![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
These are my thoughts and reactions to the recent touch threads, which I found fascinating. This has been simmering in my mind for a while, but I was a little hesitant to post it — the last thing I need is to brand myself as a person who doesn't like to be touched. Yet my experiences are so far removed from those given in the other threads that I couldn't resist.
I don't relate well to other people via touch. I now attribute this primarily to my mild Asperger's as touch issues are very common on the autistic spectrum. In particular, it never feels natural for me to initiate any sort of casual contact (beyond handshakes, which are fairly ritualized) with another person. Admittedly, part of this may have been learned, or at least reinforced, when I was young. I have vague memories of having boundary issues as a child, also common in autistics.
Furthermore, it rarely even occurs to me to touch someone; I often go weeks at a time without any sort of physical contact with another living creature. Does this bother me? Occasionally, though I'm usually not conscious of it these days. In my adolescent years, however, it was the cause of much anxiety and pain. The problem is that a lot of people use touch as an integral component of their body language. Some of these people react suspiciously to a lack of touch, though most seem to just consider me even more aloof than I already am.
While I find myself unable to initiate contact, I do enjoy being touched and don't really feel the need to give explicit consent or protect my personal space. Additionally, once contact has started I find it less unnatural to reciprocate. Until recently, however, this touch issue was further compounded by a neural inhibition problem. That is, I was very jumpy. The odds were pretty good that whenever somebody touched me I would involuntarily twitch or jerk. This is not the reaction that most people want and after a few iterations they generally give up.
I remember well the first time anybody touched me in a suggestive manner. I was a sophomore in high school and her name was Rebecca. She was a member of our band's dance team and was very sexy in a cowgirl kind of way. I didn't really know her very well, but we had been flirting a little that day. We had been at a band picnic and I was driving a group of people home; Rebecca was sitting next to me. She put her hand on my inner thigh and my leg immediately jammed the accelerator to the floor causing us to run a redlight and nearly get in an accident. The rest of the car found it amusing, she did not. Thankfully the jumpiness problem has been largely resolved in the last year as a result of Feldenkrais lessons.
Intimate contact is easier than casual contact, perhaps in part because at that point consent has generally been established and urges more primal take over. It wasn't always easier. My first girlfriend, who was very tactile, had a helluva time with me — I didn't know about Asperger's then and she took some of my contact issues personally. Thankfully she was fairly patient and I eventually learned a lot from her, though not without some strife. Of course, to get to the intimate contact phase you generally have to go through casual contact first. Unsurprisingly, most of the people I've slept with have been fairly aggressive.
While I'm usually more of a visual and auditory person, I have found that certain serotogenic substances will make me extremely tactile. My first such experience was mind blowing.
I don't relate well to other people via touch. I now attribute this primarily to my mild Asperger's as touch issues are very common on the autistic spectrum. In particular, it never feels natural for me to initiate any sort of casual contact (beyond handshakes, which are fairly ritualized) with another person. Admittedly, part of this may have been learned, or at least reinforced, when I was young. I have vague memories of having boundary issues as a child, also common in autistics.
Furthermore, it rarely even occurs to me to touch someone; I often go weeks at a time without any sort of physical contact with another living creature. Does this bother me? Occasionally, though I'm usually not conscious of it these days. In my adolescent years, however, it was the cause of much anxiety and pain. The problem is that a lot of people use touch as an integral component of their body language. Some of these people react suspiciously to a lack of touch, though most seem to just consider me even more aloof than I already am.
While I find myself unable to initiate contact, I do enjoy being touched and don't really feel the need to give explicit consent or protect my personal space. Additionally, once contact has started I find it less unnatural to reciprocate. Until recently, however, this touch issue was further compounded by a neural inhibition problem. That is, I was very jumpy. The odds were pretty good that whenever somebody touched me I would involuntarily twitch or jerk. This is not the reaction that most people want and after a few iterations they generally give up.
I remember well the first time anybody touched me in a suggestive manner. I was a sophomore in high school and her name was Rebecca. She was a member of our band's dance team and was very sexy in a cowgirl kind of way. I didn't really know her very well, but we had been flirting a little that day. We had been at a band picnic and I was driving a group of people home; Rebecca was sitting next to me. She put her hand on my inner thigh and my leg immediately jammed the accelerator to the floor causing us to run a redlight and nearly get in an accident. The rest of the car found it amusing, she did not. Thankfully the jumpiness problem has been largely resolved in the last year as a result of Feldenkrais lessons.
Intimate contact is easier than casual contact, perhaps in part because at that point consent has generally been established and urges more primal take over. It wasn't always easier. My first girlfriend, who was very tactile, had a helluva time with me — I didn't know about Asperger's then and she took some of my contact issues personally. Thankfully she was fairly patient and I eventually learned a lot from her, though not without some strife. Of course, to get to the intimate contact phase you generally have to go through casual contact first. Unsurprisingly, most of the people I've slept with have been fairly aggressive.
While I'm usually more of a visual and auditory person, I have found that certain serotogenic substances will make me extremely tactile. My first such experience was mind blowing.
