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.

My Life with Neurotypicalism: A Reversal

I have neurotypicalism (NT).

Today I am letting you into my world.

I have a mild form of it, though. I'm able to analyze critically and, at least for brief moments, pursue or monologue about interests other than socialization. I'm also able to sometimes notice small details in things. Researchers at the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical say that most people with NT have Normal Personality Disorder (NPD) and vice-versa. (Actually, they say it the other way around, but whatever. Oops - that's an NT "catch phrase." Communication problem.) I don't have Normal Personality Disorder, hence I'm considered "high functioning." I'm glad I'm not low functioning.

NT runs in my family. Everyone in my family has it too. Most of them worse than I do. It was quite a crazy experience growing up with that. Raging emotions everywhere. The littlest things would set each other off. I wasn't set off as much by a lot of them, especially when it came to the rigid rituals of "politeness." I'm lucky I'm not more severely afflicted. I'm not sure if I would be able to function in the world otherwise. I certainly wouldn't have been able to land myself a good autistic boyfriend - I would have driven him absolutely crazy were I lower functioning, having Normal Personality Disorder and other common complications.

The Triad of Impairments, according to the diagnostic criteria published by Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical, are social impairments, communicative and imaginative impairments, and restricted interests.

The social criteria don't seem too bad...if they were to diagnose me as a child it would probably be (1) and (3), maybe (4) sort of but I mostly only played with my little sister.

My strongest communication and imagination symptoms from childhood were probably the overuse of imaginative irrelevant activity, and repetition of catch phrases (mostly in adolescence, though I still do it sometimes - e.g., adopting "kick ass!" from South Park as an expression of happiness when something went my way, and using "The Bomb" a lot in high school to refer to something I really liked.) I'd say that I relate to these symptoms more than the social ones, though in traditional Neurotypicalism the social ones usually get more weight - you need two of those, but only one of each of the others.

I have a good deal of problems with limited interests and sensory impairments as well. Especially the lack of awareness of parts of objects. It's really frustrating when you're staring at a set of wallpaper, and you start to "fill in the blanks" in it and see ghosts...I've heard that's common with NT, seeing things that aren't really there, but when I talked to some Aspies about it, they said that it actually didn't sound all that NT...but the really NT part was wondering why the hell I saw different sets of patterns in two sets of wallpaper that looked EXACTLY the same. It took me, like, 20 minutes to figure out that the wallpaper that had different patterns from the rest of it was upside down. It's hard living without that fine detail perception, being only able to see how those pieces of wallpaper were the same.

I also tend not to notice, or care about, small changes in my environment. People with NT are extremely lax and out of it sometimes. We're really off in our own little world, like Temple Grandin says. Most of the people she works with have NT, so she had to study it, to understand why people couldn't see things that were obvious to her and to the animals she worked with.

And stereotyped body movements...well...it turns out NTs do have them, but only in very small amounts and in very limited ways. Anything beyond this, we don't care for, or it weirds us out. The little ones we do, though, we can tune out easily.

My senses are very weak. I'm not sure if they've always been, but they've been that way for a long time. I don't feel the pain of shirt tags most of the time, or fluorescent lights, and I have almost no desire for deep pressure. When there's chaos I can usually deal with it or space out. I have no strong texture preferences for my food. I can eat just about anything as long as I like the taste. My autistic boyfriend, on the other hand, has a much more refined sense of texture and will not eat the foods that just felt wrong to him as a child.

And my Theory of Other Minds isn't always very strong either. My communication breaks down sometimes when I've made a TOOM misjudgment and put myself under stress. My boyfriend is actually very affectionate - he always enjoys it. I'm not as much. Sometimes I get bored of it. But for a long time, I assumed that his wanting it all the time meant that he needed it, and that if I denied him - it was only mild affection after all, like holding hands and cuddling - I would be too cold for him. I also thought that he'd want "more." 'Cause I assumed he'd be like a guy with NT usually is. After a while, cuddling isn't enough for them. But I'm not ready for "more" yet. So I was getting all anxious whenever he wanted to cuddle, and trying to deny him a little but not too much, and I was communicating too indirectly, not saying "NO" when I needed to, just saying "not now" or saying nothing, just making a grunt and a gesture. And then a few minutes later he'd ask again. And what's worse, I even repressed my own need to say NO, thinking that I shouldn't have it because it's not normal for a person to not be open to hugging (but since then, other NTs I've talked to have reassured me that it actually is normal sometimes), and started nagging him about little things instead...acting just like my sister who has a more severe form of NT! I knew then that something was wrong. I talked to people about it, and realized what I needed and that I needed to say it directly. Everything got better after that.

