 At some point, any thing that you experience, I mean, anything that you do experience is sensory input, because that's how we experience the world, you know. So if you experience something and it regulates you, do we call that stimming? It really depends on it, on who you ask and how they define it. These covert stims happen a lot for especially high masking individuals, which just means if I haven't said it already that you become really skilled, you've become really skilled at blending in socially and adapting different social norms to fit in. So we go covert with our stems because it helps us play the part. I think there's another classification of stimming which I think is quite important, which is the harmful stems, because there are things that you can do which are stimmy, which are not good for you. I won't go into all of them, but like you can imagine nicotine or anything which is related to taking something. It could be things related to biting your nails or like self-injury in a certain sense. Really, it depends. I tend to get a lot of the more harmful stems when I am particularly not feeling good. I tend to call that a bit more. Autistic stimming is something which has gradually changed in a lot of the ways that we refer to it. Once it was something which was particularly stereotypical that a lot of clinicians and a lot of psychologists had isolated as being stereotypical autistic thing that only autistic people did. Nowadays, there's been a lot more elucidation of the different aspects of what we consider to be stimming. Even looking back into our history, if we are a late diagnosed autistic adult or even just an autistic adult in general, I think a lot of us can be forced out of doing our stems, something which quite often I talk about as being a pretty bad thing for us, taking away large parts of what we use for emotional regulation. Well, today we're going to be talking about the importance of stimming in late diagnosed autistic adults. This is a video from Mom on the Spectrum. Hey, it's Taylor with Mom on the Spectrum, and today we're talking about autistic stimming. What is it? Why do we do it? What are the benefits? And how can we relearn the art of stimming if it's something that maybe we trained ourselves out of as a late diagnosed autistic adult? And I say the art of stimming because I really believe that when practiced intentionally, it can really enhance your overall quality of life as an autistic adult. Stick around until the end of the video. I'm going to be telling you about my new absolute favorite stim toy and how you can get your own. If you're new here, like I said, I'm Taylor. I started this channel as a late diagnosed autistic mom. I received my professional autism diagnosis at the age of 31. It totally changed my life and I knew that I had to share everything I was learning with everyone because that's just what I do. So if that sounds like something that might benefit you either as a late diagnosed autistic adult, or maybe there's someone important to you that is on the autism spectrum, subscribe to the channel and hit the little bell and you'll be notified anytime a new video is posted. So what is stimming? We just have a moment to appreciate just how concise and well and like one takey that that whole thing was. I'm yet to develop such a skill. Like my video is just just amount to Hi, my name is Thomas. Welcome. Welcome to some autism related stuff. Like and subscribe. Hey, that's the epitome of my of my late introduction. But that looks like a cool stim. I think definitely like the importance of I think there's a lot of importance of trying to consciously integrate stimming into your life, especially if it's something that's been learned out of you. It can be considerably quite helpful. I think one thing that has been very clear to me from going about my own life is that it's not always the fact that I'm not stimming that that's the bad thing. It's about me not meeting my own sensory needs. You know, as autistic people, we tend to have different sensory profiles and what comes without sometimes is a need for certain stimulation, which is a very variable person to person. Of course, I do have a video out which which covers which is going to cover something a two part video actually it's going to cover how to find your stims and understand your sensory profile yourself. And I've forgotten exactly why I was going to say, oh dear. Thomas, family, your style of videos make make you very relatable. Thank you. You have a warm quality about your approach videos kids. This is my definition. I wrote it up here for us. So stimming is the act of moving excess energy out of the body. And it's often done subconsciously to regulate one's emotions and or psychological state. I remember what I was gonna say. I was gonna say meet you can meet your sensory needs by not stimming. You don't have to stim always to meet your sensory needs. Like for me, going to the gym is enough for me. Like if I go to the gym during the day once a day, it pretty much meets all of my sensory kind of regulate regulatory type needs, you know, there's all sorts of stems, there's physical stems, it could be like rocking, it could be jumping or bouncing, the stereotypical autistic stim is hand flapping, can also be dancing. There are also verbal stems. So you might have heard the term echolalia before, which is the repetition of sounds, repetition of words, also singing is a verbal stim. There's visual stims, think lava lamps, desktop screensavers, maybe watching an hourglass, all the sand fall down. There's stim toys, fidget spinners, puppets, fidget gadgets. I think it's important for me to mention this because I do have a video that is