Hey guys, I want to update you with my rocking back and forth update, it’s day 112. I stopped rocking back and forth January 1st 2021, after rocking for 40 years.
Actually, I started rocking when I was two – my mom just told me that. I thought I started when I was eight, and I’m 48. So pretty much 46 years of my life I have been rocking back and forth.
I don’t really understand why I started rocking. I started with a little rocking horse, staring out the window while my dad was building our sailboat in our backyard in Newport Beach, California.
Then I graduated to a rocking chair, a little mini rocking chair. Then, I just started rocking on the floor when I was eight while I watched TV with my parents.
It’s been part of my life and it got to the point where I was rocking 14 hours a day because I worked from home, and I only had to work about one hour a day on my business.
The rest of the time, I rocked back and forth, listening to music or watching YouTube videos, or just looking at my stats online because I have Asperger’s, so I get really laser focused and obsessed with one thing at a time usually.
So I could just look at my blog stats or my YouTube stats, because I was hyper focused on my business. And it just suits me, you know, just rocking back and forth, listening to music.
All throughout high school I rocked. After dinner, I would listen to hard rock and just stare out the window, and I didn’t do my homework, and eventually by my senior year in high school I had to make up nine classes.
Rocking Back and Forth Autism Update
So I just dropped out. I wanted to be a rock and roll drummer because one of the other things I did besides rocking back and forth was tapping. I loved music.
One of the first drum beats I ever did was “we got beat” by the go gos. It was my sister’s music. I listened to her music. I listened to my dad’s music, and then eventually I discovered my own hard rock music when I was 12, and that was the same year that my mom bought me a drum set.
So I would come home after school, and I would play my drums until my dad got home at five, and he was very strict. He wanted a quiet house. He owned his own rental business and when he came home he just wanted a very orderly house.
I remember just being kind of stifled under his rule. I was bullheaded, he was bullheaded.
When I was 14, I broke into a house and tried to get in with the bad boys in school and show off, and that kind of destroyed our family for a little while, and I started rocking back and forth a lot, and just listening to music.
I wanted to just create my own reality, I didn’t want to be part of his reality, and when I was 18 He kicked me out.
Then I discovered alcohol and started to drink and that was the great escape. So now I’m listening to music, I’m rocking back and forth, and now I’m drinking.
Over the years, all the girlfriends had accepted my rocking back and forth, and I would rock after work, or I would rock in the morning.
I still was only rocking like a few hours a day. It wasn’t until the last few years that I was rocking from morning until night. I literally had scar tissue on my knuckles.
They’re almost healed at this point, but you know, just rocking on the floor annihilated my knuckles and it hurt my back and it made me more anxious around people.
Because when I’m rocking, I float away, I float out of my body. I go into daydreaming. So it’s really hard for me to land back down and engage with people. In reality I didn’t like it at all.
So after 112 days, I can say that I’m not rocking, but it seems to be coming out in other areas, like, I’m starting to tap again, I’m starting to hum songs. I’m twitching my feet in my bed.
I’m still looking for ways to move my body, because there’s a sense of flow, there’s a sense of freedom with rocking back and forth, it’s hard to explain.
When I stop rocking though, it feels like I’m at a red light, you know, let’s say that you have a brand new Ferrari, and you just want to drive and you just want to go places and you feel free.
It’s a convertible so you can feel the air flowing through your hair, and all of a sudden, you’re going 80 miles an hour on this highway, and all of a sudden there’s this red light, and it’s in the middle of nowhere, and you have to stop, because you’re law abiding.
But you’re really pissed off because you’re like man I was just having a good time. The air was flowing through my hair and I was listening to music and now I have to sit here at this light and the light is taking forever to turn green.
That’s how it felt for me to stop rocking. So when I stopped rocking, I just started to dive into other areas of my life. I dove into my YouTube channels and I dove into my blog writing.
I started to work out. I started to go for walks, I take CBD oil to keep my nerves calm, because a lot of what I have, I believe, is nervous energy. I don’t know if I’m running from trauma from my childhood or what.
I think when I started rocking back and forth, when I was two, I don’t think my dad was that strict on me, so I don’t know why I started rocking back and forth.
It’s still an unraveling process, and I can’t tell you guys why I rocked back and forth. I do know that I have a very addictive personality, and whatever I put my mind to I could either kill myself, or become a wonderful outgoing person.
Unfortunately, I put all my energy into alcohol, because that was my great escape and it almost killed me. I put all of my energy into the wrong things, and I had a heart attack when I was 32 from drinking, and I had many other addictions.
I had porn addiction and I had sugar addiction. I had cigarettes. I had coffee. So if you want to stop rocking, I would definitely look into slowing down, and breathing.
I always catch myself not breathing, especially if I get around people. I will literally hold my breath. So breath work is very important, and learning how to take deep breaths.
I think we just need to slow down because you know when I was drinking and rocking back and forth and listening to fast heavy metal, I was just like go go go go, you know, what can I do now, what can I do now, and
I probably have OCD, because I get really obsessive about everything I do, I laser focus on either good things or bad things. I can focus on my childhood, I could hold grudges for years against my dad, against ex girlfriends, against bullies in school.
So you really have to pay attention to where your thoughts go, I would definitely look into breathwork and meditation, and just slow down, reduce the stimulants, you know, cut back on coffee, quit cigarettes.
Stay away from sugar, you know my fiance and I switched to stevia. That really helped a lot. Now if we do treats, it’s usually stuff that has stevia in it. Definitely stay away from stimulants and work your way up to meditating, an hour a day, you can do half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening before bed.
And turn off that TV because the news is really bad. It’s really negative, and it can make us worry, which would make us want to rock back and forth more. So definitely look into reducing your stress and look for a community of other people like us, that have Asperger’s in adulthood that rock back and forth, or we stim.
We do other other stimming activities like twitching, whistling, like twirling our hair, biting our nails, all of those things are stimming. And we do that because it’s nervous energy, but there might be something underneath that so just dive back to your childhood.
You could do inner child work and start unraveling your past. Inner Child work is where you go back to your first trauma experience that you remember, you go back as your adult self, and you assure your childhood self, while you’re going through that trauma.
Eventually when you do that more and more, you will heal your past, you will start reducing the sting of those memories. So definitely look into inner child work. Teal Swan has a lot of videos about it, you can just look it up on YouTube.
Also you can start taking CBD oil, I’ll leave a link under this video for you to check it out. And that’s basically it guys, it’s 112 days. I’m still unraveling my past. I’m trying to stay away from stimulants. But I find myself rocking other ways, you know, where I live now there’s a rocking chair, so I kind of look forward to rocking in the chair in the morning for the first hour or two of my day.
I am not going to stress out about it too much, I am going to give myself a break because I just wiped out 14 hours a day of rocking back and forth so give yourself some credit it takes time to change. You know, if you’ve been doing this for decades, like I have, it takes a long time to unravel and change your habits and pick up new habits.
But it is okay to laser focus on things just make sure that they’re positive things like business, like your health, like meditation, get a meditation app and work your way up to two to three hours a day of meditation, and I guarantee you, your life will change for the better.
So hit that subscribe button if you are new here, thanks for watching Rocking Back and Forth Autism Update. I will talk to you soon.
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