Tag Archives: autistic meltdown

Sensory Issues Part 4 – smell/taste/texture

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The process of writing this blog is making me see all the ways I’ve been not been seeing things, hearing them, tasting them. Only the ‘peak experiences’ had come to my attention.
If you had asked me, outside of the experience of pregnancy, I would have said that the olfactory channel had a small impact on me.

When I got pregnant with our first child, OMG it was horrific.

We had a gorgeous leather sofa and armchairs, so soft and squishy. I loved them. Until I didn’t.
I came home from work, already feeling a little pregnancy-queezy and there was this awful smell. At first I went in search of any dead birds or animals that one of the cats might have brought in and left in a sunny patch. Nothing. I paced the house trying to work out what it was. My husband came home. “Can you not smell it?” I demanded. He couldn’t. Long story short – it was the sofa, the leather. I would react physically, like a dog shaking its head and pawing at its muzzle to get rid of the smell.

“Can you not smell it?” is a frequent refrain of mine. It’s not enough to trigger a meltdown but it can have an accumulative effect if the other senses are overloaded. I have to walk out of a room if someone is wearing strong perfume or aftershave. My son and husband are banned from using spray deodorants anywhere where I might walk into a cloud of the stuff. In fact hubby now uses a roll-on instead. The current annoyance is our new carpets. I can smell them. I could smell the old ones, too, but I had labelled the smell an accumulation of ten years of dog-cats-teenageboys and was looking forward to a new odour-free home. The feckin’ smell is still here. It’s part of the carpets.

A related sense is taste. I’m a bit of a supertaster. I cannot bear bitter flavours. I’ve spent a couple of years trying to get used to tonic water in a G&T. I’ve finally given up experimenting with different types, flavours and garnishes. Why drink something so unpleasant in the name of being a grown up?
I hate bitter salad leaves. Give me the peppery ones any day – so it’s not about intensity of flavour. It’s about an aspect of flavour.
It isn’t just a dislike. I’m finding this one hard to describe. Thinking about it, it’s the same as the smell reaction, trying to physically shake out the taste.

A couple of days ago my neighbour gave me an exotic fruit (she’s from Hong Kong). I think it was a mango but it had an unusual shape and colour compared to the supermarket ones. I left it a while because often the things she gives us have unexpected qualities; different textures or flavours, like the apple-pears – they looked like apples but had the texture of pears. Many autistic people don’t like the unexpected in our food.
Eventually I decided to have the mango for my lunch. The flavour was very intense and had an edge to it. It reminded me that this ‘edge’ was a common experience from childhood. It opened up a door on memories. The edge is sharp and unpleasant; mango, broccoli, avocado, bitter leaves, marmalade, broth. It’s metallic.
In the same way I can only eat using certain cutlery. Our older knives and forks have the same effect as tinfoil on a tooth filling; it’s electric, metallic, painful. I’d noticed it for a while but never thought to decide to only eat using the cutlery that isn’t unpleasant. An aspect of masking – just putting up with something and getting on with it?

I wondered whether supermarket mangos have been bred to be sweeter these days and without that metallic edge? Or has my masking included flattening down not just emotional responses but also sensory responses. Does my perspex layer include everything in its controlling downward pressure? This masking, this layer, is helpful in navigating a world that can’t accept an adult having an expressive response to a taste or smell they don’t like. But how much have I missed in the opposite direction? Those wonderful flavours and smells blocked out?

This next section I wasn’t sure whether to include under taste or under a future post on rituals, rules, and routines; food separation. I don’t mind the different foods on my plate touching or even one covering another (unlike one of my sons who really doesn’t like foods on top of each other). I do however prefer to eat each thing on my plate separately. I like to taste my chicken or my broccoli (yes, I eat it now but only the young, less strong-tasting varieties) or my potatoes. If you mix them all up you can’t really taste anything. The exception is things that are supposed to be mixed up, like stew or spaghetti bolognaise that have their own mixed-up flavour. I might also mix up a couple of things if one of those foods is something I ‘ought’ to eat but I don’t really like the taste or texture of – mayonnaise to disguise the texture of a hard-boiled egg for example.

