How Stimming Changes Over Time
We all know for a fact that autistics stim to regulate our inner and outer stimuli and to express ourselves, but another thing we donât usually hear about is that stims change over time. That can feel very invalidating when we track the patterns of our stims and see certain stims drop out of use, or stims we didnât like before becoming more normalized in our behaviors.
What can change our natural stims?
A Physical Illness. If you are feeling physical pain somewhere in your body, you may stop or change certain stims to avoid the pain. That stim can permanently be altered even after the pain goes away. Another example is if you develop a physical disability, new stims may come along with it like popping joints out of your socket or feeling scars on your body. If you are blind, you may like the way light shines on your eyeballs. Losing your hearing may give you a love for musical bass because you can physically feel the music in your chest.
A Mental Illness. Sometimes mental illnesses may make you choose to self-harm, but even after youâre emotionally better, you may still self-harm as a stim. Mental illness causes more internal distress, which may require us to stim more to regulate. Autistics who are anxious may stim more and autistics who are depressed may stim less, because our moods easily affect our stims.
Environmental Change. If you used to live in a bigger place, but had to move into a smaller place and vice-versa ,your stims would most likely change to match your area. If, for example, you liked to pace a lot, but you could no longer do it, you might start relying on rocking more. Itâs probable that living in a hotter climate, you may stim less outwardly to avoid overheating. Living somewhere colder, you may increase bodily stims to keep warm.
Ridicule and Abuse. This is one nearly every autistic has experienced. As a child, you may have been repeatedly punished or put down for engaging in a stim that someone did not like. Being in school, peers will have likely bullied you for doing something that they deemed âweirdâ. Even if we arenât abused, we are usually self aware enough to recognize when someone thinks we are abnormal. They might make a remark that they think is harmless, but it actually causes problems with our self-esteem. All of these things can make us choose to suppress our stims to avoid further punishment and ostracizing.
Pride and Knowledge. On the other hand, learning to love ourselves and gaining pride and familiarity of who we are as autistics and what that means may cause us to feel more comfortable engaging in many different forms of stimming. A couple of weeks of learning could âchangeâ us from doing hardly any stimming at all to doing a lot. This increase of outward stims does not mean we werenât stimming before. There are so many subtle ways to stim that itâs 100% possible that we were still stimming back then and just didnât consciously recognize it as such. (Continuing to learn about stimming and autism may help you figure out what those were.)
Growing Older. While growing older, our body may start to like certain stims less and other stims more, even if they do not cause pain. This could be for a number of reasons, but I believe itâs just our brain changing and adjusting with the increase of our life experiences. When you were younger you were probably working a lot harder to learn about life, and you were doing so many things for the first time and probably needed a lot more regulation than maybe you would while in your 40s, feeling very settled in your life and developing a hard set routine that hasnât changed much in the last ten years.
There are a number of reasons why our stimming habits may change. There are ones that exist that I couldnât even touch on and the ones I wrote about may not completely match up with your own experiences. The main point, though, is no matter if your stims have changed, increased, or decreased, they are still valid, and you are still autistic.
Day 11 of Autism Acceptance Month 2018