also in the works talking about like the sort of grayness or the dissolving nature of what we consider to be stims nowadays. I think there's generally like three categories to what we first kind of understood as being a stim. One is it's being stereotypical. So something that psychologists have seen in autistic people and labeled as kind of a stereotypical thing that autistic people do. Another aspect of that is repetition. So it isn't doing something over and over again. And the other aspect is the regulation sensory inputs kind of aspects to it. So it's like three things. And it was once all three of those. For some things, it's just repetition and sensory input. And for other things, when people talk about it, it's just sensory input that regulates because lava lamps, they're not particularly, you're not particularly doing anything stereotypical. You're not particularly doing anything necessarily that repetitive with your body or your voice to actually get that input. But it's still in some people's eyes classified as a stim. So I mean, I mean, kind of thinking about the categories and how we categorize exactly what is stimming nowadays, not necessarily saying that it's a bad thing. Because I think it can actually open people up to new ways of meeting their sensory needs. But yeah, just the thought that I'm having is something that I'm going to go into very soon about on one of my talking head videos. All kinds of things that are on the market now. There are so many different ways to stim. So from my own observations, I could just spend a lot of time with the autistic community. I do one-on-one sessions. I do group sessions. I'm constantly learning from y'all, researching information to help support our community. And something that I've noticed is that we often are dealing with very large amounts of uncomfortable energy. So if you've heard me talk about autistic inertia on the channel before, I'll put a link to the video in the description if you want to learn more about it. It's this idea that whenever we're doing something, it's incredibly hard to stop doing that thing. And if we're not doing anything, it's incredibly hard to start doing something. Okay, so if you think about it in terms of energy, let's say that you are in the zone, the productivity zone, you're in flow state, and you are just getting so much done. If you have to stop, if you have to get out of that flow state, it is just this surplus of uncomfortable energy that you don't know what to do with. It's like this huge snowball that's been rolling down the hill for hours, and there's only one thing that can happen, just like this explosion of energy, right? Or if you're coming from a place of stagnant energy, you're in bed and you absolutely can't move, or you've been on the couch for hours and you know that you need to get up and make something to eat, but you're stuck, that's this stagnant energy that becomes really uncomfortable in your body. And it's kind of that nervous energy that that people have. And it's, I think it's something that can be experienced a lot by people with generalized anxiety, soda, GAD, or anxiety as known in sort of the lay terms. But yeah, I mean, I've always had difficulties with that uncomfortable kind of feeling. I get it particularly in my legs. I describe it as somewhat being like a sort of a daytime version of restless leg syndrome, you know, that's that's the kind of feeling that I get, or I described it as feeling like ants on my bones. I don't know whether it's something that is like just just experienced because we are autistic, or whether it's just because a lot of autistic people have generalized anxiety disorder, but who knows. Some stuff I do, I can't control, but it does happen when I get overwhelmed or nervous. Yeah, this t-shirt is very steamy. Do you consider stimming something that is done on purpose? I don't necessarily think there's a I mean, it's difficult, isn't it? Because it's kind of learned out of you somehow for a lot of people through life, either consciously by yourself, because you're at school, you're in a social environment, or from particular teaching practices, or from your parents. It tends to be learned out. So it's not something that I do subconsciously myself. Other than sort of one thing that I do is I kind of tilt my head side to side, and that's kind of vestibular related. But now a lot of the stimming that I would do would have to be conscious, or it's related to very, very heavy states of anxiety or meltdown. That tends to be the times where it does come on the most. And it can feel overwhelming, claustrophobic, but it's this pent up energy that gets stuck and stagnant. We also are constantly taking in a lot of sensory information. So people on the channel have described this as like being an antenna, or when you walk in the room, you're taking in everything around you. So you're receiving all of this energy through an antenna yourself. And all of that energy doesn't necessarily have a channel to flow through. So again, all of this energy that's staying in your body with nowhere to go. So stimming is a way that we can channel this excess energy out of our bodies. And we do it subconsciously, probably most of the time, sometimes consciously, but it's this ingrained practice that we have as autistic people to help alleviate some of that extreme tension and discomfort that we can feel from all of the energy and information that we're taking in. You can stem when you're happy, when you're overwhelmed, when you're frustrated, when you have sensory overload, when you have overpowering thoughts that are just overloading your brain, you can stem just because it feels good. So why is stimming important? Well, I