User:Soap/stim: Difference between revisions - Wikipedia
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Many stims involve [[tactile sensation]], seemingly with a lot of focus on the hands and mouth, but ''spinning in circles '' and ''rocking'' (possibly also [[headbanging]]) do not involve touch. However it is possible that rocking and headbanging are not stims at all.
==Other new thoughts==
:07:57, 7 August 2024 (UTC)
Why do so many stims involve both the hands ''and'' an external stimulus? Why do stimmers typically not flap their hands in the dark (or do they? I can only say I dont)?
80% of autistic subjects in a survey find stimming enjoyable.<ref>https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362361319829628</ref>
==Older content==
===why the hands?===
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====more thoughts====
:10:13, 27 July 2024 (UTC)
it's occurred to me that i may be unusual even among autistics in how much pleasure i get from stimming. i actually doubt this ... i think many others, (if perhaps not a majority), are just like me, but that even with our somewhat odd social skills we understand that it's embarrassing to stim in public, or even to talk about it, and so stimmers just dont bring it up even amongst each other. there may be some social media groups that i could find.
but since i've shown addictive tendencies towards alcohol, perhaps i have addictive tendencies in stimming too, even above what other autistics have. it's also possible that my ''high fever euphoria'' has something to do with this, and that my brain might be wired differently from most people, whether autistic or not, and therefore i am unusual in two different ways that interplay. i can at least say i've never heard anyone else with autism describe being so addicted to stimming that they tricked their parents into driving them to a store to buy stim toys, claiming to be shopping for something else. but Reddit's staple man, who did not claim to have autism, did something even more extreme than this, so it's clear i'm not wholly alone.
either way, it seems if Im right that people are largely unaware of this. our article, and other resources elsewhere, keep talking about how stimming is an escape from [[sensory overload]], never mentioning that it's a pleasurable activity at all. is this honestly what scientists believe, or is this a sort of [[noble lie]] intended to protect stimmers, especially children, from parents and other caregivers who might see it as no different than masturbation or perhaps even drug use?▼
▲either way, it seems if Imstimming rightis thatpleasurable for most who do it, people are largely unaware of this. our article, and other resources elsewhere, keep talking about how stimming is an escape from [[sensory overload]], never mentioning that it's a pleasurable activity at all. is this honestly what scientists believe, or is this a sort of [[noble lie]] intended to protect stimmers, especially children, from parents and other caregivers who might see it as no different than masturbation or perhaps even drug use?
===bath toy video===
:Updated ''18:29, 6 July 2024 (UTC)'' (originally written Nov 2023)
My mother once recorded me playing with bath toys, but the video is lost. Older information [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Soap/stim&oldid=1236946412#bath_toy_video here].
i will try to get hold of the video of me stimming with [[bath toys]] in the play room when i didnt realize i was being watched. but i suspect i never will, because a lot of things would need to line up:
#my parents would need to have saved the VHS tape all this time despite us not having easy access to a VCR that can play it
#the tape would need to be in working condition
#the tape would need to be labeled such that we knew which of the many, many VHS tapes contained the video segment
#we would need to pay to have it digitized. in theory we could play the tape on the VHS while i recorded it with my phone, but i suspect this would produce a poor quality video
#nothing else more important would come up in the meantime that would make my project seem like a trivial distraction
==Stims I have no interest in==▼
Having seen that my parents saved relatively little of my childhood belongings (and of their own, and those of other family members), I doubt this video still exists. Even so, I would love to see the video again, so i will not forget about this.
===oral stimulation===
this seems to be big lately, with [[:wikt:chewelry|chewelry]] and similar things. This may be a combination of three things:
:#an expanded definition of stimming (both in the sense of including non-autistics, and of including more behaviors as stimming for both autistics and NT's)
:#awareness of a common behavior
:#the marketability of a product.
It may be that oral stimulation was previously seen as unsanitary and largely ignored even if it was obviously common. I do remember talking to other autistics and hearing that they often bit and chewed their hands and feet, and I briefly mentioned my own skin-chewing habit (developed from a thumb-sucking habit) before deciding it wasn't really a stim because I had been thinking at the time that only hand-based stims counted as stims. But it makes sense that both the hand and the mouth would have stims.
Some early videos were recorded on 8mm tapes, playable only through the original device, but my parents showed me this video on TV.
