Touch is like tickling, and tickling is like torture
My skin is very sensitive to being touched.
More often than not, and regardless of whether I was expecting the touch or not, I react as though I’ve been tickled when my skin is touched.
If a tickly touch continues, then most of my body quickly turns into a hyper-sensitive surface, meaning that even expected tender touches can prove too much for me. When this happens, it doesn’t matter how softly or firmly you touch me, I’ll still jump, and want you to stop.
Imagine then, what it’s like when someone tickles me.
I run. I will do anything to get away from being tickled. Tickling is without a doubt the most uncomfortable feeling I can imagine on my skin.
My kids seem very ambivalent about being tickled. They love it, and yet find it typically uncomfortable. They yell for you to stop, and then almost immediately want you to tickle them some more. They, of course like performing the tickling too.
If I’m down on the carpet playing with them and they decide to start tickling, well, they better be prepared to be thrown off me. If I’m constrained when I’m tickled I lash out. It’s an automatic reaction that I have very little control over. I want to escape the tickle at all costs, and if that means bucking about like an angry horse, then that’s what happens. My son, who is nearly five years old has ended up a couple of feet away having been thrown off me in the past.
Perhaps I should suggest to the kids that they don’t tickle me.
What happens when I escape the tickle is almost as interesting as my initial reaction. I close down. My eyes glaze over and if I can, I seek out a quiet place to sit and be on my own for a while. I feel exhausted, despite the tickling lasting maybe 30 seconds or so.
This is very like the way I feel when I’m overloaded from visual and audio inputs, except when that happens, I tend to have been exposed to the inputs for some considerable time, perhaps a few hours. Tickling can cause the same reaction in just a few seconds.
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