Sensory problems

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I have severe sensory issues.

I do not habituate to the information. I do not get used to it.

I do not filter information. I receive all of it, until I get so extremely overwhelmed that I snap somehow.

Sense by sense:

Smell: Severe hypersensitivity. Causes migraines. Pretty much anyone that might be imagined to cause headaches does. I react to smaller amounts than people can imagine me being able to smell and am frequently told its entirely pschyosomatic. Multiple people have told me it sounds like I have Multiple Chemical Sensitivity when I go through and give them all my symptoms.

Taste: Hypersensitivity yet seeking. Salt is the worst. I cannot stand salt. I cannot stand meat and when I was forced to eat it as a child tasted an aftertaste nobody else ever described but makes me ill. I'm vegetarian. Processed foods tend to bother me a lot, which is a problem because I have executive functioning problems with cooking. Textures of food limit my diet. I also have sensory seeking tendencies, especially towards peppermint. My boyfriend teases me a lot with me and my peppermint. I will take straight, 100% peppermint oil and put it in my mouth and not understand why others find this strange.

Touch: Hypersensitivity. Limited in what I can wear. Problems with people touching me. HUGE problems walking through grass. Lots of problems with this. I don't stop perceiving touch input. Also, give me deep touch.

Hearing: Hypersensitivity with discrimination problems. I not unfrequently need to wear ear muffs, and when I'm wearing both my ear plugs and my ear muffs I still can have normal conversations without either me automatically raising my voice or my boyfriend needing to. I have lots of problems with high pitched noises - ultrasonic ones especially, and get headaches from them. Sudden loud noises reliably cause me to suddenly freeze and my boyfriend will need to drag me outside after the bird squawks because I cannot function in any way shape or form. They also interfere with my vestibular senses, which I'll get to later. I sometimes hear sounds as coming from different places than they are.

Sight: Hypersensitive. Florescent lights immediately drop my functioning level. I can't see with too bright of lights - and "too bright" is things other people consider things that are expected. I get headaches. I get visual distortions. Too many things, too busy of an environment, just makes me meltdown, if I try to interact with it because I cannot visually process it all.

Propioception: Hyposensitive. I don't know where my body is in space. I have to use vision to know where I am.

Vestibular: Hypersensitive. I can't so much as walk in a circle before I'm getting dizzy. I get carsick. I have random episodes of my head suddenly spinning that are according to a PT probably because I looked at something wrong while I was walking and that's enough to set off my head spinning. Simple moving wrong makes me feel ill.


I'm in constant overload. I cannot remember being out of overload other than the fact that I remember that there were times I was a child that I was not overloaded. There are times it gets worse, and times it gets better, but it never goes away. I have meltdowns and shutdowns from my sensory issues. I cannot be in a basic simple office with 5 other people in it for 2 hours without being in such severe overload that I must leave.

I cannot sort out information reliably. I dissociate. I stop effectively seeing. I stop being able to identify what things are that I'm supposed to interact with. I am unable to process what people are saying to me.

Day to day things others do, are things I just cannot do because of my senses. I can't drive. I can't walk outside at night. I can only sometimes go grocery shopping. I can only sometimes take a bus. I have been deemed unemployable, and am struggling to find work despite that. There are days I can't even eat.

I deal with my sensory issues always. It's not enough. But when they're doing better my autistic symptoms overall are doing better.

I am perfectly normal in a one-on-one conversation. At least I come across as calm and in control. If someone else begins speaking nearby, the sensory overload is immediately intolerable and I must remove myself or I "freak out". Touch-wise I am very up and down. Very sensitive to smells. Light is fine, but a messy visual environment is not. I have an inability to find objects I am looking for, due to vision-overload when scanning the room. Sound, though, is definitively the worst. It takes a lot of self-control and energy to be out in public and attend activities with my children.

My sensory problems are mostly tactile but sometimes auditory.

Ever since I was a kid the feel of certain fabrics (eg velvet) would make me shudder and feel really nauseous - queasy in my stomach like I was going to throw up, and sometimes I would dry reach. Some sorts of touch would make me feel claustrophobic, as though I was suffocating. It took me years before I could stand being held by anyone, and I still can't sleep if I am in contact with somebody else's body - although I have recently managed to sometimes (but not all the time) sleep with my boyfriend's arm in contact with me (but the rest of him not in contact) and this is a massive achievement. I am most comfortable sleeping with no physical contact though.

In contrast, other sorts of touch would bring about great pleasure (not sexual pleasure, but a sort of euphoria deeply pleasurable sensation), the sorts of things that other people wouldn't normally associate with intense pleasure - like somebody lightly touching my hair, or my mother playing with my pony tail while she was talking on the phone.

The touch sensitivity sometimes occurs with eating too; for example, although I really like the flavour of tomato, sometimes I can't stand eating it because of the texture. When I was a kid I would never eat raw tomato, but I would eat it in any other form. The same applied to other "squidgy" sorts of foods, like ripe fruit, I wouldn't eat any of it. These days sometimes I can put up with raw tomato, but sometimes it makes me feel too queasy so I use capsicum (called red pepper in America) in my salad instead.

In terms of auditory sensitivity, when I'm in places that are too loud and crowded I find the noise quite painful. After a short time I can get a sort of "numbing" effect, where it's like my sensory system sort of shuts down, and I get a sort of dream-like sensation of being underwater. It's a pity because I love rock and symphonic metal music but the two times I've been to a live concert I haven't been able to really enjoy it because of the crowds and the noise.

I am SUPER sensitive to smells and sensitive to sound. I can hear the clock ticking by my bed or a drip from the faucet at night and it will drive me up the wall. Smells make me gag all the time. After a party or family get together i need downtime to decompress because I get really touchy. It's rough.