My mother says she has no memory of this video, so it may not have been so important to them as it is to me now.
:My parents have finished cleaning out their house and there is no sign of the video I'm thinking of. It's possible it was never on a VHS at all, but was fed into the TV directly from the camcorder.
===thumb sucking===
it is possible that my longstanding [[thumb sucking]] habit, which embarrasses me more than the rest of these, was a hand-focused stim and not related to the (presumably mouth-based) childhood reflex. I stopped after getting an infection.
▲==Stims I have no interest in==
===spinning, headbanging and rocking===
Spinning in circles used to amuse me just as a stim by itself, but I have lost interest in this.
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I think I used to rock back and forth when I was young, but now that would simply make me throw up. again, this is something neurotypicals also do, since [[rocking chairs]] and [[swing sets]] both exist, just not in the same context.
===blinking lights===
i used to enjoy turning a light rapidly on and off, but by age 5 i was apparently afraid of strobe lights i couldnt control, and even though i suspect i still would enjoy them if i could control them, the association between the pleasant and unpleasant stimuli may have turned me off (no pun intended). see below about traffic lights.
===traffic lights===
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i remember playing with a toy piano at night where green and red lights lit up with each note that played. Perhaps ''that'' was a stim, but yet again I have to assume neurotypicals would also enjoy this sort of thing (LiteBrite etc) and just be less likely to admit to it.
:''10:05, 27 July 2024 (UTC)'' coming back to this, i may have been stimming with the traffic lights after all, as I've since remembered that both my sister and my mother (separately) made fun of me for it, and that i had a dream involving a traffic light that i believed was real for quite some time. but i've lost the memory of what i might have been doing, and ''IMPORTANTLY'', i still think it probably related to the large, shiny traffic light shells, and not to the more common stimming behavior that would involve standing in front of a blinking traffic light.
==Sensory play==
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Im surprised there is no page yet for [[sensory play]] or [[stim toy]]. The latter shows the more mainstream usage of ''stim'' and would likely be just a redirect to the former rather than being about autism.
This has nothing to do with [[sensation play]].
This has nothing to do with [[sensation play]]. I wondered if I would have to write about this sooner or later. I dont think the stims typically found in autistics overlap with sexuality in any significant way. If anythiung, someone who grew up playing with slime would find slime a reminder of chldhood and therefore a turn-off. But everyone's mind is different. (Likewise I dont think there is any overlap between stimming and [[masturbation]], perhaps because masturbation cannot be prolonged the way stimming can.)▼
▲This has nothing to do with [[sensation play]]. I wondered if I would have to write about thisthe similarity between stimming and sexual play (and masturbation) sooner or later. I dont think the stims typically found in autistics overlap with sexuality in any significant way. If anythiung, someone who grew up playing with slime would find slime a reminder of chldhood and therefore a turn-off. But everyone's mind is different. (Likewise I dont think there is any overlap between stimming and [[masturbation]], perhaps because masturbation cannot be prolonged the way stimming can.) essentially, this confusion only exists because the termninology overlaps. stimming is no more the same as masturbation than it is the same as taking [[stimulant]] drugs.
[[chewelry]] ~ [[:wikt:chewelry]]
==other links==
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[[:File:Tall_Autism_Happy_Hands.png]]
===assorted papers===
most google scholar papers are inaccesible for me, and maybe some of whati can access will be inaccexssible for others. even so:
# A [https://ejournal.unma.ac.id/index.php/ijeir/article/view/3269/2487 Serbian] study indicates that LFA's stim more, boys stim more, and younger children stim more, but that, oddly enough, students in mainstream education stim ''much'' more than students in special education. The paper's author seems to deny this in writing it up, and it may be that if true, it's because mainstream school teachers cannot easily tell their students to stop.
##[https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/bitstream/1866/19833/1/Chebli%20et%20al.%20%282016%29%20self-archive.pdf This paper] says that adults actually stim slightly more than children, though here I wonder if, as above, it's because nobody's going to tell a grownup they need to stop. Sample bias is always a problem when matching children against adults, since adults are more likely to stand out and need therapy. Also note that this study was not for people with autism specifically, although it does mention that autistics had higher rates of stimming than those with other sensorimotor conditions.
# https://www.proquest.com/openview/248fba64ea3340f899a3fc7914efeae5/1
==Notes==