Regularity for Autistic People, Part 2: Stimming and Your Neurotypical

My "Regularity for Autistic People" posts are intended to explore the common ground between autistics and neurotypicals, with a light-hearted style. As explained in Part 1, the name is a spoof of the name of a blog by an autistic writer.

In Part 1, I explained how being comforted by the routine and familiar may manifest in neurotypicals.

Today, I will describe neurotypical stimming, often called fidgeting, from my inside perspective.

Neurotypical stims or fidgets can take many forms. Some of mine, past and present, include pacing (common), tapping my fingers on walls and fences as I walk down the street, thumb-twiddling (common), clicking clickable pens, gum-chewing (common), squeezing/popping zits and zit-like formations on my skin (a self-injurious and somewhat embarrassing "bad habit"), rubbing/massaging a finger, hand, or foot, twirling or tapping a pen or pencil, and fidgeting with jewelry. I think I even rock a tiny amount sometimes. Other NT stims I've seen include shifting weight back and forth while standing on a train (just saw that one tonight), pencil chewing, and nail biting.

Their purpose, it seems, is to numb out, take the edge off of life, a little like scratching an itch, except the itch is just the diffuse discomfort of living and cannot be specifically scratched. When I perform my fidgets, I either tend to be lost in my thoughts, or just kind of numbed out. Zit popping can be an exception, which often makes me feel a focused anticipation. I can also zone out and think during that though.

NT stims often start subconsciously - we just find ourselves doing them, if that. I can sometimes become aware of the impulse to perform them, though,

Their duration varies. Skin-picking, the most absorbing of them, can last upwards of 10 minutes. Others might last a few seconds, or not even get off the ground because I feel an impulse to start them but then got self-conscious of it and the impulse was too weak to make me proceed.

NT stims tend to increase with greater anxiety, discomfort, or boredom. Though most are "socially acceptable" in their style, they can become socially unacceptable if done to excess, because they are distracting and signal discomfort. The discomfort of another person will often make a neurotypical uncomfortable, even if they are not aware of this fact. (If they are hyper-aware of this fact, they may call thesmelves "empaths.")

If you're autistic and you want your neurotypical to understand stims, maybe you can say something like, "You know how some people chew pen caps and tap their feet? It's kind of like that, but more so, and different, because of the sensory issues." Or...ask them, "How does it feel to be in a rocking chair?" I wouldn't be surprised if rocking chairs were invented by an autistic person, but they really caught on among neurotypicals, attesting to the trans-neurological appeal of stimming.

I went to an Asperger Syndrome conference this weekend, and I didn't get all that much out of it, but one thing that was mentioned was that the partners of Aspies tend to either be the most Aspie-like NTs who tend to have similar temperamental traits to Aspies (like me), or the least Aspie-like NTs who are interested in reaching out to all kinds of people (like the women my boyfriend is usually attracted to). The average NT often can't understand Aspies, and thinks that Aspies should just try harder if they want friends. Perhaps those average NTs would think that if autistic stims are a lot like normal-person fidgets, then maybe the autistic should switch to normal-person fidgets. If that happens...then maybe nothing more can be done.

It's funny...I seem to stim more than my boyfriend, who says he doesn't really seem to have any stims. He reported a couple of them when I first met him, though. Maybe the zoloft reduced the fidgets he did have, which were just about at a neurotypical level. I often like to rub his beard stubble, fidget with his fingers, and rock him back and forth. It can make you wonder who's the real Aspie in our relationship sometimes. ;) But I can read body language more consistently than he can and understand emotions as more than just binary positive or negative ("everything's fine" vs. "OMG it's a disaster") without having to think about it.

People are people, whatever quirks they have. And "lack of quirks" is a quirk in itself...how many people are normal in almost every way? Very few, I'd imagine.

Regularity: for Autistic People. Part 1: The Normality Fixation

(The title of this entry is a rip off of the "Autism: For Regular People" blog.)

Just read this post by Axinar wondering why neurotypical people get so upset over such little things as wearing inappropriate clothing.

I think I have a good idea as to why.

All human beings, autistic and non-autistic, look to a certain degree of sameness for comfort. This is said to translate for autistics into the widely known "symptom" of a need for routine and ritual, and having an inexplicable "meltdown" if one little detail is out of place.

For neurotypicals, the only difference is what details are focused on as needing to be the same.

For an autistic person, it may be a specifically comforting texture or sight.

For non-autistics, famous for being able to screen out "irrelevant" details as in the famous case of normal people not noticing a gorilla walking onto a basketball court while they're told to pay attention to the ball, it's likely to be a context-specific social custom. Certain things - like common neurotypical stereotypies such as thumb-twiddling, nail-biting, leg-twitching, and pencil-tapping - are filtered out as irrelevant, while other things, like the clothing you wear, seem to always be relevant in a social context.

In an office, you usually dress in ways that other people in the office dress, more or less. NTs get a general sense from subconsciously obserivng others of which patterns are appropriate, inappropriate, and irrelevant. If anyone violates this sense and wears something out of line - like a red dress or an old ratty sweater - then the NTs sense of "sameness" is violated. A "relevant" detail is out of place.

The result: a meltdown. (Or, to put it in traditional NT lingo: an emotional overreaction. Why are autsitics' emotional overreactions compared to nuclear disasters, and ours not?)

The meltdown may take the form of nasty gossip about the person violating the NT's need for routine (venting), and/or trying to restore the routine by putting pressure on the violator not to violate any of the relevant details. Oftentimes, nasty gossip, and subtle changes in behavior around the person, are attempts to pressure the person to figure out what's wrong and change it. Unfortunately, the NT's blindness to "irrelevant" details, and inability most of the time to even imagine them, can lead to some grave mistakes being made, as when an autistic is exposed to extreme sensory overload by the neurotypical's attempt to force him or her to "act normal" at the cost of learning and enjoying what the autistic actually can learn and enjoy.

Now why do people need sameness at all?

Possibly because if something is out of place, our instincts tell us that the cause of that out-of-place-ness may be dangerous: a predator may have moved that blade of grass; the person wearing the strange clothes is an enemy invading our territory; those odd movements could be a sign of disease, or of the person about to do something dangerous. Sameness means that there is no evidence of such an outside threat having come by. Sameness is safe.

So...I think normality is the "classically neurotypical" version of routine and ritual, which is an expression of the basic human need for reassuring sameness, which may come from the instinctive sense that if something's out of place it's likely due to a predator or threat. Hopefully this will help confused autistic people reading this blog to understand us non-autistics and the weird things we do sometimes.