User:Soap/stim

What is stimming?

It is possible that some people who stim find great pleasure in their own stims, and little or no pleasure in others, and so they see other people's stims as not stims at all, unless they take the time to think and understand how autistics differ so much even from each other, and how autistics as a group differ from other people with stims. I was never really like this myself because I was able to read literature about autism at an early age, but it may have made my definition of stimming too broad rather than too narrow, as my first instinct when seeing a video such as this is that the animal is stimming, while it occurred to me a few seconds later that perhaps the animal just had very itchy skin.

Punding is called stimming by some, and this is the page that has the famous sweetiepie photo in the lede.

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.

why the hands?

the hands and mouth combined have more tactile sensory neurons than the rest of the body combined, it seems, and much of what is left is on the face. i remember reading that some profoundly autistic children examine objects with the fingers and mouth only despite having normal vision. it isnt clear to me if these people are unable to process visual stimuli or if they simply find them less interesting. (There is a small chance that the question was added in as a "catch" to make sure that parents arent just selecting the most odd-sounding response possible, as some employment questionnaires do.)

essay

Hand-washing

This is me.

I was addicted to washing my hands with cold water when I was young, and would stand at the sink for a very long time if my parents allowed it. I am sure my hands must have been numb after just a few minutes in the cold water, and it's most likely that that feeling of numbness was, oddly enough, the very reason I was so entertained by it. I don't do this today; I've played in the rain a few times recently but I think what I like is more the wind than the water.

I didn't consciously name myself after this habit, and I didn't even remember it until I recently came across some old baby photos, but I've come to suspect the memory was lurking in my subconscience all this time. Despite having lost the memories, I know I am not exaggerating this or mis-interpreting the baby photos to make myself seem more interesting. And the two photos are far enough apart in time (I can tell by how tall I was) that I know my hand-washing habit lasted quite a long time. More photos may exist, because I know my mother made a collage of just my hand-washing habit, but some of the photos might have been just pictures of the sink.

I don't remember any particular event that made me lose interest in hand-washing. It's possible I found even more pleasure in other things, or it's possible that my parents finally ran out of patience and told me I wasn't allowed to wash my hands anymore. It may be that the pleasure faded with time just as other childhood pleasures have.

My username

If my theory that I've retained a subconscious love of hand-washing is true, then I did not really name myself after this video game, as I'd long assumed. (One reason I'm unsure is that I don't always choose usernames at one precise moment or for one particular reason; I first used the name Soap in 2000 or 2001, but since then I've picked it up and dropped it several times.) It may also be that my hand-washing habit led me to focus on the soap in the game and not the other elements. However, if this is true, it was all subconscious, because I was done with the hand-washing habit by the time I was five years old at the latest.

Bath toys

I was also addicted to holding foam alphabet bath toys in my hands throughout my childhood. I don't remember how this addiction got started, or whether it overlapped with my hand-washing habit. I do believe there was a phase in which I played with toys in the sink, but I don't know what toys they were. I rarely played with my bath toys in the tub, and didn't really think of them as bath toys at the time. As late as age 10 I was playing with them openly, even leaving them out on my bed when my best friend visited, with no explanation. Only years later did I become embarrassed, and only later still did I feel guilty for my habit. In my late teen years I tricked my mother into bringing me to a shopping mall so that I could sneak home with a new alphabet. I hid the toys from my parents from that point on, only acknowledging that I still played with them one morning in my early 30s (and only because I, even then, considered it more shameful than alcohol). I am glad that I held onto the habit for so long, as I grew taller, because it means the toys today in my adult hands still feel the same as they did when I had a much stronger habit. (Whereas if I had given up the toys when I was smaller, I might have found later on that they felt too small.)

The bath toys today are mostly made by Munchkin and manufactured in China. Most of the competitors are lookalike products with swapped colors, some of which might come from the same factory. However one alphabet I have says that it was manufactured by Sleeping Partners in Binh Duong, Vietnam. This is the same holding company that owns Tadpoles, which makes similar foam products such as floor mats. Others, such as Little Tikes, make their own letters where the shapes are also different. All of these products are made of EVA foam today, which is probably the best material for holding water and then drying out later on. When I was young I remember a competing product with a much squishier foam, which I was equally fond of at the time, but which I now suspect would have had trouble drying out after use in the tub (by this time I had already moved on from playing with the toys in the tub, assuming I ever had done so in the first place).

