Stimming

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Today, my 20-year old son told me that he believed that he stimmed as a small child because it made him "high" in such a way that he was able to better cope. I was shocked. He told me that even now, if he is having a mentally pleasurable conversation, he might stim in order to derive even more mental pleasure from what is being discussed. He said he remembered me asking him why he stimmed for the last 15 years and now he finally had an answer for me. I hope that he can give others insight into this as well as he did for me. He said he knew why he stimmed by the time he was in middle school but couldn't properly explain it to me up until now. He said having a glass of wine at college after a stressful emotional event (relationship break-up) gave him clarity into his stimming and why he did it. He told me he believed that just the idea of being "in" a relationship made him high. He confessed that he convinced himself that he liked the girl but actually knew very little about her plus they had absolutely nothing in common yet he felt incredibly pained that she didn't want a relationship with him. Can anyone relate?? Isn't commonality and familiarity the glue that holds people together?

I am glad I never had to go through this philosophizing exercise. See, we live in an information era. You can google. You can search for information. So, there is no need to repeat other people's mistakes.

It bugs me that parents would spend time philosophizing about the "purpose" of stimming.

I mean, autism is not new. We are 75 years after Leo Kanner's 1943 paper on child autism. (See, you can google to check I don't lie.) Stimming is the most common characteristic of autistic children. If there is a universally-accepted answer to the "purpose," don't you think that researchers would have found it out decades ago? Do you think you, or your son, would be the first one in the world to find it? I mean, these are all simple questions. These questions have been asked by millions of people. What makes you think that Google wouldn't return an answer to you?

Another good thing to do is: you observe. You observe those parents that ask these questions, and so many of them claim to have understood the purpose of stimming. Then you watch the development of their children. Guess what? I see them fail. Their children just don't develop well.

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The point is, when parents philosophize, children then go through underdevelopment. Philosophizing is harmful to the development of the children.

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So the point is: why do people repeat the mistakes of other parents? One family after another embark on the exact same route. One family after another fail. One after another family suffer. What's the fun in all that?

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A week ago or so there was this hurricane Michael in Florida. At the same time, it was probably nice and dry in the Sahara Desert. What's the point? The point is, moisture comes from evaporation of water into the air. You would hope all that moisture were distributed evenly. But it is not. Some places get storms, some places are dry. You find local peaks of wet and dry weather. There is something called the "butterfly effect." In popular culture, it says: a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. The mathematical formalism is known as the "Chaos Theory."

Similarly, autism is a renormalization phenomenon inside the human brain.

http://wrongplanet.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=368385

The location of those giant dewdrops inside human brains is dictated by chaos theory. They are essentially unpredictable. It is almost pointless to ask why hurricane Michael lands in Florida Panhandle and not somewhere else. Some of these spots of hightened attention are connected to the positive center of the brain, leading to stimming behaviors. Some of them are connected to negative center of the brain, leading to sensory/rigidity issues.

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I saw the chaotic origin of stimming, from very early on. That is why I always tell parents to stop philosophizing. The question to ask is never WHY. But WHAT. Parents should ask: "WHAT can I teach my children when they are stimming?"

See, the same parents the complain about their children's stimming, are also the parents that complain that their children are not learning, not developing. Do you see the irony?

Stimming is the moment of maximum attention of autistic children. If you don't teach them at their moment of maximum attention, when are you going to teach them?

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This goes to the entire idea of "modulation." Read the "Fun and Facts" article.

http://www.eikonabridge.com/fun_and_facts.pdf

See, to me, autism is one and one single issue, solvable by using one and one single tool. That tool is called "modulation."

Look at the Yin-Yang diagram:



There is a dot of Yin in Yang, and a dot of Yang in Yin.

Modulation goes from the positive to the negative. From the known to the unknown. From the happy to the sad. By leveraging the modulation technique, you open space-time wormhole tunnels inside the brains of the children, and help to establish more and more connections inside their brains. As I always say: elementary, my dear Watson.

That all there is to autism. That's how I managed to develop my children. I have used one and single tool to develop my children. You see I do one thousand things: I draw pictures, I make animation video clips, I prepare hand-drawn card albums, I build model safety elevators, I assemble electronic circuits, I take my son to elevator rides, I tell them: "Sometimes life is tough, sometimes life is fun." I do a thousand things. What you don't see is that, behind everything I do, it's simply all about modulation.

Autism is simple, and beautiful. It's just too bad that people can't see the true face of it.

From some of the stuff I've read by people with autism and from other research stimming can be a way to regulate emotions/behavior so it would seem plausible that if someone were to stim in a given moment where they felt connected to another human being that possibly that self regulation could cause them to feel more rather than less connected. I know sometimes when I'm discussing a pleasurable outing to my oldest son who has autism that he will flap his hands energetically. It seems reasonable that the flapping is accentuating the positive response he is having to planning our outing.

I've also heard the comparison of stimming with deep breathing.

In regard to the above response it may have been well intended but was delivered with such acrimony I'd find it hard to follow. I'm also not a fan of one size fits all approaches to responses to autism.