Aspies and Pain Tolerance

Much has been said about aspies & feelings and aspies being able to tolerate higher amounts of pain. I don't think I've gone into either topic in any real depth yet.

In short, Aspies aren't supermen and superwomen... They can be hurt and often are in pain, whether it shows on their faces or not. They just complain about it less than some people I guess.

Emotional Pain
While it's true that sometimes an aspie will lack empathy and won't feel anything for a given situation. I'll discuss that in a later post (sorry). It isn't true to say that the feelings of aspies can't be hurt. They can. Sometimes the aspie will show a reaction to their hurt feelings and sometimes they'll lash out. More often though, aspies will simply remain silent and impassive despite internal turmoil.

Physical Pain
Wouldn't it be wonderful to be in a world without physical pain? Everyone feels pain to some degree - including aspies. It doesn't have to be a huge pain to be felt, a paper cut or scraped knees will always bring tears out in an aspie child.

So where does the "no-pain" idea fit in?

Aspies are very good at ignoring pain, particularly if they're engaged in their special interest. The sorts of pain most commonly "ignored" by aspies are things such as muscular/nervous pain, rather than wounds. Although wounds can also be ignored.

Why is this a problem?
Pain is our body's way of telling us to stop what we're doing and have a rest or seek medical assistance.

You can imagine the long term effects of ignoring a toothache or a muscular/nerve problem like RSI.

In fact, I can speak firsthand about the RSI problem, since I have it. It's strange, when I go to physio for my injured hands, it hurts when they work on them. I take my mind off the hurt but then they ask me whether I can feel "this" (as they squeeze a nerve or something) all the way down my arm to my hand. I can't tell them and it takes a little while to become "switched on" to the pain again.

It's not that the pain is gone, just dulled.