think there's an important stipulation there to be made about stimming just because it feels good. I think a lot of people within the autistic community will classify that as being sensory joy. I don't know about you, but in my mind, I kind of separate stimming and sensory joy up into two things because on the one hand, like it's sensory joys is something that I experience when I or something that I want to experience when I don't really need to regulate. Whereas when I stim, when I'm getting that input, it tends to be to curb some level of emotion. And it's not always negative emotion, but it tends to be negative emotion. Sometimes it can be positive excitement related stuff I've experienced quite a bit. I want to share some quotes with you from a couple of articles that I found online about autism and stimming. I'll make sure to link those in the description. If you'd like to read them, they're both really good articles. This first one, this quote is from Matt Medina from Embrace Autism. And he said, I find that stimming improves my ability for active listening, especially during long conversations. Any sort of cognitively demanding task will unconsciously involve me stimming as I work through the problem. Something about the repetitive movements locks me into my work and allows me to funnel that concentration onto the object of my meditation. This next quote is from that's another thing as well. Like would you consider that to be stimming? I don't know. I guess suppose it is quite regulating, but I only really do it if I only really fidget I only really do that stuff to regulate. Like if I'm trying to get some work done, and I'm feeling bad, like I will stim during it because it kind of helps me regulate while I'm working. I don't know if I would classify it as stimming when it's just related to like focusing on something though. I'm not sure. Happy to be here in burnout and depressed. This is helping. I'm glad to hear Rose. I am also not doing the best myself so we're all banding together in our feelings of burnout and mental health things. You know about 40 digits of pi. That's very interesting, Rowan. I like pi. Pi is a good it's a good number. It's also a very nice dessert concept. Stephen Cap who wrote an article called stimming therapeutic for autistic people deserves acceptance from the spectrum news. Stimming is proving to be a healthy and constructive way of modulating emotions and external stimuli. Study participants told us that stimming soothes intense feelings helping them regain a sense of control. Participants said they sometimes stim out of joy or excitement and other times out of anxiety or boredom, but that the emotion colors the behavior. For example, yeah, like I think I did do like one of my one page posts on Instagram where I was basically like taking different emotions I felt and like different stems which are related to them because they do tend to be different depending on how I'm feeling sometimes. Hand flapping that reflects a positive emotional state often involves holding the arms out and making a waving motion whereas in hand flapping due to distress autistic people tend to keep their hands and arms near the torso. I thought that was really interesting. So it's almost like it can be kind of brought in internally as like a way to kind of protect yourself. You can keep things close if that feels comforting. But if you're happy, you know, you don't feel this need to protect yourself. You're going to kind of be out here and you might be dancing or waving your arms around a little bit bigger. And again, these are I think I've seen some stuff like particularly related to like the impact of like yoga, you know, obviously, I think sometimes having like doing yoga poses which are particularly quite expansive can sometimes fuel you with a sense of confidence to sense certain degree or like even posture to a certain degree like kind of puffing you pulling shoulders back and standing up straight. I think, you know, does have some level of impact on your emotional state. But also, if I'm struggling with anxiety, if I'm about to have like a meltdown or a panic attack or something, I will basically do that. Like I will make myself as small as possible. If I make myself small as possible, it does tend to reduce a lot of the anxiety that I feel a couple of examples. There's so many different ways to stem. So a question that I've been asking myself the past couple of years, it's been about three years since my diagnosis, which I can't believe. But I've asked myself, did I forget how to stem what happened? Because I think initially, like I felt kind of separate from others in the community, because I didn't think that I didn't think I had these big over stems. And looking back on my childhood, it's like, I don't remember doing that kind of stuff. And so I was like, well, maybe, you know, maybe this doesn't fit me. But I slowly realized over time that I for sure stem in so many different ways all the time. So there's different reasons why we might stop stemming. I mean, I definitely stemmed a lot when I was a kid. I don't really do it as much nowadays. I think the one that's quite consistent is anything that's involved with spinning, like even now, like I'm like rocking back in my chair, rocking or spinning or like bouncing. I used to like go on my trampoline after school every day. Just bounce away all the stress. Probably should get something like that. But the nature of the UK weather is particularly cold most of the time. It's not always the best. Pretty easy to learn early on that stemming is not necessarily socially acceptable. So not a whole lot of other people are doing it. Maybe no one around us is doing