Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello, I was only recently diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, It was six years ago and only recently have I taken the diagnosis very seriously.
Some sort of enlightenment has dawned but one behaviour I have that may or may not be stimming is thumb sucking, it is usually only something I do asleep, which is where my ego has no control, but, on public transport, which I use but little, I find I want to suck my thumb maybe to reduce stress, and I do feel that people bite their nails or smoke in public so why should I desist?
I know that the wider public considers the habit rather odd in a person of my age but would the enforced discontinuation of it be masking?
When using computers, which I hate, it is also better to suck rather than shout I find.
I have of course repeatedly had the New Year Resolution of I really must stop sucking my thumb many times, except once in about 1998 in Eskdale where I pointedly sucked my thumb at a New Year's Day Party. Is it O.K. to do this, is it stimming or is it just flagrant attention seeking? The fact that I do it more often in private does suggest that it is more than an affectation but another inescapable fact is that it is corrosive to self esteem and that this is not entirely down to negative public reaction.
Some public reaction, funnily enough, was quite supportive, but never it there ever going to be a thumb sucking pride parade unless some toddlers get strangely politically aware.
Well I was just wondering if anyone else here had seen or heard of this as a stimming behaviour? The internet is very wide of course and so I have come across an autistic thumb sucker or two who was an adult, but that maybe nothing to do with autism.
Hi,
Thanks for posting this. I am 30 years old, identified as on the spectrum, and suck my thumb on a daily basis for comfort - using the computer, driving, sleeping. I found your post because every now and then I search the internet to find a shared perspective and until now never have! I was also diagnosed later in life and did not mention the thumb sucking to therapists at first due to extreme shame. I have now realized the behavior as a necessary self soothing mechanism (I also rock sometimes and play with my hair etc) and think a lot less of it than in my youth - I’ve even admitted to being a thumbsucker with my current partner, completely unprompted. I have learned to hide it from public view pretty well but am finding myself less embarrassed if I slip up and get seen. I love your idea to wear a THUMB SUCKER mask and am glad to have a peer.
Oh Hello, I have not been here for a while, the last response was four months ago, since then the mask wearing has dropped off a lot community wide and yes it was a quick and effective way of getting the message across, hello I suck my thumb, do you find it odd? Most of my motivation in doing it was just to see how people would react in public. Until I was fourteen or so the habit was jut for the family to see and I would have been shamed if any schoolfriends found out, but for some reason I decided to do a social survey of my own and did it openly in public. I really do not know fully why, I had seen a few girls older than me doing it and had asked them about it, maybe that was why, but the motivation was not self soothing now, it was seeing what I could get away with. Mostly what I found was that the public did not disapprove, it mostly looked away and some if they talked to me at all did not mention it. Only three times have I ever been asked...'are you sucking your thumb?'
There are, of course, no reliable statistics on how many adults do it as it is hard to imagine the office for national statistics sending it out as a census form question, but television and other media sources quote it as being between ten and fifteen percent. It cannot be that high..I have only ever once heard a nineteen year old woman say...oh yes, me too and the only faintly sciencey study was one where some French academics looked at a graph of a study of children between zero and sixteen years of age, the number of thumb suckers dropped as the age went up but the shape of the curve seemed to say that it would never hit zero, and so from this they deduced a figure of two to five percent of an adult population are thumb suckers.
These days it is only ever in sleep or getting there that I ever do it in that un self conscious way, I have just given up my car because I was fed up with it and public transport is now my only option and it was on public transport that I did most of my thumb sucking in public, I am not totally sure but I think that courting outrage was probably part of motivation but it certainly was not all of it. I am sure it helps with travel nerves even though I am mostly okay when travelling it is the imagining in the days preceding that I got worried about what can go wrong.