Living In My Skin - Pain

One thing I didn’t talk about much when I first spoke about propioception was pain. However, it is also one of the ‘body senses‘, like touch, and is processed in the same part of the brain. The skin has different receptors for detecting temperature and pain and pressure. I’m very sensitive to temperature, the cold is almost painful to me - which is another reason I walk around looking very tense, other people are walking about in t-shirts and I’m shivering in my jacket. Also I’m very sensitive to pressure. This sounds a bit odd but I’ll go into that another time.

I was shying away from the issue of pain because it makes me feel more like a weirdo than I usually do. But I do have issues with pain. The most obvious thing and least crazy sounding thing is when I don’t notice that I’ve hurt myself. Where as I have a hyper-sensitivity to temperature and pressure, I have the opposite problem with pain. It’s not a serious problem, I’ve heard of people breaking bones and not noticing, my problem isn’t as bad as that but I’m pretty sure I don’t feel pain the same way most NT people do.

Pain is essential because it tells us something is wrong and makes us act to fix it. I remember one time, I was carving a rabbit out of wood for my Nan for Christmas. I slipped with the chisel and it went into the lower joint of my left thumb. It sounds very painful, but at first it didn’t hurt. I just looked down and cursed myself. I should have gone to A&E, but I didn’t have a car or know anyone who could drive me. Later it did start hurting quite a lot. I couldn’t move my thumb for about a week and it was about a month before I got the grip back in my left hand and it’s still weaker than my right hand. If I’d felt more pain sooner I probably would have called a taxi.

Then there are other times when I can be sensitive to pain. One thing I do a lot is to pick at my skin, I pick my spots and I pick at my lips as well. I was a very spotty teenager and this continued into adulthood. I have less spots these days, but I still get a few sore spots when my period starts. For some reason I just can’t leave these alone, I just have this belief that I can remove the blemish if I just squeeze it hard enough, even though logic tells me it will take longer to heal if I pick.

This picking started from a very young age. When I was about six, I grazed my knee. Not an earth shattering life experience but I remember it because it took so long to heal. My parents became so concerned they took me to see the doctor. You see I couldn’t stop picking the scab, and it was slowly getting bigger and bigger. The doctor persuaded me that I had to leave it alone otherwise it would go green and I might get very sick.

I liked picking it because of the scabs. I would play with them; I liked their texture. Then I would squeeze my graze and watch a new scab forming, sometimes I‘d lick it clean. I don’t like describing this because it all sounds like very strange behaviour. But then I was a child and I was autistic. Also taking the scab off would hurt, not loads but it kept me fascinated. I don’t know why I liked it. Maybe for the same reason I stim, I think this has also contributed to the spot picking problem.

I wasn’t going to write about this subject, but then I had a dream, it wasn’t a very nice dream, and I thought if I don’t look at it I’m going to keep getting this dream. It was about people hurting themselves. I wonder if people who are into S&M have something different going on in their brain to other people, maybe their brain is interpreting pain signals as pleasure signals. I think it’s different to what is going on when people self-harm which seems to be a psychological issue. I know autistic people sometimes hurt themselves to create sensations and stimulation in their brain. Banging your head against something hard or soft is a way of doing this. Some autistic people like biting things. Neither of these are socially acceptable behaviour if you a high functioning adult.

I think my spot problem is part psychological and part stimming. My parents were very strict with me. The amount of telling off and discipline administered to me would have been out of proportion had I been a high risk prisoner in Broadmoor. Punishment is a strange concept. Where did we get the idea that punishing someone will make them do what we want, or that punishment is a way of attaining justice? None of us are responsible for administering justice. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have the police or courts, I’m talking about the things you can’t legislate for. You can’t put someone in prison for having a different opinion to you, or for not loving you or for ignoring you.

Anyway, I read somewhere that when we grow up we continue to treat ourselves the way our parents treated us. So if you had very critical parents you will be very critical of yourself. If your parents were always punishing you, you will find ways to punish yourself. I grew up thinking I must be a bad person, why else did my parents disapprove so much of me? I see spots, and think they are the badness inside me coming out, hence the need to squeeze them. When I picked my scabs as a child though all I remember was that I liked doing it. To start with it was probably just that I liked the scabs and the pain was something new to me.

I am wondering now if a lack of pain receptors could be responsible for the daredevil antics some autistic children get up to. Maybe they don’t have as much awareness of pain, so they don’t anticipate it and they do things most other children would be scared of doing. I would often be climbing onto things and jumping from high places when I was a kid. My parents used to call me Action Man. If you experience pain less than other people it will take you longer to develop caution. It wasn’t till I fell down the stairs whilst swinging on the banisters on our landing, and nearly went through our glass front door, fracturing my skull in the process, that I learnt to be more careful. I would still climb on the banisters, I was just a bit more careful.