If you could live without stimming, would you?

Anyway, most of my physical movements I could force to be somewhat normal, such as constant foot tappings, finger tappings, ect, and I learned to do stim things others don’t notice as much, like pinching my own hands. However, a life time of beig forced.shamed into trying to be more still has had its consequences. I am morbidly obese now when I wasn’t before. All the movements do burn caleries. :) Also, I think it has dulled my thinking. I remember my mother telling me to put down my book and go outside and play with the other kids like a normal child. She also put me in a mental hospital. I later read the reasons and one of them was that I keep bringing large amounts of mud in the house. I liked making mud pies, and putting myslef in as much mud as possible was calming in the way some people wrap themselves in blankets. My mother held a masters in phycology so she was listened to over me.

Understanding would go a long way to helping us all get along. Thank you for what you are doing.

My son has been diagnosed with Autism, and while he is now verbal and able to somewhat tradtionally communicate, I am glad there is more awareness with his generation.

I don’t know anything about Simone Weil, but I have a knee-jerk response to the items in her list (at least as they’re described) referred to as a need for obedience and punishment. That knee-jerk says “pontificating prick”. But I haven’t read the material, so it’s a pretty superficial judgment.

These needs, or food, are as essential for the life of the human soul as food, warmth and shelter are for the life of the body. The following ouline of these needs is taken from an anthology of Simone Weil’s writings.

The needs of the human soul are as follows: order, liberty, obedience, responsibility and initiative, equality, hierachism, honour, punishment, freedom of opinion and freedom of association, security, private property, collective property, and truth.

Order, which is the first of the soul’s needs, is an arrangement of social relationships such that no one is compelled to violate imperative obligations in order to carry out other ones.

Liberty is the ability, in the real sense of the word, to choose.

Obedience consists of two kinds: obedience to established rules and obedience to leaders.

Equality is the public and general recognition that the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being.

Hierachism consists of a certain veneration or devotion towards superiors considered not as individuals, nor in relation to the power they exercise, but as symbols.

Punishment is the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law. He is reinstated inside the law by being subjected to the punishment ordained by the law.

Security means that the soul is not under the weight of fear or terror.

Truth is the most sacred need of the human soul.

I suggest perhaps part of the problem is that Maslow (or at least, common interpretations of his theory) fuses the prioritization we all do on the basis of IMPORTANCE with the prioritization we all do on the basis of IMMEDIACY. The very most basic “needs” that are supposed to be at the base of the Maslow hierachy pyramid deals primarily with TIME-BOUND needs: if we cannot breathe and continue to breathe then this becomes a threat to our survival within minutes. If we value life, and something abruptly threatens our ability to breathe (and thus to live beyond five minutes from now), then this necessarily becomes an immediate priority over more long-term needs like making friends. If we suddenly have no access to water, this is not quite as immediate an emergency but can still threaten our survival if this situation seems set to last beyond a few hours (if it is hot and we are exercising) or a few days (if it is not too hot and we are relatively sedentary). Finding a new source of water would necessarily also need to take precedence over things that can wait a few days without threatening survival. Threatening our more immediate needs does also threaten our ability to meet our longer-term needs: if we die tonight then we will not be here tomorrow to meet our need for creative outlet by spending the next day composing a symphony or writing a poem.

In other words, it may be that the things Maslow defines as “higher level” priorities might be better defined as “less time-immediate needs” rather than necessarily less important per se. If we, for most of our lives, have the most basic levels of Maslow’s hierachy of needs (i.e., our most time-sensitive needs) without needing to devote extraordinary and on-going amounts of time and attention to meeting these needs, this means we have the chance to meet our so-called “higher-level” (less time-sensitive) needs as well. So if we have already had the chance to invest in these less immediate needs (for example, we have several strong relationships with friends/family that we value; we are able to invest time in creative or other endeavors to meet our self-actualization needs etc.), and then a temporary crisis emerges (the emphasis here being on TEMPORARY), this means we can meet our short-term survival needs (food, shelter, yada yada) and put long-term (so called “higher-level” needs) on hold without sacrificing them altogether. If we spend a few days following an earthquake focused on immediate survival, this would not necessarily threaten longer term goals such as achieving “self actualization” through training for a career that is dear to our hearts. Nor would it need to threaten our ability to nourish our loving relationship with family or friends over the long term: if our relationships already have a reasonably good foundation then it can withstand the stress of being out of touch for a few weeks or months (in the case of friends/distant relatives in remote locations) or even the more immediate stress of maybe being more cranky and short tempered with each other for a few days (in the case of immediate family with whom one weathers the crisis).

