#8 | Thinking About Stimming
Dec 20, 2021Watch the webclass, "4-Part Roadmap to Encourage Adulting Actions."
Download, "The Quick Start Guide to STEAR Mapping"
RESOURCES
Autistic people use stimming to soothe themselves. Experts assert that supporting their stimming is helpful to nurture self-acceptance thoughts to our autistic young adults.
However, our thoughts and others' reactions can create disturbing thoughts for us like, "They shouldn't do that in public," or "Those people are staring," and "Do they have to do that for so long?"
While we do our best every day to slow down the world for our autistic loved ones, sometimes we would also benefit from slowing things down for ourselves.
This video offers the action of recording our thoughts about stimming, then separating them into clean vs. dirty pain. Clean pain are the emotions that naturally arise from situations, like when we watch our kids suffer because they are autistic living in a mostly non-autistic world.
In BETTER THAN HAPPY, my coach, Jody Moore, says that "Clean pain is the type of pain we feel when we are going through a grieving process over what we thought would be." We want to give ourselves the space to feel those emotions. They are real, and letting them pass through us cleanses us.
Dirty pain, in contrast, is not as useful. It comes from the stories our brain offers that rejects what's happening. It's when we tell ourselves that something has gone wrong.
I advocate that recording our thoughts and noticing which type of pain they create can be helpful when we want to choose to practice those thoughts that create a life we love that works.