I still wish I had a better TOOM. It's really hard to understand how my boyfriend thinks and feels and senses things. I have to ask him so many questions, and even talk about things to my friends and have them come up with questions to ask him.

Sometimes I wish that I could be cured. Other times, I'm happy to be able to change activities very quickly, experience the "pseudo-simultaneous awareness" described on ISNT as a common comorbidity of neurotypicalism (sometimes it's interesting and helpful to feel like I'm processing two emotions at the same time when I'm really just feeling one and rememberin the otehr), and to be relatively insensitive to nagging irritants like tags, fluorescent lights, different food textures, hair-washing, and nail-clipping.

I think those of us with high-functioning neurotypicalism can contribute a lot to society, if we're given the proper accommodations, like not having too many details to keep track of, and jobs where our flitty attention and dull senses are assets or at least not major deficits. People with low-functioning neurotypicalism, however, are known to be dangerous and violent - bullying, neglecting, and even killing autistic children, and softentimes other neurotypicals as well. It would probably be a good thing if LFN were cured.

Note: this post was inspired by an autistic blogger's rant about autism communities where the constituents buy into the mainstream theories too much and see themselves in terms of their "symptoms."

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.

What's it like to be neurotypical?

It's not having to think about what it's like to be neurotypical. Unless you want to, just for fun. (I ripped this off from an ethnic diversity skit I saw in college, where at the end, the white person said, "What it means to be white is not having to think about what it means to be white.")

It's not even having to hear of the word neurotypical unless you end up with important autistics in your life.

It's being able to laugh at all the NT jokes on autistic websites and knowing that you don't fit all the stereotypes, while not having to worry about an autistic boss, in-law, friend, or family member assuming that you must not be capable of thinking rationally or speaking honestly because you're neurotypical, or saying in all seriousness, "You can't be neurotypical! You can hold an intelligent conversation and don't have to buy all the latest fashions."

It's wondering why your aspie boyfriend drives some of your relatives crazy, becuase you don't have to think about all the nonverbal cues and tokens of politeness that your relatives are automatically looking for and not finding. You seem to get along just fine with them...well, ok, not perfectly, but you don't seem to annoy them as much as he does.

It's being able to wear clothes with tags (well, most of the time - some tags do grate), work under fluorescent lights, eat foods of any texture, wash your hair, clip your nails, and sleep with no blanket on in the summer, all comfortably.

It's being able to fidget without it being called some specialized term which sounds like a euphemism for fidgeting with one's own unmentionables, have a passionate interest without it being called a "perseveration," participate in classes and activities without them being called "therapies," and appreciate the small beautiful things in life without being accused of being unable to see the big picture.

It's being unable to claim some glorified label that wins you nerd status points...but gleefully being able to glorify that label without realizing its full implications.

It's actually enjoying chattering about the weather with an acquaintance for a few minutes.

It's being able to let a minor conflict turn into a fascinating conversation with your Aspie boyfriend about how your minds work differently from each other, and to wonder what it would be like to think and feel the way he does, and be eager to apply this information to resolve the conflict...while your relatives still attribute most of their conflicts with him to his being spoiled and rude.

It's not having people wonder if you're biologically incapable of loving someone.

It's not seeing people like you being described in the media as an alien, ghostly, pitiful, or unsentient being, or their neurological status mentioned in news reports about crime except when a neighbor comments, "He was such a nice, friendly person. I never expected this of him."

It's seeing everyone who commits a crime being labeled "evil" and "a monster," so even if they showed no introversion, eccentricities, or signs of so-called mental disorders, you can reassure yourself - if you want to - that the criminal is not like you and that nobody has to worry about you or someone like you committing a crime.