it. No, people do. I think it's something that's pretty consistent of what I've understood is being a pretty human behavior, whether you're autistic or not. I mean, it's kind of bring us back to that kind of distinguishing thing that I mentioned earlier about, you know, it's not particularly stereotypical as being as an autistic thing. But people do tend to do like little stems as some people characterize it. You know, biting your nails or like bouncing your leg up and down. I've seen that in people who aren't autistic too. Like it's kind of just getting rid of excess energy, I would say. Or maybe if you've had too much caffeine, you know, some people might get like that. Yeah, I mean, when it comes to like little stems, I think everybody does that. I think it's just characterized more as being autistic stemming because that's like out of the norm. It's not really something that a lot of people do. There's those very stereotypical based stems that we see a lot of autistic people use. I think you can't classify those more stereotypical things like rocking and hand flapping and eye flickering and stuff like that. I think that's more related to like this concept of big stems, you know, but it's really dependent on the person and what they believe exactly stemming is because it can be very variable what people consider to be stemming, you know, because at some point you've got to, I mean, at some point, anything that you experience, I mean, anything that you do experience is sensory input because that's how we experience the world, you know, so if you experience something and it regulates you, do we call that stemming? It really depends on it on who you ask and how they define it, but it does seem to be used very loosely. I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but I have noticed that. And so it can be very uncomfortable to be the only person doing something. We want to be like our peers who want to blend in so we don't want to be noticed. People might have told us that it was annoying or distracting to do those things, maybe in class, maybe at home, it was upsetting to your parents or your brothers or sisters. So you found a way to not do those things anymore. There's all different reasons why we might stop stemming in larger ways, but this is often channeled through other discrete ways of stemming or covert ways of stemming and looking back on my life, I can see it everywhere. I picked up my lip, I bit my nails, I picked at him, I twirled my hair, I tapped my feet, I drummed on the desks. There's all different ways, even blinking. Like I remember a phase where I just was like blinking all the time because it felt even right now, it feels kind of good. So there's all different kinds of covert ways where we might subconsciously, our body might say, well, I still need an outlet for these things. And it finds a way to move that energy through your body. Here's my kitty. He is literally staying just out of frame. So your body tries to find these other outlets and it's really interesting what our body comes up with because again, there is this excess energy and it has to go somewhere. It can't just stay. It has to move. I think these being sort of dissolved into sensory input that regulates you. I think that's fine. But yeah, it definitely has changed in the way that we use the term stemming, like the way that we use the actual language. Hi, Joseph. You're a musician. But William says I'm a musician. Playing guitar is a perfect stem for me. There you go. Never realized that eating was a form stemming. That's so interesting. I suppose it's like it's pretty much just any input that you have that regulates you to a certain degree. That's the kind of the overarching thing that you can find in pretty much any use of the word stemming. But yeah, I won't go over it too much because I have to talk about it, but I do have a video coming out about sort of the different changes in the way that we use the term stemming. Covert stems happen a lot for especially high masking individuals, which just means if I haven't said it already that you become really skilled, you've become really skilled at blending in socially and adapting different social norms to fit in. So we go covert with our stems because it helps us play the part of a certain social group. We're not sticking out. We're not being annoying or distracting. One thing that people share with me a lot too is that they scrunch their toes and their shoes. That's something that you can do that nobody ever sees. So what happens when we suppress these stems? If we need an outlet and we're not giving it to ourselves, it kind of becomes like this traffic jam in our brain. So our brain has all these processes that are trying to happen. And I think this is compounded for autistic individuals because we've got social anxieties. We've got delayed processing. We've got sensory overwhelm and then trying to figure out a way to direct this energy if we don't feel safe physically stemming. It's like this traffic jam and this huge cognitive kind of brain fog sets in where our executive functioning becomes impaired and we can't make decisions as well because there's not enough bandwidth. Our bandwidth is tied up trying to figure out which process that needs to focus on first. The energy is stuck in our brain and there's no channel that I can move through. When this happens, you might notice and for some of you, this might be kind of the precursor to a meltdown, kind of a warning sign that you're approaching that you might start get this feeling of being claustrophobic, of feeling like your skin is tight or like you need to crawl out of your skin or you're itchy. This feeling of just being stuck or overwhelmed