Which brings me to texture. I can’t eat slimy, slippery or rubbery things. Instant gag-reflex. My dad, when I was a child, insisted that the only way to eat boiled eggs was soft-boiled. Bleuch! I can only eat them hard-boiled or fried on both sides if we’re talking fried eggs. And again I often have to disguise the texture; a full English breakfast where the crispy bacon or well-done sausage hides the rubberiness of egg whites. I definitely have to be in the mood for eggs. I can’t bear fat on anything other than really crispy bacon.  Lightly cooked fish or overcooked fish; yuk. It’s a minefield.

I saw an angry tweet the other day from someone ranting about an adult only being able to eat chicken nuggets and french fries. You have to wonder what is going on in someone’s head that they can get so angry about another person’s food choices. What does it matter? It doesn’t affect your food choices. It’s not like you’re being forced to eat chicken nuggets. Get over it.
We don’t choose to have these sensitivities.

If you are or think you are autistic, you have a right to your own likes and dislikes. It’s time to pay attention to your own responses and choose those things that give you joy. Enjoy!

Sensory Issues Part 2 – Sound

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The second most sensitive sense for me is sound.

For a time there in my early thirties I thought I was going deaf. I had always had hearing and ENT problems as a child (or maybe I was just autistic?) and so thought this was a continuation of some sort. I saw a consultant who, after tests, told me that my hearing was perfect. So, why could I not hear what was being said if there was any kind of background noise, I asked. He told me it was because I was born prematurely and my inner ear hadn’t developed fully and so it or my brain coudn’t process or distinguish sounds when there was a lot of auditory input. Hearing aids wouldn’t help and the only solution was to learn to lip-read. At that time I had two young children, worked full-time and so had no spare time to take lip-reading classes. Besides, I kind of already did lip-read, and still do. If I can’t see your mouth when you’re talking, I can’t hear you. I can’t process your words.

Roll forward to self-identification and my rabbit-hole autism research and I read about something called auditory processing disorder (there are similar processing disorders for the other senses, too). Aha!
When there are multiple auditory sources, I cannot process them. I cannot pick out the one relevant source – your speaking voice –  and cancel out all the others – background music, the television, other people in the pub, traffic noise, the fan on my computer… you get the idea.
My hearing is actually very sensitive. When we first moved into this house, at night I could hear the pump of the underground reservoir some distance to the back of our house. At least that’s what I think the noise is. It drove me nuts. Last night I could hear it through my mattress – until I put my ear plugs in.

I cannot process information if you simply tell me. I need to see it in writing – whether pre-printed or written down myself as you talk. Alternatively I need to see something done and actively do it myself to either take it in or to learn something new. I cannot easily process the spoken word. I struggle with tv programmes if the speech isn’t clear and have to rewind and watch key bits of dialogue to follow the plot. I can’t tell you if I like a movie unless I’ve seen it a couple of times to let me process it fully.

If you want to tell me something important, you need to be absolutely certain you actually have my attention otherwise it might not go in. I will not hear anything you say if I am focusing on something else – hyper focusing. It’s what many autistics do. If I’m reading, all of my attention is on what I’m reading and no auditory input is going through. I’m not being ignorant. I can’t hear you.

I hate using the telephone. I can’t process the words fast enough to answer in a way that I can be certain is the right response. I have to ask people to repeat themselves. I have to write it down as I listen to be able to take it in. I much prefer email or text.

This doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like any sound. I love sound. I love loud music – but only my music – I cannot abide Jazz. Remember that fingers-down-a-chalkboard feeling I talked about in the last post? That’s me and Jazz. I cannot bear it. For a while I kept asking why do I  love Blues so much but hate Jazz. What is it musically that makes that happen. Now I can let go of that and assume it’s part of my processing issues.

I will use music as a barrier to all other sounds if I want to concentrate on reading or writing. Sometimes with lyrics (the words just wash over me anyway) sometimes without.