The lack of an article for bath toys is something I've occasionally thought about correcting, but the one time I started on a draft I realized there wasn't much I could write about. As I've implied above, I'm mostly active at Wiktionary now and I doubt I'll get back to the bath toys article here anytime soon. There is also a potentially problematic restriction against uploading pictures of toys, and while I think the foam alphabet bath toys would be exempt from that restriction, an article about foam alphabet bath toys isn't a very good article about bath toys overall.

Timing

I dont know when I first started playing with bath toys. My mother claims I started out playing with them the way other kids did. I know I liked refrigerator magnets too, which may have been easier for me to hold in my hands when i was very young. But I note that the foam alphabet bath toys are intended for very young children.

Summary

Both of these habits involved my hands. Until just now (Jun 2023), I had always thought of my odd childhood habits as being water-related. But I preferred to play with the bath toys outside the tub, and I don't remember any particular fondness for baths or playing in the rain, so it seems that whatever gave me pleasure only worked through my hands. I've lost the pleasure of washing my hands now as an adult, though it's possible I'm still getting some very weak pleasure that I just don't recognize because I've never been without it. I still occasionally play with alphabet bath toys, and might have the world's largest collection outside a warehouse, but it is no longer an addiction.

I am glad for this habit, as it is much cheaper than many other pleasurable things.

alcohol

It did not occur to me to try drinking alcohol until my early thirties. This may have been partly due to stubbornness on my part, and a wanting to be different, such that I couldn't respect myself if I were to develop a normal habit like drinking. When I did start drinking, I needed to do it my own way. I preferred to mix red wine with red raspberry icecream, which I called a Pink Cow (because it did the opposite of what Red Bull does). I've taken breaks from the bottle (the longest break since I started drinking being 2½ years) but I consider myself to be a heavy drinker since I don't plan to give up the habit completely unless health or some other situation forces me to. As much as it hurts to admit it, I get more pleasure from alcohol today than from bath toys or hand-washing, and continue to drink despite obvious negative consequences, whereas playing with bath toys would bring no such consequences. This is why alcohol now embarrasses me but my childhood habits do not.

Some symptoms I get after drinking are not mentioned on the hangover page, such as visual hallucinations and muscle spasms. These are new symptoms for me too.

Hand sanitizer bottles

I also collect hand sanitizer bottles, but only if they're rectangular. More on this later. I think these unite hand-washing with the feeling of holding something in my hands. My love of alcohol is just a coincidence, I think.

Low-alcohol activities

I've done some stereotypical stims with low BAC, such as playing in front of a traffic light, and playing for 2h40m in a sprinkler during a power outage. I will make no apologies for this, though it still puzzles me why I cant get the same pleasure from my shower.

The shower

It's possible I can't enjoy my shower because I feel trapped. Both physically (moving around is fun), and with the mild but ever-present fear of a power outage.

other info

echolalia

is there any relation between echolalia and stimming? most likely not.

we say Children often first babble syllables and eventually words they hear. For example, a baby may often hear the word "bottle" in various sentences. The baby first repeats with only syllables such as "baba" but as their language skills progress the child will eventually be able to say the word "bottle". and this is almost certainly a mistake.

It's possible my first words were echolalia, since my mother claims I was speaking at 7 months, but that my first word was whassat ... at that age I'm pretty sure I didn't understand what I was saying and must have just liked the sound of it. And I admit I'm skeptical of being able to produce an S sound at that age, too.

Scratchpad

Small children may be more likely to engage in stims, and break the habit at an early age.

Reddit's staple man may have been punding or something else.

What hormone, if there is one, is common to all stims? Is it dopamine?

the photos

Although the photo quality is poor since it's so old, i've just now noticed that the picture of me at [1] probably shows me playing with a full sink of water, since my left hand isnt fully visible, and since i probably couldnt reach the faucet at that age, someone (most likely my mother) must have filled the sink for me first. therefore at this age i wasnt yet sneaking up to the sink, and the expression on my face might be something like "what? already? i just got started". This picture is forty years old and i wouldnt trust even my mother to remember the situation at this point. Since this was the kitchen (though it looks like a bathroom, I know it isnt), it's also possible that my mother simply needed to use the sink herself for its normal purpose, but that to me all I could think of was discipline.

office supplies

reinforcements and those colored shiny stars. i loved these when i was nine years old. I have a memory that may well be false of my teacher driving me to a store to buy the colored stars. But that makes no sense

urge to play

Ten years old was the last time I remember a physical urge to play, while I was sitting in class, as opposed to the more common feeling among adults and older children of simply being bored by the lesson. It was a very specific desire to get home and play with my bath toys, and nothing else would have satisfied me at the time, not even recess which was probably less than an hour away. I remember being bored in class at other times (though not often) and that was a very distinct feeling, even though I felt the same frustration at not being able to leave the classroom.

