Feeling guilty about stimming

[Cutesie]

Without going into an exhaustive history of my stimming (which is tempting to do), I'll try to make it brief. I stimmed a lot as a kid (rocking the most prominent one), then much of it seemed to just disappear. I have no memory of trying to stop.

When I went into mental health crisis fourteen years ago, a lot of stimming returned. Now there are many days when it's happening every couple of minutes. It's finger wringing and hand twisting that I do a good deal, probably because that works for walking, which I do for hours at a time.

There's another reason that those stims are common for me, I think. They are the strange, stereotypical stims that I was used to seeing in autistics. My brother Ikey (pseudonym) used to do it a ton. (Now my fingers move more than his.) Others, too. Like @AuroraBorealis mentioned here, my stimming increased with my self-diagnosis of ASD. Knowing this has caused discomfort, thinking that I'm faking it to "confirm" my autism.

It's not that that bothers me so much, though. I tend to stim more in front of other people. Some of this can be attributed to the added stresses of being in public - but not all of it. I can tell that I'm doing it on purpose to get attention. Not that the purposefulness is at the top of my consciousness. It's really confusing, by the way, to try figuring out how voluntary stimming is.

When I'm upset and isolated in my pain, I want to cry out to someone, anyone, that I'm hurting. I want to run around and scream, to let everyone know that I'm crazy. Instead, I stim in front of them. Why does this bother me so much? Because I feel that I'm misappropriating the autistic's tool for my non-autistic problems.

After the thrill of that initial discovery of my autism had died down, I'd started to question it. Maybe it was just ADHD or something like that. (I'm not diagnosed with that either, but it's quite clear that I have it.) Combine that with the my psychological issues and maybe it's not autism at all. Maybe I'm just finding an excuse to explain why I'm living a failed existence. Those thoughts had gotten so far that I could feel guilty about stealing a feature from this community.

Now that I'm back to thinking of myself as autistic, perhaps these thoughts will go away, and this post will just be a story of what once was.

 

[Jumpinbare]

FWIW, I found I was doing my main stim while reading your post.

 

[jsilver256]

I can't say what the case is for you, but for me about 3-4 months post-diagnosis, the stimming really kicked in. I attribute it to a combination of stopping drinking and success in therapy.

Prior to that, I was locking myself in a room and shutting down basically 24/7, going through work motions. I also had very repetitive mental stims - like thinking certain images / playing certain games on a continuous loop.

My therapist says I stim twice as much as other ASDs and he attributes that to a lack of being able to express my emotions verbally. Both stimming and outbursts are emotional catharsis. Since I have little in the way of expressing myself verbally, that emerges as increased stimming.

Stimming is a strange sensation (when you get aware of it) but I need to remember that my pre-diagnosis existence wasn't really living.

 

[Cutesie]

My therapist says I stim twice as much as other ASDs and he attributes that to a lack of being able to express my emotions verbally. Both stimming and outbursts are emotional catharsis. Since I have little in the way of expressing myself verbally, that emerges as increased stimming.

This seems very familiar. On a good day, I'm stimming at least every couple of minutes. Each time is due to some stimulus of anxiety or, mire rarely, positive excitement. It could be anything that sets me off - sights, sounds, touch and my thoughts.

It's interesting that noticing my stimming level can tell me what mood I'm in. Often, I feel rotten but can't isolate what type of feeling it is. This week, for instance, I noticed how little I was stimming during a terrible meltdown. It was then that I realized that depression, rather than anxiety, was the driving force in my mind at the time.