Sensory Processing

My depression has been better for the past several days (finding wood to knock on).  Sir has been holding a fairly rigid “no screen time” rule during the day and I’ve been (mostly) following it, and I think it might be helping.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I don’t have bipolar symptoms.  Sigh.

It’s nice not feeling completely deadened alternating with drowning with depression, but for several days I’ve been struggling with a different, fun symptom – sensory processing disorder.

While the most obvious (to me) manifestation of sensory processing disorder is tactile, I’m realizing that I probably have lower levels of auditory and visual processing symptoms a good deal of the time, I just wasn’t recognizing them as such.  But just now, as I was avoiding writing, I was reading another woman’s blog about bipolar and she was talking about her auditory processing issues and I was thinking, “Oh my God!  I thought I was just bitchy!”  But actually, I probably have auditory processing issues.

So… the last few days I’ve been having a tactile issue.  Usually my tactile issues happen in my toes or my mouth, sometimes in my fingers.  It can escalate to full body issues (and visual and auditory) when I’m in an acute dysphoric state (when Sir and Sub Brother have to turn off lights and anything that makes sound, and strip my clothes, and… hope that gravity itself doesn’t make me too insane… that and… air…).  What happens is… like right now… I can’t stand the feel of my tongue against the inside of my mouth… touching my teeth, touching my gums… And I can’t stand the feel of the inside of my cheeks touching my teeth and my gums.

You neurotypical people out there probably don’t even think about how much contact there is between surfaces inside your mouth, but let me share with you, there’s a fuck ton!  Your neurotypical brain has a function called gating that basically lets you tune out sensory information that is deemed (by your brain) as irrelevant.  This is really just a great efficiency function, it means your brain doesn’t spend energy focusing on things that really don’t need any focus, like the sensation of your tongue and cheeks touching your teeth and gums all the time…  Or your toes touching each other inside your shoes.  Or the places between your fingers where you skin touches…  Or probably, most of the time, every spot on your body that is touched by clothing, or your hair…

But my brain doesn’t always believe in efficiency, and sometimes, my brain decides it must process ALL THE FEELINGS!  And… oh my god, it sucks so much.

When I start feeling it, I try very hard to find something else to focus on because the more I think about the feeling, obviously, the more it becomes central in my focus, so my first strategy is to become highly engaged in something else, and to NOT let myself move my tongue/lips/cheeks (or toes, or fingers) trying to alleviate the sensation.  The more I move, the more the sensation is activated, and the worse it gets.  But it’s very hard to both think about something other than your mouth, and pay attention to not letting your mouth move, and so I am highly defeated in my plan, and usually just have to try to meditate and breathe and not move as much as possible and hope for it to pass in a few hours.

Sometimes that works.

This week it hasn’t.  And it’s continued for three days.  And because I can’t stop myself from trying to make it stop, I am developing sores inside my mouth because I can’t stop moving my lips and tongue to try to change the places that are touching.  I’m also getting headaches because I’m overworking the muscles in my tongue and jaw and face so much, trying to move constantly.

The same thing happens in my feet and legs when it’s my toes, and in my hands and arms when it’s my fingers, though fingers are the easiest because I can literally spread them completely and get some relief… mouth is the fucking absolute worst.  This evening I spent ten minutes literally holding my lips away from my teeth with my fingers, just to give myself a fucking break, and even then, my tongue was still getting touched.

Then, today, my mom was visiting and she was talking about something, and, because of how she is, she kept getting off on sidetracks (she’s like me, perhaps) and going of on asides, and I really just wanted to know the upshot of the story she was telling, and I wanted to SCREAM, because, in my head, I just kept thinking JUST STOP TALKING!!!!

Part of it is that my mom is particularly talkative.  The guys (who I spend the most time with on a daily basis) don’t talk as much, and they usually sign instead of voice (Sir, though, not always), and they just… don’t ramble as much, they’re both much more direct in their thinking, I think, and their expressions reflect that.  I’m more meandering (good thing THEY don’t have bipolar) and so is my mom.  So I find that… when I’m feeling twitchy, I will absolutely not be able to stand my mom talking at me, and I become really impatient and irritable.

I’ve thought, in the past, it was because… it’s my mom, I have a complicated relationship with her, etc.  But now I’m wondering if it’s more simply biological.  I become extremely irritated by the constant barrage of sound, especially in situations where I normally have an expectation of quiet (like in my own house).

The blog I was reading described auditory processing disorder as feeling “overwhelmed” by the sound, and becoming “agitated, irritable, and anxious” which is… EXACTLY how I feel in those times.

And when I look at it even more closely, there are even times when this comes up with Sir and Sub Brother, although less, probably because of who they are, and also because they are more sensitive to my reactions and generally stop when I get twitchy…  Even though I just think I’m being bitchy.  They might be recognizing bipolar where I don’t.  This evening Sir was saying something about us cleaning the house tomorrow, which instantly triggered a lot of anxiety for me because… the house is messy, most of it is my crap, because I’ve been trying to pack for a trip, and I just feel that the mess is too big and overwhelming to deal with.

Sir was very calmly laying out our plan for tomorrow to get things under control, and probably it won’t take more than a couple hours to do all of it, but, I just felt more and more overwhelmed and twitchy and kind of stopped looking at him (we were all sitting at the table together).  He started to voice because I wasn’t looking at him, and then I couldn’t stand hearing him and started just saying/signing “Okay…  Okay!  OKAY!  OKAY!”  I just wanted him to stop making sounds at me!

And he did…

Probably because he knows me better than I know myself.  Sigh.

And he wasn’t mad at me.  But he did send me up to get ready for bed (alone, in the dark).  He knows my mouth has been driving me crazy, and that my mom talking was making me crazy.

Sigh.

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