Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self: Intentional Pain and Pain Stims

In Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self by Ariel Glucklich many different reasons for intentionally inflicting pain are discussed. The one that stood out to me the most was pain as medicine. 

When pain is medicine, it is the solution to a problem. Many neurodivergent individuals, especially those with autism, use pain as a way to self regulate. This is often called “pain stimming” and is common enough that many people see it as a stereotype of autism. For example, many people think all autistic people hit themselves. While this does happen, this is not how it always presents. As an autistic person I find pain stims very useful for self regulation because they are usually a lot more subtle than vocal stims, for example, and therefore can be utilized for self regulation in public more often. I personally have a little plastic turtle that has some spikes in it that I use to stim.

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about pain stimming that paints it as inherently dangerous self-harm behavior. However, I feel it is much closer to the way pain is described by Glucklich. Glucklich provides an example of the difference in the experience a car passenger losing a limb from a crash and a soldier losing a limb in battle will have with pain. To the car passenger, this loss is devastating, but to the soldier this loss got them out of harm's way and the pain is therefore a much more positive experience. Since pain stimming is used for self regulation, there is usually something worse going on that someone is trying to avoid by pain stimming (overwhelming setting, stressful social situation, etc). This is more similar (albeit way less dramatic of a scenario) to the soldier than the car passenger, as the pain means that worse things were avoided.