Venting Touch Starvation?

[GeneralPanda199]

Being someone diagnosed as autistic (Asperger's Syndrome at the time), i was never one that liked physical contact, like how most autistic people are i believe, i didn't even knew about the word of being touched starved until a couple of years ago.

Last year i got myself a body pillow from a giveaway i won, initially it came with some anime girl i forget her name, but i replaced her with my favorite game characters i've been into for a while, Zhongli from Genshin Impact. I would show a picture but it's a big suggestive so i don't wanna risk it.

Lately i've ended up becoming very attached to it, cuddling with it all night long, despite me always just moving around left and right on the bed, since i tend to struggle with sleep for a long time, but lately i've just started to crave some kind of physical affection with someone, similar to how i was doing with the pillow. Cuddling with pillows and plushies isn't something new for me mind you, i've always been like this ever since i was a child, but it never crossed my mind wanting to have any kind of physical affection with another person, even though despite my issue with depression and lack of social interactions, i've always been one to not have a lot of friends, it's just now that it's starting to happen.

Though there's something that confuses me for when it comes to touch starvation, when it comes to someone that is touch starved, is it usually just about human touch in general, or more complicated stuff like hugs or cuddles? Cause if it's the latter, wouldn't about everyone around you have some kind of issue with social starvation? Cause even if you're like an extrovert and have a lot of friends to talk with, unless you have a relationship, you wouldn't just go around and hugging your friends right? And even less cuddling, or do friends even cuddle at all?

Idk i'm just a bit confused about it all. I'd like to try and interact with more friends irl more often, but i don't think i have the courage to do it. So for now i just sort of imagine how it would feel to hug and cuddle with fictional characters, Zhongli is usually my biggest example but there's others too

 

[itbelikethat]

Well people are dynamic, they change quite a bit, I myself was a very cuddly kid, but I have adhd, with suspected type one asd (working on diagnosis atm). Many people are actually quite touchy, and it varies from culture to culture. Some places it was common to greet one another with a smooch on the cheek.

I've always been touch starved, and would seek sex with strangers to have that fulfilled. I am however very selective with who I show my physical affection with, and can only do it behind closed doors.

If you feel that it would help then start asking someone who would be cool with it for a hug, and see how that goes.

Funnily enough I had jokingly thought of charging a small fee to cuddle with people who was committing ctb, I know I'd like to be with someone as I go.

 

[steppenwolf]

I don't want to talk about myself and the history of my relation to physical human contact in any detail, even though there's nothing I wouldn't want people to know; I just don't want to talk about it. Let's just say that physical human contact is something I can live without and have lived without for decades, and I drink and smoke habitually and take drugs sometimes. I don't like people enough to hug them, and physical contact with them always makes me uncomfortable even if I crave it, which I almost never do. To my mind, hugs are for children, and if I didn't get enough of them as a child myself then that's just too bad; I'm not a child any more and I've been an adult for far too long now and that ship sailed long ago. Far worse things happen to people than they don't get enough hugs or blow jobs.

I have read that children who are starved of physical affection display morose behaviours, and develop self-harming tendencies in later life, like alcoholism. But I think that's a facile thesis. I have also seen psychological studies whereby toddlers of different provenance are given wooden blocks to play with and filmed playing with them. The toddlers from settled families (who presumably enjoy a lot of affectionate physical contact) immediately start playing with the blocks with obvious enthusiasm and delight. The toddlers who are borrowed from the orphanage for the day (and who presumably are physically neglected) simply ignore the blocks and look around the room looking worried, or make themselves as small as possible and suck their thumbs. The professionally-qualified research psychologists with their privileged educations then conclude, that children who are starved of physical affection in their formative years develop permanent psychiatric dysfunction, with the tacit implication that it would be better for such children and for everyone else if they were simply drowned in a bucket. But since élite educated researchers are supposed to be more civilized than that, they simply stigmatize the touch-starved children with lifelong psychiatric disorders instead, and (fingers crossed) such children save everyone the bother of drowning them by hanging themselves before they achieve full adulthood. Simply because as toddlers, not knowing what was happening, or whom they were going home to, or where their next meal was coming from, they had more important things to worry about than infantile play with stupid fucking blocks. And as if the Einsenhowerian nuclear family model of exemplary psychological functionality two-cars-in-the-drive-fly-the-kids-to-Disneyland-for-the-holidays is perfectly sane and achievable by everyone in the world, and is not obviously leading humanity to certain apocalypse.

It's a false thesis. Physical contact is irrelevant to psychiatric function. I don't avoid physical contact with people because I'm dysfunctional; I'm not dysfunctional and any dysfunctional behaviours I exhibit are a response to my dysfunctional environment, and not any intrinsic function of myself. I avoid physical contact with people because I don't like them very much. And I don't like people very much because it's always too easy for me to find good reasons not to like them which I am perfectly capable of articulating.

 

[Jaded_Wolf]

Though there's something that confuses me for when it comes to touch starvation, when it comes to someone that is touch starved, is it usually just about human touch in general, or more complicated stuff like hugs or cuddles? Cause if it's the latter, wouldn't about everyone around you have some kind of issue with social starvation? Cause even if you're like an extrovert and have a lot of friends to talk with, unless you have a relationship, you wouldn't just go around and hugging your friends right? And even less cuddling, or do friends even cuddle at all?

I think to some degree, we as social animals need (other) human touch to some extent. How much, or what type of human touch someone needs, I'm not sure.

With hugging friends, I think it depends on cultural and/or gender norms. As a mid-western American, it's not uncommon for me to hug other women I'm close friends with, but never with my male friends.

 

[Pluto]

 

[Hikari.]

This is so real.