It's living in your own little world just as much as any autistic does, without people making a big deal out of it.

It's reading in a popular neuropsych book about the prevalence of people lying to themselves, and automatically thinking of yourself as an exception, and then reading that statistics say most people think they're exceptions. And then deciding that if you do lie to yourself constantly, you're probably so deeply unaware of it that you'll probably never be able to figure out the truth anyway. And then wanting to figure out the truth because you still want to be an exception.

The Angry Wives' Club

The most prominent NT opinions on autism in general are spread by mainstream psychology and by desperate and frustrated parents who buy into the notion that autism is a dire disease that should be cured by whatever means imaginable.

In my sub-sphere, the world of NTs in romantic relationships with autists, the most prominent voice is the Angry Wife, exemplified by the average member of the infamous "AS Partners" forum. From what I gather, you pretty much have to be an angry NT wife to join and for your posts to be published: they screen newbies heavily to keep out trolling and unsupportive posting (some people have reported trying to give them a piece of their minds and getting censored), and they only allow the NTs to join. With some of the things they say, I can see why they're so infamous. Aspies as Dementors? (What if these wives themselves are the Dementors who have sucked the souls out of their Aspies, hence the extreme withdrawal and lack of emotional reciprocity they complain about?) All AS/NT marriages end in divorce? (Who doesn't fall out of love these days? And those that don't have to put some work into maintaining love.) Only they exist? (Do the husbands only exist to the wives as someone to blame?)

Angry wives aren't just on the Internet, either. Books like Aspergers In Love and An Asperger Marriage also tend to have a bit of a bad reputation among Aspies. My boyfriend has the "Aspergers in Love" book along with a few other autism-related books, but he never reads them. I flipped through "Aspergers In Love" and it didn't have much I could relate to in my relationship, with all the NTs being extreme NTs and the Aspies being extreme AS.

So where are the NTs who still love their Aspie partners, and don't believe that the stereotypical broken marriage is all that's left?

AS And Their Partners is a decent place to go. Unlike the angry wives' club with a similar name but a very different philosophy, it is open to both Aspies and NTs, is led primarily by Aspies in happy relationships with NTs, and takes a positive, egalitarian stance toward relationships in which one or both partners have Asperger's. People share adventures and tips on how to handle some of the problems that crop up. Unfortunately, the only section that's open to public view is the introduction section, where quite a few people come in introducing themselves with rants about their relationship, such that the public face of the forum tends to inadvertently promote the Angry Wife stereotype. (An Aspie online friend read some of the newbie posts, and thought AS And Their Partners was an angry wives' club and mistook it for AS Partners.)

NTs with positive attitudes can also be spotted on pro-neurodiversity AS forums that are open to NT allies, such as Aspies for Freedom and Wrong Planet. But given that these places are chiefly Aspie-oriented, the NT voices there might be a little harder to find than on AS and Partners, which caters explicitly to both Aspies and NTs.

Many of the pro-neurodiversity parents are probably also in loving AS/NT relationships, but as parents tend to do, they may talk more about their children than their marriage.

Eccentric NT

The advantage of not being your stereotypical flaming neurotypical woman is that it's easier for me to appreciate the kind of love an AS boyfriend has to offer, without being repulsed by the quirks. I've sometimes wondered why my boyfriend, an obviously sweet and ethical guy, had so little luck with women.

The disadvantage is that I don't have very much in common with other NT women in relationships with AS men, so can't really establish rapport with them or help them easily.

I'd looked into participating in a local group for the NT romantic partners of AS adults. I was turned down for it because I didn't fit the typical demographic: I wasn't nearly as old or as experienced in my relationship as the others involved in the group. They were all married 50-somethings, and I'm a single 20-something.

But the leader of the group, a therapist who deals a lot with AS issues, also noted that I have a few things in common with Aspies. I'm not as "emotional" in relationships as your typical non-AS woman, I have certain limits to physical affection (didn't like hugs as a child, still don't like kisses, and can't hug or touch indefinitely without it feeling boring or like eating another spoonful of dessert after I'm stuffed - the pleasure wears off), and, well, I'm nerdy, to summarize the rest of it. :)

These things have always puzzled me myself. Why have I always felt like I'm kind of like people with social learning disabilities, yet never was diagnosable with anything but the ubiquitous ADD, which now I suspect may have been a mistake?

