as small as a world and as large as alone, Hi! I am a different anon, and I saw your ask...

3:38am August 17, 2014

Anonymous asked: Hi! I am a different anon, and I saw your ask about sensory overload in the tags. I just got diagnosed with sensory issues by my therapist, and I found out that all the things I had thought were panic attacks were actually sensory overloads! I have the same thing, I get sluggish and I don't understand what people are saying and I feel like screaming and crying and I need to go somewhere quiet and away from people to feel better. If you feel like that, it could be sensory overload, anon!

That’s really interesting about the panic attacks.

I’ve noticed that people trained in psychology interpret sensory issues in psychological terms very often. It’s great to hear of one bucking the trend.

I’ve told horror stories about my first ever case manager. One of her most annoying traits was her psychologizing everything.

One line in my original IPP: "Amanda does not think it is dissociative in nature when she walks into the closet and closes the door during a stressful meeting.“

Which besides the manipulative way she phrased that…

GETTING AWAY FROM SENSORY OVERLOAD IS NOT FUCKING DISSOCIATION.

I’m the… king/queen/whatever of dissociation. I know all about how to dissociate. I’ve been dissociating since I have been aware of anything, in order to deal with severe chronic pain. I know what dissociation is and I know what it feels like.

Overload is not anxiety.

Shutdown is not dissociation.

Doing physical things to distance oneself from overload is sure as hell not dissociation.

And it makes me furious that people still confuse these things. I mean I understand that ordinary people, including psych patients, do. But it maks me furious that many trained therapists refuse to tell the difference. And people working in the DD field.

I swear though that they can’t understand overload. They can’t understand what it’s like for your brain to be so full that it can’t take anymore. The only comparable state they know of is a high-anxiety state when your brain is full of emotions. So they assume that overload is a panic attack, or that it’s anxiety of some kind, and they try to treat it as anxiety. (Like that person in the #actuallyautistic tag whose therapist is forcing them to do "exposure therapy” on painful fabrics. I know exposure therapy. My mom was in some of the preliminary experiments on exposure therapy for phobias. Sensory issues are not a fucking phobia.)

Anxiety meds don’t help overload for me. The only med that ever helped overload for me was kava kava, in high doses (the kind you get from grinding up the root and making your own thick beverage out of it), and that wasn’t because it helped anxiety, it’s because it has specific chemical properties that don’t exist in most anxiety meds. Also one illicit drug helped overload amazingly, but I refuse to recommend it, especially because an autistic person of an opposite type to mine could run into serious trouble if they took it. Anyway, anxiety meds don’t help my overload much because not much of my overload is anxiety. For some people there is an anxiety component and that will help though.

But:

Overload != anxiety.

Shutdown != dissociation.

Avoiding overload != dissociation.

Getting out of overloading situations != dissociation.

Anyone who insists on looking at overload and shutdown through an anxiety/dissociation model is someone you should not be seeing.

You’re very lucky to find someone who is telling you that your “panic attacks” are actually overload. Too many will tell you the other way around that your overload is just panic attacks, and prescribe you an antidepressant or anti-anxiety med for “panic attacks” when what you need is help dealing with overload.

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