#miiiight have hyperfocused on that for a quick minute

[nope-body]

I talked to my therapist about my sensory issues and how it fits into sensory processing disorder pretty much perfectly and I know that we’re trying to work through a whole lot of things right now but it feels like she’s not actually listening to me on it? She sent me an article on sensory processing sensitivity, which isn’t what I was talking about and the article itself came off as sort of... weird? Something about it seemed off and I usually trust my instincts when it comes to that stuff because they’re never wrong. It also just. Didn’t fit what I was describing to her. Here’s what they say about someone with sensory processing sensitivity:

“A highly sensitive person — whether child or adult — processes sensory stimuli and information more strongly and deeply than do others. Individuals with SPS express these characteristics:

Deeper cognitive processing

More attention to subtleties

Greater emotional reactivity

Pausing before acting

Greater awareness of environmental and social stimuli, including the moods and emotions of others”

And half of those are the exact opposite of what I experience! I don’t even know what “more attention to subtleties” even means, but I don’t pick up on things that everyone else does, much less pick up on more things. I don’t pause before acting; I realize I’m doing something halfway through the task! Others moods and emotions? No clue! None whatsoever! I’ve only learned to identify when someone might be upset because of my parents- if they were having a bad day or were angry or frustrated or tired or anything negative, I have to be able to pick up on that or I will end up getting yelled at. Some of the identifiers I use for them can be generalized to others, but not always. And usually I think someone is irritated when they aren’t, so if anything, I’m less aware of “the moods and emotions of others”, not more.

And the stuff that does fit me? Can all be explained by other things. Deeper cognitive processing? Possibly adhd, possibly just genetics; I can’t say for sure because the wording is so vague that it could mean almost anything. Greater emotional reactivity? I’m traumatized! What do you want from me? And yeah, I have “greater awareness of environmental stimuli”- again, vaguely worded and can be clearly explained by my adhd- adhd brains don’t filter out the stimuli that neurotypical brains would deem unnecessary and filter out. I’m aware of everything happening and every sound and touch and bright light because my adhd doesn’t let me ignore them.

And my issue isn’t that I’m overwhelmed because my brain isn’t filtering stuff out. The issue is that I have so much difficulty processing any sensory input, which is made worse when I’m trying to process everything with no filter, and when it gets to be too much, it is physically painful to me, something that no one seems to get.

I don’t understand what people are saying half the time! Not because I can’t hear them or because they’re talking about things I don’t know about. I don’t understand them because the sounds they’re making, the sounds that everyone else seems to understand perfectly, sound like garbled gibberish to me. And when my brain gets tired from trying to process something (or everything)? The stuff it can’t process just becomes painful to me. The lights? Not even as bright as outside, just regular lights you’d see in a school or a building or wherever, they are too much for my brain to process. They are too bright and they hurt my eyes and to be honest, light in general hurts my eyes. When I’m in the shower and I think I got soap in my eyes, and I close them and rinse them off? I have to cover my eyes when I open them or else I won’t be able to tell whether the pain I’m feeling is soap or just the light.

And I looked at the Wikipedia article (as a base point) for sensory processing sensitivity, and it seems to be almost entirely based off of the research of one psychologist, Elaine Aron, and it started with a book she wrote, which seems to be the origin of the term “sensory processing sensitivity” and “highly sensitive person”, and only after the book was published did they formally establish the terms in any scientific context. Despite asserting that sensory processing sensitivity was a trait, and highly implying that it was a personality trait (she published an article connecting it to Carl Jung, who is a widely known psychologist who studied personality, in an academic journal), previous research 20 years earlier connected high sensory sensitivity to a lower stimulus threshold in the thalamus.

In non psychological terms, Elain Aron says that her sensory processing sensitivity is a personality trait, but other research shows that high sensory sensitivity is because the thalamus, the part of the brain that all sensory information passes through before it’s essentially “sorted” to the other parts of the brain, lets in more sensory information. The extra information that it lets in is what would be filtered out by a thalamus that belongs to someone without sensory sensitivity.

Elain Aron seems to be the driving force behind the term and concept of sensory processing sensitivity, based on her many books on the topic and her research articles, which, when looking up “sensory processing sensitivity” on scholarly google, seems to be the only articles cited on sensory processing sensitivity when it’s then used to look at how it impacts businesses people and technology use and pretty much anything. When sorted by relevance, she is an author of half of the “most relevant” articles on it (5/10), and almost everything else is taking her research and adding onto it through their own lens. Her first article using sensory processing sensitivity in a scientific context (as I said above, published a year after her book on the topic was published) has been cited by almost 800 other articles according to google.

She seems to be the only primary source of information on “sensory processing sensitivity”, and some of her conclusions, primarily the ones about “highly sensitive people” having a greater awareness of others’ moods and emotions, seem to be a bit. questionable. She has an article where they did MRIs on “highly sensitive people” and found that they all activated the same areas of the brain when looking at happy pictures, but I haven’t seen anything comparing the awareness of others’ moods and emotions between highly sensitive people and not highly sensitive people. And since she was also the one who created the questionnaire that establishes whether or not you’re a highly sensitive person, I’m starting to question things a bit.

I think that “sensory processing sensitivity” is simply not a thing, at least not in the way Elaine Aron defines it. I definitely believe that sensory sensitivity impacts people, some more strongly than others, and I think that being aware of others’ moods and emotions is a trait that can be present more strongly in some than others, but I don’t agree with how they are seemingly lumped together into “sensory processing sensitivity”, and the subtle wording around it that makes those with it, so called “highly sensitive people”, seem better and special and different, in a good way.

Sensory processing disorder, on the other hand, fits my experiences. The symptoms aren’t very clear cut, since it is not an official diagnosis in the DSM-V (though the symptoms of it are listed as possible symptoms of those with autism spectrum disorder), but from what I have gathered, it can be simply listed as

Hyper-responsive or over-responsive to sensory stimuli

Hypo-responsive or under-responsive to sensory stimuli

Sensory stimulation seeking

It seems like basically your brain processes sensory stuff weird and wants a certain level of input from each sense, beyond which that sense’s input ranges from mildly irritating to excruciatingly painful, and under which your brain almost ignores it completely. To get the correct level of input for each sense, your brain creates drives to seek out that correct level of input, and those drives can be distracting if there isn’t enough input or painful if there’s too much. So you then would take an action in response to that drive- whether it’s fidgeting with something (adding touch input), listening to music (adding sound input), turning off the lights (decreasing visual input), pacing (adding proprioception input, or your sense of your body in space), or something else.

Additionally, sometimes your brain just doesn’t process something right, like not understanding a word being said, not recognizing what’s in a picture, not recognizing the taste of something you’re eating, even if you’ve had it hundreds of times before, or something else. I think this may fall under hypo-responsive to sensory stimuli, but that symptom is more of a reaction to the actual symptom of your brain not processing a sense. If it’s not processed correctly, how can you be expected to respond the way you would otherwise?

This is what I’ve sorta concluded based on what turned up in my searches, because they were either unreliable, unhelpful, or both, so this is my understanding of sensory processing disorder. I might be wrong, but what information I’ve gathered on it makes sense for me, and fits my experiences. “Sensory processing sensitivity”, on the other hand, doesn’t, and I’m not even completely convinced it’s a “personality trait” that makes sense.