5:12am November 23, 2014

Toilet phobia.

Don’t worry, there’s TL;DR at the end with the basic questions I’m getting at.

I had a terrible toilet phobia growing up.

My older autistic brother liked to play in toilets, apparently with their contents as well, although I wasn’t told that part until I was older. I guess my parents didn’t want me even more grossed out than I was.

But like all things between us, we were opposites.

I had to spend a lot of time on the toilet so this presented a problem. Some of the fear was of the toilet itself, but some was of the sound it made when flushing. I was especially terrified of toilets that flushed themselves, as one of ours did due to a malfunction. But I had chronic, severe constipation, so I still had to sit on the damn toilet too often. (I was also scared absolutely shitless by showerheads, and particularly the one in our house’s main bathroom, so that didn’t help any. But that’s another, long story that I don’t want to tell here.)

Anyway, I was even more afraid of unfamiliar toilets. And I was terrified – for entirely different reasons from each other – of outhouses and public toilets. In the case of public toilets, it was the flush. It was loud. It drowned out every other sensations. It turned the entire world streaked with white, with some grey and black around the edges. Some kids are afraid they’ll be flushed down the drain. I knew that was impossible, especially because I regularly fell into toilets that were way too large me. I was afraid of toilets partly because of falling in, in fact. But the biggest reason was the sensory overload of the flush, the way it bled over into all my senses and rendered all of them useless at the same time.

I developed the same technique for dealing with public toilets as I did the dreaded flushing toilet at home – flush and run. That is. Do my business. Get my pants up. Get as far away from the toilet as possible while still in reach of the flush handle. Reach for the flush handle. Poise to run. Flush. Run like hell out of the stall, and hopefully out of the entire bathroom as well. I didn’t understand hygiene well enough to wash my hands anyway, and couldn’t make myself linger if I wanted to;

I know this sounds strange from someone whose place of solace in school was also the bathroom. But my place of solace was an empty bathroom, the part with the sinks, not the part with the toilets. The toilets were more or less safely contained within stalls.

Anyway, I know that a lot of autistic people have specific fears of specific objects that crop up over and over again, and heading the list might as well be toilets and vacuum cleaners. (We also tend to be fascinated with toilets and vacuum cleaners. The opposite of an autistic trait is generally another autistic trait. Non-autistic traits lie somewhere in the middle. Damn I wish I could locate that study. I keep wanting to cite it, every-damn-where, and I can’t ,because I can’t find it amid my mounds and mounds of papers on autism I have.)

So I know there’s got to be a lot of people on here who had or continue to have a phobia of toilets, for sensory reasons or otherwise. In my case it was sensory reasons. I still remember the contortions my parents went through to get e to use pubic toilets, outhouses, and worst of alll, port-a-potties (the smell of chemical toilets, the grunge, the disgustingness, worse than flushing in some ways). These sometimes resulted in hours-long standoffs. Once I remember my dad sneaking me in to the employee’s toilets at Big Basin because I flat refused to use the port-a-potties they had set up there. On that trip I’d used an outhouse while caught in a rainstorm, but I would still not use a port-a-potty.

Anyway.

So one of the adaptations I made to my fear of toilets was developing a “favorite toilet” in each public bathroom they normally frequented.

For instance, when I was first in school (public school – in America that means state-funded, not posh) there were two bathrooms i used on a regular basis. In each bathroom, IIRC, there were two rows of two stalls each, and then a wall with mirrors separating them from the front of thee bathrooom.

In the first bathroom, I would go to the right and pick the bathroom stall at the very back. In the second bathroo, I would go to the left and pick the bathroom stall at the very back. If those stalls were occupied, I simply wouldn’t go to the bathroom, until they weren’t occupied. I very rarely remember using a different stall, and I remember the complete and utter terror that I felt in doing so. I still have nightmares about those toilets.

Anyway, I guess my question is twofold:

1. Did anyone else have such an extreme sensory response to toilets (particularly those industrial-strength public toilets) that it lmade the world disappear from out from under alll your senses at once?

2. Did anyone cope with toilet phobias of any kind (regardless of the source) by developing “favorite toilets” that they would use to the exclusion of all other toilets? For instance, at school?

Oh and a third question: Did anyone else’s weird toilet behavior persist into adulthood? When I first moved out on my own, I had a very unreliable bathroom that flooded the house frequently and scared me a good deal. I don’t think that was the only reason that I ended up going to the bathroom on my floor and yard, but I’m certain it was one of many reasons.

TL;DR: I’m autistic and grew up with a common autistic terror of toilets. I am wondering about other people’s experiences. Namely: 1. Did anyone else have such a strong sensory reaction to flushing (especially in industrial-strength public toilets) that it literally felt like the entire world turned white with some grey stripes and I lost all connection to my body and all connection to everything through sensory channels of any kind? 2. Regardless of why you were afraid of toilets, did you develop a routine of having one or more ‘favorite toilets’ in a public bathroom that you would allow yourself to use, while not being able to make yourself use any other toilet? 3. Did/does any of your strange toileting behavior persist into adulthood?

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