Helping someone feel comfortable with their stims

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We are in a downward spiral.

Part of it is my daughter becoming increasingly self conscious about stimming.

I am still not 100% what she does are stims. She has done them since November. They are a series of hand movements and spins which she calls "checks" and she mostly does them at transition points and when she is overly anxious or at junctures where she is making a decision about something. I think they are stims as opposed to OCD. They make her brain feel good and re-balance her.

She has some silent ones she does in her head (as replacements) but they are not as satisfying. When she is happy she does them with more flourish and exaggerates them.

I stim to but most of my stims are quite small and discreet. Rubbing my fingernails, pinching myself, pacing... lining things up.

So anyway, how do I best help her come to terms with this? If she is going to continue her overt stims she will be asked questions. Friends already ask her. She doesn't like that. That makes her self conscious and is making it harder and harder for her to do them at ease.

What would you say and do?

That's a hard one.

My first thought: Try to have her restrain those stims amongst her peers, but be allowed to do them at home.

This society, even the most enlightened aspects of it, are not quite ready for stimming.

Thanks. We had a chat about stims and now I am even more confused. We compared stims and I said how I had this silly one when I was her age where I basically played this tune I knew from the piano but with my teeth and how if i did that now that would feel super uncomfortable but then it felt good. But chatting about stims and how they might evolve she says that the big ones - the very overt ones she calls checks - she doesn't want to do and it doesn't feel good doing them. That makes it sound more like OCD. But then most of the time I stim it is unconscious, like when I am bored in conversation, I only notice it after I have been doing it for a while.... hard to make sense of it all.

When I think of "checks," I think of "restraints," then I think of OCD because OCD is frequently about "checks" and "restraints."

Sounds rather like OCD to my untrained mind.

Same to my untrained mind.

Think I am slightly in denial about this as I am not keen on CBT and I don't quite know what do do with OCD.

Now I guess I have to go back to the dreaded autism unfriendly gp.

Otherwise, how is your daughter doing with her peers?

Which "autism unfriendly group?"

Really good, she has 2 best friends. They love her and she loves them. They come for sleepovers and love hanging out here. She is often the one who is singled out to get invited over to their houses for play dates and lunches out and barbecues and stuff. The tricky bits are school where she can get left behind in groups or find it hard to keep up socially. Most of the time her best friends stick with her but there is the occasion where they go off and she can't find them. Also, she is changing school from the summer.... she spent three days at the new school over this past year and each time found it easy to make friends. It might be harder to get another "best" friend but I think she is very social by nature (much more than me!) and she can always keep seeing her best friends at the weekends. In many ways it will be easier as she won't have to deal with the playground politics and can just see her two best friends in a home environment.

Sorry for the long exposition about the social life of my 8 year old. I am all jittery today! Crappy week. Hope you are doing better.

Oh, the gp ( general practitioner) is about the least autism friendly and knowledgable person in the world.

I'm sort of thinking that maybe your daughter might not have any sort of "pathology" at all. Perhaps she is "behind" socially---but she impresses people enough for them to want to assist her. I'm thinking "eccentric" more than I'm thinking "autistic." Or perhaps "Broad Autism Phenotype" could be a good descriptor.

Of course, I haven't observed your daughter over a long period of time (or any time, really )

When I was a kid, a few kids wanted to "assist" me, too (that's the basis for Kraftiekortie, by the way. It's a tribute to a kid who stood up for me when I was nine). But, mostly, I was isolated, teased, bullied by both teachers and students. It was quite obvious that there was something wrong with me as a student. It was even more evident when I was under 5 years of age. Then, I exhibited Kanner's-type signs.

Many times, there's a fine line between "pathology" and "eccentricity," in my opinion, when it comes to autism spectrum disorders (or lack thereof).

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 07 Jun 2018, 11:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Under 4-5 there was little to suggest autism, only when pressure and demands set in and she was out of cope.

A lot of the time it is actually her assisting other people. I will never forget the time when her friend came to our house for her first sleepover. She had tried at other people's houses but always gone home crying at 2 in the morning. My daughter bent over backwards to make her comfortable and to reduce her anxiety. And it worked. But my daughter had to go to bed most of the next day from the exhaustion.

My daughter has her ASC diagnosis. And I think she is very much an aspie but I think she does often pass. Easier in some ways, harder in others. We told the dentist last week as she needed some dental work and I thought it important to weigh up the need for braces against demand avoidance and other anxieties. I think the dentist was quite shocked.

I guess it's possible that she might have a "subtler" form of Asperger's or whatever, which could be the theorized "female" presentation.

There is a basis for believing the existence of the more subtle "female" presentation could be implicated in a relative lack of diagnosed females.

In my anecdotal experience, I haven't really seen a real preponderance of male Aspie types over female Aspie types---like what is represented in the literature (i.e., a 4-1 ratio between males and females).

To be honest I don't think she is all that subtle. I asked the clinicians when she got diagnosed if it was pretty obvious to them and they said they knew quite quickly. They also made the point of saying if school hadn't picked her up there would be other girls who were more subtle that they wouldn't pick up too.

That was a national very experienced centre which specialised in difficult presentations and girls though.

What’s most important, is that you love her—whatever pathology or lack of pathology she actually has. And that you’ll adjust based upon HER, and not some supposed composite or model.

Your avatar is one of those where you can see many different things depending upon one’s mood or visual orientation

Sometimes, I see a sea wave. Other times, I see a woman’s dress.

I do know that you are a person who has sort of a Renaissance Lady's type of knowledge of things.

Well one thing that really stood out at assessment was the cognitive testing. In some areas she was on the 99 percentile. They said high intelligence often helps girls mask and pass easier too.

She's very bright----that's for sure.

She has cognitive awareness---which, of course, does help her mask. She definitely has "aspects" of Asperger's, if not Asperger's itself.

I didn't "mask"----because I was too pathological at the time. I had no cognitive awareness. I had very little "awareness," period.

I had a severe neurological disorder which, at age 5, somehow resolved itself somewhat--to the point where I became more Aspergian than Kanner-like. More like your daughter. Though with not as much cognitive awareness as her. I was smart---but not bright like your daughter. I was smart in a limited sense.

It's stunning how much I really didn't know when I was younger----despite the fact that I was pretty academically "smart." When I was 18, for example, I wrote my "statement of purpose" (I was applying for university) in yellow crayon.

I sense that she will, through her cognitive awareness, make excellent use of her Aspergian aspects. Like people like Temple Grandin did.

She is very aware. This morning one of the struggles is she wanted to do her stims / checks but felt people might think she was a "jerk" so couldn't but then she couldn't not do them so she got caught.

It is very interesting what happened to you and how dynamic it all is.

I have seen that myself. We had a period at 5 years where she couldn't dress and sat naked for 3 weeks drawing on kraft paper which I covered the floor with... and then she transitioned out of that back to functioning really well again. It was never enough for me to suspect autism until she hit 8. But then I think in many families she would have gone into teenage years and adulthood before getting a diagnosis. Find that hard to imagine though.

The yellow crayon story is priceless. Did you rewrite it?

I feel it could go either way here... with the right academic environment all will be well, with the wrong environment I will be homeschooling within the next couple of years.

Nope....didn't rewrite it. I was too apathetic. All I wanted to do was get out of my mother's place. Going to university would have kept me there four more years.

I really don't know what possessed me to write the "statement of purpose" in yellow crayon. Perhaps I wanted to seem like I was "Bohemian," somehow. Bard College is known as a bastion of Bohemianism.

I was very apathetic in general. I was very much like some of the young people on WP; this is why I feel like I understand them fairly well.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 07 Jun 2018, 12:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.