Let’s talk about harmful stims, everybody.

butterflyinthewell:

autasticanna:

I’m sure we’re all guilty of stimming in a way that was physically harmful to ourselves. Picking at our skin, pulling our hair, biting our lips. A lot of harmful stims can be avoided with access to stim toys, because many of them are absent-minded. If you’ve got a tangle, your fingers will mess with that instead of picking at themselves. If you’ve got a chew necklace, you can gnaw on that instead of the side of your hand.

But those aren’t the harmful stims I want to talk about. I want to talk about violent stims.

Banging your head against a wall. Slapping yourself in the face. Pricking or even cutting yourself. Those stims.

They’re one of the primary things allistics use in their evidence of how scary and terrible autism is. And that makes a certain degree of sense, because violent stims are scary. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen allistics actually discussing the root of these and why they happen, instead of just how to hit us until we stop, and that’s a huge problem.

Here’s a story. Several weeks ago, in my terrible old job, I had to go to work while I was in the middle of a multiple-day burnout. I had already missed a day because of it and I couldn’t afford to miss another one. I got stuck with a headset with a microphone that was too hot and put all the noise from the room directly into my ears. My headphones were also broken, so I had to try and understand what people on the other line were saying through loud static on top of every other sound in the room. I made it about an hour before I started feeling like I was going to die. I could feel myself shutting down, which I could not afford to do at a job that required me to talk constantly. I couldn’t go home. So to keep from going catatonic during the pauses between calls, I stabbed myself in the arm with a mechanical pencil repeatedly. Not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough to leave little red marks in my skin for two days afterward. 

I tried other stims. I went to work that day armed to the teeth. I brought my cube, my sequin band, a little jar of slime, a bottle of perfume, everything I had. I knew it would be bad. I was prepared for it to be bad. But in a situation that overwhelming, no harmless method I had was enough. Physical pain was the only thing keeping me responsive. It wasn’t for attention. It wasn’t to make a point. It was just the only thing that could stop my soul from rocket-launching out of my body.

I’m not defending violent stims. They’re bad and they shouldn’t happen. But according to what I’ve observed, they are almost always a “Dire Circumstances Last Resort” stim. They’re the autistic hail mary. They only rear their ugly heads in situations of extreme mental, emotional or physical overload. The best way to stop us from doing them is to not put us in those situations in the first place.

This, this, SO MUCH THIS.