It is an especially frightening experience to feel present in one moment and then trapped underneath a barrage of confusion in the next moment, somehow still a being in a body, but negated enough to feel like the body is a fortress and the being is a prisoner.

Never put them down for their outburst—especially teens and adults. They know that flinging themselves on the couch or on the floor or curling into a ball and sobbing heaving sobs isn’t becoming, and so there’s a good chance that they’re already feeling really ashamed and silly.

In SPD brains, white matter is in fact less well connected in some areas where we’d expect to see it, particularly in the back of the brain.

My sensory experiences are not a series of complex but mutable thoughts that I can work to wipe out from my consciousness, or a difference in chemistry that can be alleviated through medication. They’re simply the result of how my brain is built.

in the moment, unable to connect to the world, trapped within a brain that is malfunctioning and a body refusing to take directions, a shutdown feels like a tiny death.

However, my physical symptoms exist whether I un-think them or not. It’s like telling someone with any other neurological condition—like multiple sclerosis or epilepsy—that their symptoms exist in their thoughts and chemical makeup: it’s just not true.

While I spend a great deal of time running away from some input and running toward other input, I wish upon all the stars in our galaxy that I could feel secure in my body moving through space. It’s something people without sensory issues must take for granted—the simple pleasure of really being somewhere, not just in mind and soul but also in a

they found a structural, biological basis for SPD.

white matter the subway of the brain. It connects the grey matter, which are the parts of the brain that do the processing—like that of sensory information. Different areas of the brain need to work together for us to do things like think, perceive, and learn, and the white matter helps with this. In typical brains, this movement of information