Rejecting my adolescent ADD diagnosis, and having been out of treatment for it for a few years before I decided that I probably never had ADD because I don't seem to struggle with the issues as such now (I struggle with "normal" issues), I could be one of the last remaining "eccentric normal people," a dying breed with the proliferation of neuropsychiatric "disorders." And even then, because I got that ADD diagnosis once, my status as a "normal" is not quite pure.

There was an advantage to the concept of "eccentric" that has been lost with the gain in knowledge of neurological differences and their various forms: the recognition and acceptance of these people as not necessarily abnormal, in the pejorative sense.

The concept of "normalcy" is often understood as a version of the general, trans-cultural category of "our own kind: the group of people we try to relate to as worthy to care about and understand and empathize with. " The more people we leave out of this category of basic humanity, the less we're practicing our potential for empathy and interpersonal creativity.
Ideally, it's important to understand the neurological diversities as a way of relating to the people who have them, yet at the same time, labeling them as "abnormal" is harmful. So if we label them as "normal" and ignore their differences, we invalidate them and fail to understand them; but if we label them as "abnormal" and try to fix them, we also invalidate them and fail to understand them. More people need to see beyond this polarity...and polarities in general, but I won't get into that.

Popular Conceptions of "Mental Disorder" Impair NT Development

It isn't just the "neurodiverse" who are being held back by the view that they all have "diseases" that must be "cured" in order for them to live fulfilling lives.

The shrinking of the category of "normal" to an increasingly unattainable ideal is bad for the development of the full strengths of neurotypicals, too.

Compared to autistics, neurotypicals are supposed to be good at seeing "big pictures," changing their routines and habits, and imagining and working with the minds of other people. And although I don't believe autistics are necessarily as weak in these areas as they're made out to be, and especially not for the reasons they're made out to be ("they're just born that way" rather than "they just see the world differently and nobody realizes what to do about it"), I think that NT cognitive styles really do have potential for a certain flexibility that can be put to many great uses. The adaptability of modern humans to ever-changing environmental conditions and social situations is thought to have been essential to their evolutionary success, and the majority of modern humans, pretty much by definition (though given the way definitons are going, this might change), are neurotypical. Oftentimes if something in nature ends up common, it's because it "works."

But current concepts of "mental disorder" shrink down "normalcy" to a pinpoint and lead to the expectation that someone or another will "treat" or "cure" everyone who isn't "normal." This encourages us normal people to be lazy, thinking, "Oh, we don't need to change, THEY do. THEY have the problem." As a result, we don't change, and our cognitive flexibility that we could be using to work on reaching a mutual understanding with the neurodiverse people next door goes unused. We are not encouraged to stretch our imaginations to peer into very different minds, because those minds don't need to be so different.

And so we become just as inflexible and unempathetic as we claim autsitics are.

And it's not because we're just wired to be that way. Yes, part of our nature does include the capacity to dim or shut off empathy if fierce competition with another human or group of humans becomes necessary or exceptionally advantageous for survival. But another part of our nature, probably just as powerful, allows for the overriding of the nasty side when there is much more of an advantage to cooperation.

A lot of talent, spirit, and even life can be lost if that overriding capacity is underdeveloped. Do we really need all those wars, and all that schoolyard bullying? Would relationships be as strained and short-lived if people were encouraged to try to understand people who think radically differently from themselves?

We NTs don't even all think the same way as one another. We miscommunicate all the time. We fail to see the other's perspective. And that's supposed to be our strength. Focusing on the weaknesses of those who think differently from us, labeling them as disordered and inherently at fault for all their problems and expecting them to be cured, plays against that strength, and instead fortifies costly ego defenses that amplify our weakness of tending to pay too little attention to the hard and relevant facts of reality. How can we see the gorilla in the basketball court when we're too busy trying actively NOT to see things that threaten our ever-so-fragile egos? It's a lose-lose situation. The strengths of all are underdeveloped, and the weaknesses of all are amplified.