Good Touching... and Bad Touching (sort of)
It has been said that when it comes to being touched, I react like a cat.
In general being tactile is good for me. When playing, when cuddling, touching really suits me.
Today, however, it didn't.
For the second time in my life I did yoga today. A work friend of mine told me that our gym had a "Power Yoga" class on this evening, and I thought it sounded like a good idea. In general my workout regime involves a lot of weights and cardio and medicine balls and core work. You know, the fun stuff. I'm happy with what it does, but I am conscious that I'm not as fit as I could be in other ways. I'm not as bendy as I'd like to be for instance.
So there we were in the middle of the studio surrounded by people who knew what they were doing much more than she or I did. There were a lot of instructions that didn't make sense to me. "Breathe through your navel." "Lengthen your thoughts into nothingness." I looked around at what others were doing and tried to copy it, but all in all I was out of my element. Now I tend to like something intense and strenuous when I go to the gym. Yoga had it's place, and I did enjoy the physical challenge of it, but it was very much not what I am accustomed to.
Being out of my depth the way I was brought on a degree of stress and frustration, and this changed the way I felt about being touched.
The instructor was moving about the studio making adjustments to people, and being as inexperienced as I was, I was one of the prime candidates for adjustment. That meant being touched. At times when I am under pressure I become very aware of my body and I become very sensitive to being touched. It's one of the pitfalls of being an aspie. This was one of those times. As soon as a hand was laid on me, even a helpful hand, I felt doubly uncomfortable. On more than one occasion I literally winced when a hand was laid on my back and another on my belly to get me into the right position. Yoga is meant to be relaxing, but under those circumstances I was outstandingly tense. I was rigid as a board.
Eventually it became too much. As she was moving my back foot I winced again and in front of 50 people, said "Could you not do that?" I felt kind of bad and more than a bit self conscious. She was a skilled professional who was doing her job, but I was getting increasingly uncomfortable. For the remainder of the class she took care not to be quite so tactile.
It wasn't the first time I had reacted to touching in this way. At times ex-girlfriends of mine discovered that stroking my neck or my hair at a time when I was having an aspie moment was pretty much guaranteed to elicit a negative reaction.
At least now I have a better sense of what's going on.