Inactive Tutor answered • 05/29/22
Tactile defensiveness is an abnormal response to tactile sensations that is often part of autistic characteristics. Like many other characteristics of autism, we all may have it in small amounts that increase when we are under a lot of stress. This is important because if your child has tactile defensiveness, you can relate to him or her by remembering those moments in which you were totally sticky, sweaty, your skin irritated enough that you could feel it. That is how the tactile defensive child feels when he or she is clean and fresh. So, imagine that when you are sweaty and sticky, someone wants to give you a hug. I am sure the hug will not be very welcome. Now, just imagine how welcome your "love" feels to the tactile defensive child.
The best explanation I have found for tactile defensiveness is that in many autistic children and a few other people, the cells that help pass the information from external stimuli to the brain for interpretation, and then to the peripheral nervous system to tell the body how to respond are damaged. That cell group is very small in all of us. It is at the heart of the limbic system, which is the animal center in our body. Our brain does many things. Most of what it does is located in specific areas. The limbic system is dedicated to our basic animal functions. And in that center, a tiny group of cells, called the amygdala, directs the information from the external sensory system to the internal sensory system, and to the brain. There, all sorts of information are crossing each other, integrating, separating, blending, and distributing. If only a few cells are damaged, most of the information can be operated, but when different modalities are happening at the same time, the amygdala saturates and cannot integrate information anymore. This causes stress and the need to stop the stimuli. If the stimuli continues, the brain resorts to anger to stop it. If repeatedly, the anger is not effective to stop the stimulation, the brain shots off the processing of the sensory stimuli and resorts to focusing internally, resulting in repetitive performances, like rocking, blank stares, and even the production of meaningless sounds.
When we interact with a child that has tactile defensiveness, trying to show love and attention may result in negative responses. If the responses are frequent, we tend to develop anxiety about showing love. For this reason, mothers of tactile defensive children some times become detach from the child. This is very bad for the mother because she loves the child, but feels guilty not hugging or kissing the child.
I know from experience working with mothers of autistic children who are tactile defensive, how sad the situation is for the mother. The good thing is that in most cases, the rejection of hugs and kisses can be corrected quickly. The way I approach it is by pairing hugs and kisses with reinforcers in a training task. In this procedure, I integrate classical conditioning with operant conditioning.
