#ticklishness

🇬🇧🇨🇦🇺🇸 Dunno if I've already posted this bruh (Sorry to whoever made it, the original image was of terrible quality and I had to redo it. I couldn't read the signature to keep it💔💔💔)

Nay, I say!

When your Ler knows exactly what you’re feeling.

When they know just the right touch on just the right spot.

When they know how desperate you are to make it stop.

In the past year or so, I've come across an interesting question more than once in a few different online tickling communities that has really prompted me to think deeper on the whole experience of being tickled. It's a deceptively simple question with a heartwarming innocence around it. It's been posed a few different ways, but the core question is, "What does being tickled feel like?" Honestly, the question has caught me off guard each time I've seen it. My surprise was much like what it would be if hearing someone ask, "What does pizza taste like?" Sure, there are certainly people on earth who haven't had pizza before, but I don't know any of them. It just takes me out of my experience for a moment and helps me reflect on how others' experiences are different. It's also given me some new insights about what it means to be ticklish and why some of us might have different experiences with it.

What's the big deal? you might be thinking. Some people just aren't ticklish! Yeah, I do know that, and some of the people posing the question were definitely coming at it from that angle. That part was much less surprising to me, as I have met people who genuinely aren't ticklish (though I'm still fascinated by that group as well). The big surprise for me came from those asking because they had never been tickled before. I guess it's just something I hadn't considered up to that point. Some had been tickled a little, such as a quick little poke or squeeze, but not enough to have a full grasp of what it feels like, while others had never been tickled by anyone to any degree. It's difficult to imagine how they must feel. Like all ticklephiles, they also have an evident fascination to the same weird activity that we all know as tickling, but while carrying a deeply unsatisfied curiosity for what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the experience itself. Something about that idea, and the sentiments layered in each person's question really pulled at my emotional strings and made me feel for their longing. It made me want to give each of them a warm and safe first-time tickling experience to bridge the gap and satisfy that missing piece for them.

Back to the question at hand, though: What does it actually feel like to be tickled? It's an extremely difficult question to answer in any kind of meaningful way that would help someone who's never had the experience before to truly understand it. Trying to answer the question has reminded me of a classic question that often comes up in the fields of Psychology and Philosophy, which is, Is it possible to adequately describe a color to a person who has been totally blind since birth? The widely accepted answer to that question is no. For example, a lot of people will try to describe the color red as being warm, rich, bold, vibrant, or passionate, but even all of those descriptions together don't begin to give someone an idea of what the color red looks like when they have no experience with color at all. I think the question about tickling is probably the same way. It's just something that has to be experienced first-hand to fully appreciate how it feels. That being said, much like the exercise of trying to describe a color to a blind person, I think there's still something that can be gained by both parties in trying to answer the question anyway. And so I'm going to give it an attempt here, fully expecting to fall short, but aspiring to give at least some level of insight to those that are curious, and hoping to acquire a more intimate understanding of it all myself.

For a while now, I've had an idea that I call the dimensions of ticklishness, which refers to the different categorical aspects of what the experience of being tickled is like. Though it's somewhat reflective of academic research and literature, it's not completely founded in established hard science and leans on some of my own anecdotal experience and observations. Like a lot of similar constructs, it's a tool to help break a complex idea down into simpler parts to make it easier to understand (as opposed to being an accurate and infallible representation of reality. And I think the kind of breakdown this provides is the best place to start in attempting to answer the question of what it feels like to be tickled. So next I'll list and describe what I feel are the known dimensions of ticklishness. Remember that these are broad categorizations and there will be some slight overlap in concepts because of the intertwined messiness of human experience, but the idea is to understand that there are fairly independent aspects to the experience that vary in their manifestations from person to person. Some people even have little or no experience on one dimension, but a very intense experience on another.

Dimensions of Ticklishness

Sensory: This encompasses the sensations one experiences when being tickled. Each person has a different degree of sensitivity, and aside from that, the actual sensations themselves can be very different types of sensory experiences from person to person. Light tickling (as in light strokes across the skin) are usually felt as something like tingly, prickly, itchy, or sparky sensations. Some people experience light tickling more on the side of pleasure, while others interpret them more as discomfort or even pain. On the other hand, hard tickling, as in the kind done by squeezing, poking, and other forms of firmer pressure, is often felt as more of a jolt, shock, or similar spike in sensation. It's usually a sharper, more noticeably intense sensation. For that reason, people are more likely to interpret it as a discomfort or pain than for soft tickling. In addition, some people are simply more pain sensitive and it's easier to cross into that threshold, but can still experience hard tickling as a pain-free sensation.

Reflexive: This encompasses the involuntary and semi-voluntary reflexes of a person being tickled. The specific reflexive responses to being tickled can vary quite a bit from person to person, but may include laughter, crying, screaming, other vocalizations, sweating, nervous tremors, pulling away, muscle spasms, elevated breathing and heart rate, and various other fight or flight responses. If the person experiences the tickling more as a pleasurable sensation, they may move into the sensation more than pull away, though it is possible to both experience it as very pleasurable, and for the body to still reflexively twitch or pull away. If someone is very ticklish, they may experience anticipatory reflexes, reacting before the tickling actually happens.

Emotional: This encompasses any and all emotional aspects involved in the experience of being tickled. Parts of the brain involved in emotional processing and regulation are involved when someone is tickled. Because brains are very plastic and have great variability between individuals, the emotional response and experience of being tickled can be so different between people, or even for the same person under different circumstances (such as environment, mood, who's doing the tickling, etc.). The emotional connection to tickling can be a link to some of the reflexive reactions some people have, such as laughter, crying, etc.). Just as much as the sensory dimension, if not more, the emotional dimension plays an important role in what it actually feels like to be tickled. It's the lens through which we see the rest of the experience. Depending upon how the brain interprets being tickled, it can evoke feelings of playfulness, distress, anger, fear, anxiety, confusion, happiness, bonding, romance, sexual desire, panic, desirability, and much more. It's important to realize that someone's reflexively emotional outward expressions are not necessarily always representative of their inner emotional experience. For example, someone may be laughing from being tickled, but having a very bad experience, or someone may be crying and having the best time of their life. No assumptions should be made based on outward expression and regular communication is important to ensure both the tickler and the ticklee are comfortable.

Taking those different dimensions of experience into consideration, one can at least have an idea of the different ways tickling is experienced by different people. There are clearly more typical ways that people experience it, such as laughter producing jolts of exciting, but difficult to tolerate, sensation. However, there are more atypical ways in which it's experienced, such as a pleasurable, spasm-inducing response that produces no laughter at all. There's a matrix of many different possibilities, which to me is one of the aspects of tickling others that is so fun and fascinating. Each ticklee can be fun and interesting in their own unique way and it's always exciting to explore and figure out how their ticklishness works.

For me personally, tickling often feels like jolts of unbearable sensitivity, kind of like electricity. I instinctively want to pull away from it like when an ice cube is touched to a very sensitive area. I often reflexively laugh, but out of self-consciousness, I try to hold it in. Sometimes just hearing the word or being threatened with tickling will fill me with a sense of nervous excitement. Under the right conditions, for me it is unbearable and I will beg and try to escape, though my inner experience is that of enjoyment.