or claustrophobic. Kind of like the the autistic meltdown aura, you know, you get that feeling. I think the claustrophobic feeling and like the blurring of your peripheral vision, I think that's kind of for me related more to having a shutdown, which is a precursor for me having a meltdown. I like the way that they're describing it though. I think you can get rid of that energy, I suppose in different ways. 100% going to the gym is that for me. That's like the my way that I meet a lot of my sensory needs. Does anyone else deal with your clenching if you're too focused? Yeah, me too. You get like an aching feeling in your mouth like oh my god, what have I been doing for the past hour or so? I used to scratch myself as a child, I just realized. Yeah. Yeah, I used to, yeah. I think there's another classification of stimming, which I think is quite important, which is the harmful stims, because there are things that you can do which are stimmy, which are not good for you. I won't go into all of them, but like you can imagine, nicotine or anything which is related to taking something. It could be things related to biting your nails or like self-injury in a certain sense. Really depends. I tend to get a lot of the more harmful stims when I am particularly not feeling good. They tend to come out a bit more. Oh gosh, my jaws are tired all the time. That is a sign that that energy is stuck and that it needs a way to flow through you. You might just have no other words other than you feel stuck. You might not be able to make decisions. You might try to think through the same situation over and over and over again, but you can never quite finish the thought. That's when I start realizing, oh, I think I need to stim like something stuck. So as you start becoming more aware of your own patterns and what tends to happen whenever you feel stuck, whether it does feel like your skin is crawling or you feel stuck or claustrophobic, just simply becoming aware of that and realizing, okay, something needs to change. The energy is not flowing right right now and giving yourself the opportunity to stim. Test it out. Try something new. If you're not feeling comfortable doing it in front of other people, which I still don't really feel comfortable doing big stims in front of other people, go in the other room, go in a closet, just jump around. I like to bounce on my toes and like throw my hands down. Just kind of feel the weight of my body going into the floor that always feels really comforting. Laying on a carpet or a rug, it's a good one that it's a good one. Constantly chew stuff. I'm the only person who buys chewing gum in bulk. I have some really hard chewing gum that I have, which is quite nice. I do enjoy that. I pet my finger with my thumbnail just enough to hurt slightly. I think I have a cause from it. Yeah, I have the same thing with my gums, like with like toothpicks. It's not good. I tried to stop myself from doing it, but it is a big stim for me, like picking at my gums basically. But give yourself an opportunity to explore and try all different kinds of stims and take note of what it feels like in your body after you do it. So let me explain. One of you had commented about imposter syndrome. And as we try to relearn how to stim, we start rethinking everything like, oh, am I just making this up? Do I actually need to stim right now? Or am I just forcing this? I would say it's going to feel really foreign and awkward for a while because your brain, we have grooves in our brain and you've trained your brain. When you're feeling overwhelmed, don't take this path, take this path, right, the discrete covert stim. So in order to start creating a new neural pathway, you're going to have to make that decision over and over and over again to try something different. So keep experimenting and then take note of how you feel after you engage in a stim. Does your body feel lighter? Do you feel less pent up energy? Do you feel less stuck? How are you emotionally? How are you able to make decisions now? And as you focus on the results of the stimming in your life, that will help with imposter syndrome of am I making this up? Because I would bet that you'll start noticing improvements in your ability to function when you start intentionally engaging in active stimming. Yeah. And I would like to highlight again, you can get these effects as well by doing things which are, which do provide you with a certain degree of sensory input. So it doesn't always have to be these stereotypical big stems. It could be something like rock climbing, really, or going to the gym or trampolining or, you know, do swimming even to a certain degree. Like if you can, if you can do something regularly, which allows you to get out that pent up energy and also fulfills some aspects of your sensory needs, that is kind of a good way of approaching things and you also get to do stuff as well. Like you also get to kind of engage of a hobby in a sense. So it's kind of two birds with one stone kind of thing. So the more you focus on the benefits for yourself, the quieter that imposter syndrome becomes. But it is a practice. It does require some grace and self compassion and just not taking yourself too seriously, right? Because it can feel really silly to stim. I like to headbang in my car by myself sometimes. There's just, there's all different kinds of ways to do it. And it'll take a while to start feeling comfortable with any of it. You can start small. There's no pressure to do anything big and large. You can start at your own. Yeah, find a good song for the old head banging. What's that? What's that song by Rob Zombie? The dick through the ditches and boom through the witches. That's