I remember playing with the numbers on the signs at my first job.

I think my roommate may have seen me stimming with cards ("Wyoming"). I remember being reluctant to attend college specifically because I would need to give up my stimming habit, but then changed my mind after realizing I could do it in the woods. I was nearly an adult at this time, so I wonder why the urge to stim was still so strong. It's possible that our brains, even in late adolescence, still have childhood pleasure pathways open that close shortly afterwards. (And not just for autistics .... think about video games and loud music. I even remember seeing an apartment rental ad that specifically stated I had to be 25 or older. It wasn't explained, but I knew that it was about loud music and not something related to jobs or income.) Even if the above is true, though, I suspect one reason I stimmed so much in adolescence was that I didn't have reliable Internet access, nor a car to drive, so there wasn't a lot else for me to do.

side issue

I've said several times to others in conversation that while many adults are nostalgic for childhood, actually re-living it would be a prison sentence, as most of us would throw a fit on the first day back when we realize we're not allowed to control where we go, and (depending on what age we return to) might not even be allowed to leave the house. Why is it, then, that even the best off among us are not traumatized by our childhoods? I believe our brains change so dramatically as we age that what pleased us then will not please us now, and that even adults who greatly enjoy re-living childhood experiences with their own offspring would not actually want to re-live the experiences as actual children. I think also that our brains change so fast that there are even great differences between, for example, three-year-olds and six-year-olds.

Many of us remember happy childhood experiences at places such as theme parks. But if we actually re-lived our childhoods, we would not be able to visit those places at will. Neither do we get nearly as much pleasure from visiting such places as adults. Those few people who would enjoy reliving their childhood might be those same few who prefer routine over pleasure, perhaps because it makes them feel safe. Yet if we had adult minds I suspect we would not feel safe either.

bath toy video

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:

1. 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
2. the tape would need to be in working condition
3. the tape would need to be labeled such that we knew which of the many, many VHS tapes contained the video segment
4. 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
5. nothing else more important would come up in the meantime that would make my project seem like a trivial distraction

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.

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.

other thoughts about bath toys

because of increasing health problems, i've had to cut back on drinking and might need to stop altogether. i've noticed recently that i have the urge to play with the bath toys in a way i havent felt for quite some time, and i think it is a physical urge, not an emotional one.

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.

I dont think Ive ever used the head banging stim, because I only do this while listening to music, "like everyone else". It is also possible that head banging is "not a stim" because people do it to block out sensory information, but if the definition of stim is open to debate, this is a meaningless distinction, so I will consider it a stim now. Currently our article at Stereotypic movement disorder contradicts itself.

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.

traffic lights

I know I liked traffic lights enough that I was amused to hear there was a song called I Like Traffic Lights when I first heard about it as a teenager. (This was the early days of the Internet, so there was no way to play it. I was disappointed when I found the actual song some years later. But how could I not be? They werent singing about me.)

However, I suspect this wasnt really a stim. It's just that my parents somehow acquired a set of traffic light shells when I was very young, and those were my toys for a while. They were quite large and heavy, and in this era they had their colors in the glass, and I suspect all traffic lights were white underneath the shells.

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.

Sensory play

Sensory play seems to be big nowadays. it's possible it always was, but didnt have a name until recently. like I said, LiteBrite was around when I was a kid, and its popularity seems best explained by the fact that it has lights, and that's pretty much it.

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. 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.)

other links

This site refers to OCD's behaviors as stimming, but still carefully distinguishes them from the stims of autism.

hand washing post in an autism subreddit not related to OCD compulsive hand washing. drumming is probably a typo for stimming since there are other typos in the post. In the comments are other people talking about the same thing. i found this by searching for something like playing hands water autism because otherwise the OCD sense dominates even without OCD in the query string.

File:Tall_Autism_Happy_Hands.png