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BTW if you want to see a big group of NTs stimming… go to a rave and look for people on xtc.

For me the lights and music = instant stim. No drugs needed.

But I still have stimms and have even devises less obtrusive forms of the ones that work. I use them deliberately now that I have discovered what they do and what benefit they can yield. If you think of stimms as an attempt to impose stability on the mind with a physical action, (usually if not always a repetative action), then you may see that they are an attempt to stabilize the mind against a barage of distractions either internal or external. This is precisely what stimms do for me. My need for them is less these days and I use them to keep my mind on task, I have cultivated ones that are not particularly obtrusive and do not appear all that much beyond the scope of normal.

Possibly my best example is finger snapping when I am looking for something. It merely looks like I am impatient about something, but the action and sound of repeated finger snapping keeps my mind focused on looking for an object and prevents my mind from wandering off on other thoughts even pressing ones.

Exactly how does it work. I am not sure, but while I am doing it things seem to almost magically appear, often while I am looking right at them and not seeing them. The finger snapping brings my mind back to task and I remember that is the thing I am seeking.

Needing something (e.g. a tool) is a distraction to the task at hand. The overall task is dominating my thoughts and the finger snapping seems to break that dominance for my search efforts to bear fruit. The primary task at hand and/or a myriad of minor distractions are interfering with the necessary ancillary task of finding the tool. Frustration rises but the rythmic stimm is like some sort of metronome for regulating the mind and getting it to work orderly.

Ok, while that is my take on the matter, it suggests that a child having fallen into a stimm behavior is really trying. Albeit others may see it as distractive, annoying, and inappropriate. I probably bug some people while looking for something on the shelves in the store and snapping my fingers, but it is minor, and not so wierd to them as if I flapped my hands.

Those of us who don’t want to change don’t understand why the push to make autistics appear ‘normal’. Unless we are physical hurting ourselves or others, does our stimming really make a difference? By definition, it is our response and attempt to accept the rest of the world. Is it really important to lose the diagnosis? Is the ultimate goal to appear normal? These desires are always what NTs want so that they can be comfortable around them. They don’t take into account our comfort whatsoever. Do you really realize that we expend a great amount of energy and effort it takes to act ‘normal’? So many of us need days to recuperate. Tony Atwood described it best with his “tree in a clearing” analogy. If we compensate for a less mature ‘social tree’, our other, dominate trees will tire more easily and will not fully function in the way they should. Why try to cripple us? Accept us and allow us to function in our own normal, natural way. We don’t need to change, you need to understand us and accept us for who we are and what we have to offer.