it. That's a good head banging song. Make sure not to give yourself a gun question now. own pace with whatever feels good. One thing I wanted to mention in this video is the importance of allowing autistic stems. I think this might be one concern that people have about ABA therapy. I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, but some people have said that with ABA therapy, it can train kids to not stem when they need to stem. So I would just kind of like to throw out a word of word of warning. Is that a phrase word of caution? I don't know. Does that make sense? Just if you do know someone in ABA therapy, if you have a child in ABA therapy, I would just encourage you to make sure that you kind of understand the goal in that therapy for your child and that you make sure to encourage stems whenever it feels right to your child. Another thing that kind of pops up. Yeah, do not try to stop non harmful behaviors. Yeah, Dracula, there you go. In educational settings is you might have you may have heard teachers say quiet hands, you know, keep your hands in your lap, be quiet. And as I've been researching and learning about stemming this week, I've kind of stumbled upon a rally cry of parts of the autistic community being loud hands. So I'm encouraging you and especially the parents encouraging you to encourage your kids to have loud hands and to do what they need to do in order to feel comfortable and that that's not socially unacceptable, right? And hopefully that will become more and more normalized as we learn more about the. Well, I don't think it's our place to talk to tell the rest of society what is considered to be socially acceptable. Like we can only work with what people think. I think there's a lot to be said of these stigmatizing things of that nature. And when I'm saying that, I'm not saying that it's like I think it's unacceptable. But I think for a lot of people generally in society, they definitely look at things which they do not see very often and make very harsh judgments, which I think a lot of people are quite concerned about, you know, you just concern them if they are to use kind of this this stemming, I would say that, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot of ways going about and it's going to be individual person to person, you know, to a certain degree, you know, perhaps suppressing stems in situations where it might make you look more vulnerable and cause some issues into personally or in the phrase of kind of like confrontation, you know, it's, it's got to be. I think if you stem and you make yourself stem, and it causes you more problems, more issues, it makes you feel worse, more paranoid, you know, that you got to decide whether it's something that you want that you're happy with doing yourself. But I do think that to a certain degree, like, you know, you should try it, at least, or find some things that you can do, find some things that you can do, which do meet your sensory needs on a more frequent basis. You have loud hands. I do not have loud hands, sadly. I wish I did. I probably would do if I hadn't sort of taught myself how to stemming so much the importance of stemming. Okay, so before we wrap up, I have to tell you about my new favorite fidget toy. So I get so many offers in my inbox for fidget toys. We try this out, we try this out. I promise you I turned down like 90% of them, because I don't want to share stuff with you all that's just junk. You know, there's so many like cheapy products out there that have weird textures and smells and they're loud and clunky. This is not that. Okay, this is called the Ono Roller. Cultivate the practice of stemming in your life and that it will add value by helping you feel more regulated, more grounded. Thank you very much, Mom on the Spectrum, Taylor Heaton. If you haven't seen our podcast together, I highly recommend going and checking that out. It was a good interview. It was really nice. Taylor is a very lovely person. I've had a few chats with her over the years. It's been lovely. I feel like my body forces other stems when I try to control one. That's interesting. Very interesting. Isn't the point that it's harmful not to stem? Yes, it's not a good idea not to have some level of sensory input, I would say, if you need it to regulate. I think just the reason why I said that before is because there are some people who, particularly when I talk about unmasking or stemming, people do have independent thoughts about, is this a good idea to be promoting people to do? Could it put people in dangerous situations? I'm more or less just playing lip service to the feelings and thoughts of those particular individuals, but you're right. In an ideal world, in my ideal world, people would be able to stem and people wouldn't harass us for it. I think it really depends. I feel very happy stemming in the company of people that I care about and feel comfortable with. In public, with strangers, people I don't know, maybe not so much. It's more of a thing that I just prefer not to draw the attention to myself. It's hard really to explain, but the premise of stemming when you need to is something that I agree with, but for me to do so, particularly in public places where I don't feel very comfortable and particularly when I get negative reactions or pointing and laughing and people harassing me for it, then it does become a particular issue. But that's not related to actually stemming. That's just for people. But that was the importance of stemming in late diagnosed autistic adults by mom on the spectrum. Go check it out in the description, give it a like, give a subscribe, show us some love, and drop a comment below and tell her that I sent you.