Sensory deprivation play is one of the best things I’ve ever experienced. Not just because it was extremely arousing, but also because it shut down several of my senses. With a blindfold and headphones, I only had my sense of touch and smell available.
I would later come to find that the best type of meditation for me is body scanning, which is what I did naturally during the play. I could feel my knees against the sheet, the cloth against my eyelashes, the air on my bare skin. When that connection was made between that firm hand and my backside, I felt it more than I’d ever felt anything.
It was delicious.
I suppose it’s not too surprising it was as beneficial as it was because my baths typically consist of closing my eyes with my ears under blistering water. I just hear *everything* all at once, feel everything all at once, and having a place to concentrate those feelings fits perfectly with sensory deprivation play.
It wasn’t until my journey into learning about myself that I considered my exceptional hearing may be because of my autism. I can hear a phone vibrating a floor up. I’ve invested in earplugs to help keep my concentration and keep myself regulated. With exceptional hearing comes exceptional overwhelm.
The 8 Senses & Processing
You may have noticed it says 8 senses. It’s not a typo. This includes the 5 readily known senses (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) but also the vestibular, interoception, and proprioceptive senses. Balance, motor skills and body awareness.
In neurodivergent people, all 8 senses can be over or under-sensitive. Not all of us will be over or under-reactive in all the senses, and even then, how much sensitivity we feel will differ from one person to the next, from one situation to the next. Sometimes, it can be all the time, such as with my hearing.
Impact play can be excellent for maintaining a healthy state of mind. The thought of maintenance spanking has always interested me. Many people describe a level of calm afterward that I struggle to find daily. Plus, I like spankings. It’s a win-win.
Pain can be such a stress reliever. Not all autistic people like pain, and even then, the type of pain will vary. Getting bit will never feel good to me, but a slap on the face will get my full attention in all the right ways. In those trusted environments, we are given some control over the sensations we’re feeling, even if we don’t control when exactly we are feeling them.
I don’t know if it’s because I have such receptive senses, but subspace is easy for me to fall into when my Dom has a firm hand with me. When I get grabbed by the throat, it’s very clear what’s happening, where it’s happening. It’s an anchor. When my head gets yanked back by a hand in my hair, I know where to look. I can only look where I’m allowed. It’s peaceful.
Emotional Processing
Emotional processing helps us integrate our experiences into our everyday lives. A ton of people have issues with emotional processing, autistic or not. Your autistic partner will be no different in that category.
Emotional processing issues isn’t a lack of emotional intelligence or lack of empathy. It isn’t being emotionally immature. It *means* we don’t emotionally get hit with news or an event at that moment. It doesn’t happen all the time, but some common factors in creating processing issues are stress and overwhelm.
Emotional processing issues can be small things, but they can also be very large things. When one of my kid brothers passed away last year unexpectedly, I told my dad I was sorry for his loss. I felt the shock that everyone feels when they find out someone has died, of knowing that person is no longer there, but it didn’t occur to me yet that I had lost my brother.
I often don’t see how things will affect me right away, though I’m learning to be more conscious of it. I know from experience how similar things have affected me in the past and I can draw off the experience from that, and it speeds up the processing a bit, but new things create new feelings.
I cringe now when I think of all the times I’ve heard “Are you sure it’s fine? I feel like this will be a problem later.” Because it tracked. I did find myself upset or bringing up an event (good or bad) hours or even a day or so later. It feels better to know where this is coming from so I can be more conscious of it, too.
It can be really hard on relationships of any kind. It can be confusing because it doesn’t always happen, and we can’t always predict any difficulty coming. From my own experience and reading about processing differences, it seems that the more emotional an event is, the longer is will take us to process.
Having a partner with processing challenges of any kind can be exhausting for both people. Try to remember that your partner with Autism may need some more time or even some help managing their feelings. Allow them that space and time, don’t rush them, and try so very hard not to make them feel bad about it. This isn’t anyone’s fault, least of all theirs.
Self-Regulation & Soothing
Self-regulation is something that took me a long time to develop and I’m still figuring out what works best for me. It is dependent on being able to recognize emotions, something people with Autism can struggle with, especially those who are younger. Even as an adult with a healthy skill set, I can still find myself dysregulated all too easily.
The biggest difference with us is that so many simple settings can throw us into dysregulation (meltdowns and shutdowns, anxiety, anger, all of it is considered dysregulation). Self-soothing tools are critical here, but some awareness from those around us would go a long way, too. The way we each personally self-soothe is going to look different, but the number one thing I ask is that you just let us do what we do when we need to do it (assuming it isn’t causing harm).
This leads us to the next part: Stimming, and why it matters for your dynamic.
