stop. Why should an autie be forced to stop, just because we do not like their stimming, or the frequency is greater than ours? And stimming serves a very real, positive purpose for them that cannot be replaced with something else (unless you count heavily medicating them to shut down their sensory perception altogether).

Better than forcing them to stop is to help them redirect their stimming to a less obvious one. So the flapper who waves their hands in the air can be encouraged instead to become a tapper who mre inconspiculously drums their fingers against their thigh. A child who howls or gurgles or chortlers or grunts may be encouraged to softly hum a melody. A child who licks things or places all in their mouth can be given a smaller item instead to place inside their mouth where is is less offending (but not so small they may choke!)

The issue of the palatability of an autistic child in our view is a problem that lies not with the autistic child, but inside the viewer. Do we force Blacks to lighten their skin because we do not like dark skin? Should we force Asians to have “corrective” eye surgery to give them rounder eyes? Would it be proper to slap the hands of lefties to force them to be righties? Absolutely not! So it is with auties. They have all the same rights to person and identity as any of us “regular” people, and to view it in any other manner is a crime against their person, against their basic humanity.

I will climb down of my soapbox now. Did I answer your question?