Making Sense: A Guide to Sensory Issues

A meltdown is anger and tears. A shutdown is dissociation and fear.

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.

Sensory issues are life-long and come with different challenges at different stages of life. I believe that challenges depend on three important factors: 1. Neurology, or if and how the brain can rewire 2. Past history, or whether or not negative social and emotional patterns have been established 3. Phase of life and related environment, or the ex

People with sensory issues usually don’t have issues with sensation, but they struggle with perception and responding appropriately to what the brain perceives.

Just because the sensitivities are invisible doesn’t mean they don’t exist.)

It’s most important to remember that dysregulation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There’s always a cause, as subtle as it may be to the untrained eye. It could be the smallest extra shard of sensory input or even a nanosecond without sensory input. It could be an ongoing onslaught of sensory information or hours without engagement.

Hungry? Cold? Sleepy? Have a racing heart? Need to use the bathroom? You know how your body is feeling thanks to our eighth sense, interoception. This sense is key to our day-to-day functioning as a person living within a body. It helps us identify the state of our organs and what needs to be done to maintain homeostasis, or a balanced state.

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.

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.

Their war cry is simply, Huh?