I think where Maslow may break down in a more visible way is over the longer term, maybe particularly for people who experience what people in more comfortable circumstances would term a “crisis” as an ongoing state of existence. Longer-term needs can be put on hold for a brief time if that becomes necessary in order to focus on meeting more immediate (usually survival) needs. But as Amanda points out, that does not mean we can simply sacrifice them altogether. And it certainly does not mean that we lose the DESIRE to meet longer-term needs. What it does mean is that the constant scrabble to meet more immediate needs makes it much HARDER to meet longer-term needs, which do usually require an on-going investment of time, energy, and effort to achieve. Certain longer-term goals (such as achieving an academic degree) also require that on-going investments of time etc. be available in predictable increments over a certain sustained period of time. (e.g., we may need to be able to devote 5 or 10 hours a week to studying for a particular course on a consistent basis for X weeks, which would not be possible if a more immediate crisis disrupts this schedule.) That’s very different from saying that these longer-term needs are necessarily less IMPORTANT as common interpretations of Maslow’s theory (or the theory itself) would seem to imply.

That’s why we have an 80% failure rate in Research and Development teams full of degreed professionals who’re being paid (and paid well) ostensibly for their ability to be objective. It’s the reason we have the Outsider Effect, because the herd instinct has always been more closely associated with survival than has been the ability to rationalize.

But I actually talked about Maslow some in the 2nd chapter of this book I’ve still not published yet and part of that included pointing out specifically that it breaks down with amazing frequency. Just off the top of my head, teenagers often commit suicide over “acceptance” issues. Acceptance is supposed to be much higher up than breathing — doesn’t keep them from intentionally stopping with the breathing thing. Which tells me that at least for some people and/or at some times, those “higher” needs are much more fundamental, no matter how trivial some folks think they are.

But everyone got it wrong about why we were doing it. The psychiatrists thought it was caused by some kind of “imbalance” in our brain and was related to our OCD, though the drugs they gave us never put a dent in it; the therapists believed that we were harming ourselves on purpose because we felt we were bad and ugly and deserved to be hurt (we did feel this way at the time, but it was not why we did it). Our main therapist speculated at one point that the reason we did it was because we were “so dissociated from our body that we couldn’t feel pain” (not true at all). She also used to ask us, for some reason, if we could “feel our feet” and seemed to think we couldn’t (I would think we would have trouble walking on them if we couldn’t?).

Ironically, the more we were told that we were only doing it because we hated ourselves, the more angry we became with ourselves for being unable to stop (and the more it was treated as a thing we were deliberately choosing to do). Presumably, after we had come to feel better about ourselves, the “behavior” should stop– shouldn’t it? We tried sitting on our hands, having other people hold our hands away from our head, biting and scratching our hands or slamming them against things as “punishment” when we caught ourselves doing it, and none of that worked. Most of the time, it seems now in retrospect, we needed it as a sort of “focus.” Admittedly, it wasn’t the most innocuous focus, but it was the one that became entrenched. We don’t do it nearly as much any more, but I think that this is largely because we’ve learnt to identify the signs of overload in ourselves. It was probably a lot of other things too, but the vast majority of the time, it was actually never the “self-hate issue” it was always treated as. Neither was banging our head, or anything similar. We did spend long periods of time hating ourselves, but it didn’t necessarily follow from there that every time we did something apparently “self-harming,” we could only ever be doing it because we hated ourselves.

At the time, we needed to do it. We couldn’t not do it. We didn’t have the time or the mental energy to get ourselves set in some new habit that didn’t look bizarre to others or leave bald spots on our head. We didn’t realize it until years later, however, and just spent our entire teenage years castigating ourselves for “being weak.” However, if we hadn’t been forcibly immersed in the environments we were in, we might not have had that need, or to such an extent.