Sensory Processing Disorder

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Do you have SPD that affects your social life? What are the effects?

I’m not sure if I have sensory processing disorder per se but I have gone to therapy for sensorary issues. I went for noise. Certain noises are minor torture. I can feel my body tense up. One of the noises is chewing. Jesus Christ when some one eats I want to punch their face in. One thing we did in therapy to alleviate this was to stimulate another sense such as touch.

SPD is the single worst aspect of my existence, hands down. It's made me pretty agoraphobic, thanks to the times I've started blacking out during sensory overload. It was worse when I was younger and couldn't understand what was happening. These days, it's more of a drain than a source of panic, which has helped quite a bit. Socially, and apart from the agoraphobia, it affects my ability to focus in chaotic environments (which, from my point of view, is most environments). Conversations can become impossible and eye-contact is frustrating. If I reach sensory overload it's difficult to understand people and process my surroundings, like trying to read rolling text that's moving too fast. But the effects of SPD is something that I've seen vary from source to source. Some, especially those that advocate it as an independent diagnosis, tend to blame SPD for a whole host of neurological and physical symptoms, from joint hypermobility and atypical drug reactions to social impairments and executive dysfunction. Others, more straight-forward, limit it to problems with sensory integration. In the former case, there seems to be a very fine line between ASD and SPD, but I can't really work out where it's drawn.

It doesn't affect my social life at this point because my husband knows I need CC on when I watch television. Mine is auditory and I'm hyper aware to the point that it all sounds the same - which sucks when you have three sons.

My middle son caused a mall emergency to be declared last year due to his inability to tolerate things like escalators/elevators. It was a big fiasco and I had to fill out an incident report in front of a lot of people. He also has to have every meal deconstructed in order to eat - the items can NOT touch. Otherwise, it's straight meltdown mode.