The world is a scary place.

Re: trichotillomania.

I didn’t know there was anything wrong/abnormal with this until about 2 years ago, when I stumbled upon an article on it. In other words, when I was bleeding and not feeling it, and when I was ripping my hair out and investigating how cool and slippery the hair root was, and how the tip of each hair root has a black dot on it, and how you can slide the hair root off the hair…I just did it, and didn’t think about it or wonder if other people did it. In other words, there wasn’t a “name” for it in my mind as a child.

I wonder how many things do not become “sick” in a person’s mind until after they are told by someone else that it is “sick.”

And yes, feeling pain but not registering it the same way as everyone else outwardly is one thing. And there’s more than one reason for not feeling pain when you do get hurt. And then there’s expressing pain early in life but getting told over and over “that didn’t hurt!” until you don’t trust your perceptions. And there’s not being able to conceptualize pain very well despite feeling it. And there’s feeling it and reacting to it but not consciously noticing it. And there’s having a chronic pain condition that by comparison makes other pain feel like nothing, or that actually results in diminished touch sensation in some areas but increased in others. And… so forth. There’s a lot of things, and I can’t do them justice right now.

What I meant, with regards to abuse, was that whole entire kinds of people get declared unilaterally incapable of pain, and by extension incapable of suffering when abused. That’s one reason why I wouldn’t classify “all autistics” that way, nor even “all nonverbal autistics” (Tito has done that and it’s one of the few things he’s said that has really pissed me off, because he basically says that if an autistic person can’t speak then you shouldn’t worry about hurting them because they won’t feel their body much anyway, which is only true of some, and not all “innately”). It’s just not true in any universal sense and sets people up for abuse.

Something on the order of:

“My cousin’s best friend did that… doesn’t that have a name or something?”

“Yeah, it’s called trich-o-till-o-mania.”

“Mmm.”

“Yeah.”

The odd thing is I don’t remember this conversation occurring only once. It seemed to occur rather frequently in my presence, and the fact that I was there was almost never directly acknowledged at all.

I have bald spots but I have such thick hair that they don’t show up unless my hair is really short. (Shorter than it is right now.)

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/trichotillomania/AN00026

I have no idea if this is considered a kind of SIB or more of an OCD, or if the two are related.

I still pick at myself, practically all over myself, all the time, but I don’t pull out my hair anymore because I’m trying to hang onto it in my old age ;-)

I first started thinking about this “under-registering” and “over-registering” pain a few months back, after answering several caregiver questionnaires given to me by my autistic 4-year-old’s occupational therapists.

Ben is an “under-register” according to their questionnaires, whereas my other son is an “over-register” of pain. Not only that, but the same thing goes for fears. Ben is hardly scared of anything and will approach classically scary things, like people in clown suits and dogs or whatever, and David is phobic of a lot of things even to this day.

I can definitely see how someone could look at someone’s OT profile in let’s say an institution (if even something like that would exist, I don’t even know), and see “under-registers pain” and use that as an excuse to inflict pain on that person.

The other thing I was thinking about was this. On top of Ben supposedly “under-registering” pain, he has severe motor planning difficulties in the area of language. I wonder if it’s really a myth that he under registers pain; rather, maybe because of his motor planning difficulties, he doesn’t cry and scream as fast or as intensely as nonautistic/normal kids would because the signal is not getting to his brain at the same rate.

In other words, perhaps the pain is just as painful but the outward behavior suggests otherwise, and because he can’t verbalize his pain it is just assumed that he is under-registering it. I can see how this can set somebody up for abuse.

All I can do is speak for myself when I say, I did NOT and generally do not (I just remembered slicing my hand open on a catfood can in adulthood…it’s all coming back to me…) feel those things the way I “should have” felt them. It was like I was watching somebody else bleeding. Ironically, I can’t watch other people’s *papercuts,* let alone gushing blood. My stomach literally flip-flops when it comes to someone else, but I can inject myself and cut myself and it doesn’t really bother me at all. The cuts start to really hurt when they are healing, however.

I think that explains it for me very well. It isnt about pain or hating myself because actually I think I’m rather fabulous and I dont really like pain/ discomfort. I find stimming has the same effect if not suppressed. I have subtle ones for work!! yup, it feels like it stops my head spinning off somewhere scary when things are stressful.