I need a hug, essentially always

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I feel like to generally feel stable I need considerably more hugs than the average person. Except I also don't like strangers hugging me. To my understanding, it is not uncommon for people on the spectrum to be adverse to touch. Curious if this is a dichotomy that anyone else can relate to?

Do you like touch and associate it with emotional response?
Was it more to do with the physical pressure or psychic presence?
Which of these bits mattered more?


More or less, I do. Just not necessarily daily...
But I only allowed a very few to touch me.
Everyone else just doesn't feel right; awkward at best, tolerable for the wrong reasons.


My dichotomy lies with the need for pressure and my overall distrust of human presences.

The physical part of me is a bit welcoming -- who wouldn't likely mind a tap or a squeeze.
But the less physical part of me in my head, is always on guard and a bit wary to anyone who isn't allowed to touch me.

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I don’t generally like actual hugs, but I love giving virtual ones, so here, have a big dragon hug from me

((((((((((adromedanblackhole))))))))))

When an infant is put to bed, many times the infant is wrapped tightly with a blanket immobilizing the arms to keep the infant thrashing around at night. Dr. Harvey Karp is an American pediatrician and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and wrote “Happiest Baby on the Block” describes the technique he uses to calm a crying child and prepare it for sleep. "You need to be imitating the mother's womb.” One of the techniques is swaddling. Swaddling recreates the snug packaging inside the womb and is the cornerstone of calming. Swaddling keeps your baby's arms from flailing and prevents startling, which can start the cycle of fussing and crying all over again. It also lets your baby know that it's time to sleep.

Both these doctors recommend very similar techniques to calm stress in a core brain, which is applying pressure to hold the arms close to the trunk of the body.

Temple Grandin is a prominent author and speaker on both autism and animal behavior. Today she is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. She is a visual thinker Aspie. When she was attending college, she developed and patented a hug machine, also called a hug box, a squeeze machine, or a squeeze box. This device is a deep-pressure device designed to calm hypersensitive persons, usually individuals with autism spectrum disorders. It is a therapeutic, stress-relieving device to help overcome problems with an oversensitivity to touch. She describes the logic supporting the device as follows:

Deep touch pressure is the type of surface pressure that is exerted in most types of firm touching, holding, stroking, petting of animals, or swaddling. In contrast, light touch pressure is a more superficial stimulation of the skin, such as tickling, very light touch, or moving hairs on the skin. In animals, the tickle of a fly landing on the skin may cause a cow to kick, but the firm touch of the farmer's hands quiets her. Occupational therapists have observed that a very light touch alerts the nervous system, but deep pressure is relaxing and calming.

This is one reason why weighted blankets provide relief for many Aspies.

I have a copper back brace that I wear for compression. It does not replace my need for a hug though.

When I most "need a hug" is unfortunately exactly when I'm so strung out I'm likely to start flailing around and smashing things if someone so much as touches me. It's a problem.

When I was stressed, panicky, sad, lonely, scared, ANY form of constriction or restriction would bring on a REALLY bad panic attack.