Growing up with Sensory Processing Disorder is a particularly challenging way to live, mostly due to the limited amount of diagnostic criteria, research or general consensus on what SPD is. The goal of this article is to share a personal experience growing up with a diagnosis of Sensory Processing Disorder.
Sensory Processing disorder, simply put, is a disorder in the way the brain interprets sensory input. In other words, how our brain responds to touch, taste, sight, smell, and sound. Many of the symptoms of SPD in children and even adults mimic the symptoms of disabilities on the autism spectrum. For this reason, many people with SPD will struggle to acclimate to general social settings, for this reason and many others, this generally leads to anxiety disorders later on in life.
For me, growing up, I experienced many challenges which I still silently face to this day. The worst of which was sensory overload. Sensory overload is when you are over sensitive to sensory stimulation. The best way to describe this to someone who hasn't experienced it is a feeling of overwhelming panic because there is too much input being processed at once, you can feel every fiber of your own shirt pressing on your skin while you also hear the wind outside, the light from the window, etc. This can happen at anytime and sometimes can make social settings very disconcerting. My parents had a tent put up in my room, when I had a situation of sensory overload, I would go into the tent where it was quiet and safe until it passed.
We also experience struggles with physically touching others, eye contact, and general spacial awareness. Catching a ball, writing with a pen, playing an instrument, are all extremely challenging. Growing up, I showed no hand dominance, and so I had to spend years in occupational therapy exercising my right hand to write and even then, my hand writing was so illegible that my school asked me to type with a laptop in class instead of using a pen.
There were lots of tools to help with the symptoms, but many of them, like the laptop in school, made it apparent to other kids that I was different, or something was wrong with me, and after enough time, I started to believe it. Although over time, I began to learn how to overcome many of the challenges that SPD created, some of them I still struggle with today. For instance, sometimes I feel things hotter or colder than they are, or even just feel hot on one side of my body. Sometimes I still have trouble holding eye contact, eating crunchy food, or learning new synaptic skills. As a whole, SPD is a very little known disorder which is only recently being recognized and studied as a disorder independent of autism.
Generally speaking, as a child, and even now as an adult, I can say from experience that a person with a diagnoses of Sensory Processing Disorder wants what any person would want, to be understood, accepted and loved for who they are.