For some autistic people sound is excruciating. I saw a man in a T.V. programme who reported that he can hear electricity humming through the wires in the walls. Some people wear noise cancelling headphones to simply negotiate the everyday world without being overwhelmed. For me, when I reach overload, I get a kind of nausea deep inside and I have to retreat to silence.

So, again, a request. If you know someone who seems to zone out and not hear you, they might not be being rude. If someone wears headphones, they might not be being anti-social. If a child is covering their ears in distress they might be overloaded.
Give us space. Look at what you could do to help. Want to meet up for a chat? Suggest somewhere quiet without canned music and bouncing hard surfaces everywhere. And don’t make a big show of it.

We’ll love you for it.

Sensory Issues Part 1 – Touch

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One of the key elements of  autism is having sensory differences. This can mean that we are over sensitive or under sensitive to any one or a combination of the senses. It can mean that we either avoid or seek out sensations. Some things we are so sensitive to that we experience it as painful. This could be (and has been reported as such by some autistic people) what is behind some autistic melt downs, especially if the autistic person is non-verbal and does not have an alternative way of communicating their distress at sensory overload.

I’ll describe what goes on for me with the hope that if you are (or suspect you are) autistic then it might help you in your own journey of self-discovery. If you’re not autistic then maybe it will inform how you behave with any autistic people (child or adult) that you meet, perhaps treating them with greater kindness and understanding, maybe even helping them to resolve whatever is overloading them.

Let’s start with touch as that’s the one I’ve been most aware from an early age (although I had no idea it was autism-related). As a child (and still now, obvs) I couldn’t bear the feel of rough textures on my fingers, hands or feet. I couldn’t bear nylon socks (the new fangled, easy-to-wash fabric that everything was made of in the 60s and 70s) or crunchy nylon nightdresses, although I loved the smooth, silky feel of the care labels on the night dresses. I avoided rough fabrics or surfaces but sought out smooth and silky textures. I hated the itchy woollen blanket on my bed but loved the satin edging to it up around my face.

To accidently touch a rough or crunchy fabric is, for me, like fingernails down a chalkboard. It makes me shudder, sets my teeth on edge and makes me dance around, shaking my hands to try and get rid of the rough feeling. To touch something smooth is soothing and calming.
This ties into one of my avoidance strategies and a couple of my stims.
I once had a boyfriend (not a very nice one) who noticed that I habitually tucked my thumbs inside my curled up fingers. I had never noticed that I did that. He picked on it and told me not to do it (told you he wasn’t very nice).
Only once I self-identified did I twig that doing this protected my fingers from touching things, even the nice textures; you can have too much of a good thing you know. It is also about keeping my skin hydrated. I do not like having the skin on my hands or feet feeling dry and tight (or have anything ‘drying’ on them, for example flour or dust). This creates a physical tension inside me, like a coiled spring, until I can wet my hands or put on some handcream. As a child, the skin on my feet used to split right across the balls of my feet when I wore nylon socks in synthetic shoes.

My most frequent stim is that I constantly run my fingertips over my thumbnails and my thumbs over my fingernails. If I wear nail varnish the stim becomes all-encompassing to the extent that it begins to feel like a sore tooth or an exhausting nausea of over-indulgence and I have to stop. I also constantly touch the back of my teeth with my tongue, with the same over-stimulation impact, when I’m tense.

I can wear (natural fibre) socks so long as I have shoes on. I cannot stand to be in stocking feet.
I cannot walk on carpet in bare feet.
When I shop for clothes the second thing I do (after pre-selecting colour) is to touch the fabric. It’s a feather-light touch, just in case it’s an unbearable fabric. You can’t always tell just by looking what the fabric will feel like.
I can only wear loose-fitting clothes made from soft, draping fabrics.

Watching me you might not see any of this, other than perhaps my twiddling fingers, but it’s like a volcano inside.

Part 2 I’ll talk about Sound. Hope you come back to take a look.