What is it?
I get the question a lot, “is this thing that I’m dealing with, that I have a lot of anxiety around, just anxiety, or is it sensory?”
For example, is not brushing your teeth a matter of anxiety or is it sensory? Or is it just not getting up to do it? Being lazy? Not adulting, or functioning, being broken? People come up with a lot of theories to explain it that are judgmental and limiting and don’t really lead to a solution.
And I get it. There was a good decade where I barely brushed my teeth, and I was severely judgmental to myself about that. And it can be difficult to pick apart, because anxiety and sensory things can mask each other, so things that are sensory, if you’re not thinking about it in those terms, it could seem like, “I don’t like it,” and then “I don’t like it” turns into, “I want to avoid it,” and then it turns into stress or anxiety.
So it’s easy to not even realize that it’s a sensory thing.
When I finally had this autism language, and everyone was talking about sensory stuff around autism, I didn’t really think I had much sensory stuff. I knew that I was sensitive to lights, and loud noises, and that I didn’t like tags in clothing. But beyond that, there wasn’t much, I thought.
It turns out, I have a ton of sensory issues, but because I never thought about it in those terms, it was just “stuff that I avoid,” “stuff that I don’t like,” or “stuff that I have to force myself to do,” or that “I have to get through.” But when I started looking at it in those ways, then I could start to figure out, okay, so what is it about this that I’m avoiding? What is it about this that I don’t like? Is it this? Or that? Or is it some other thing? And I could figure it out.
Working to find solutions
I didn’t always find a solution right away, but I could at least identify what’s going on.
Then it wasn’t just “oh, I’m a crap person and I can’t do adult things.” It was “oh, I have a lot of oral sensitivities, and the toothbrush actually triggers the gag reflex. And of course, I don’t want that. That’s my body’s way of saying that there’s something toxic in my mouth and it’s trying to expel it. This isn’t a problem. Like this isn’t me being broken. This is just a thing that happens with me. Is there another way that I can accomplish the goal of having my teeth clean without triggering the gag reflex?”
And it took a few years and a lot of different experimentations, but I finally figured out something that worked, which was strangely the closest thing possible to a normal toothbrush. It was just a frickin’ bamboo toothbrush, just changing to bamboo instead of plastic and especially one with a small head (like a child-sized head), worked. That was it.
When I started asking, what was it that bothered me, I had a useful question, and I could keep working at it until I found something that worked.
I went through electric toothbrushes, and finger brushing, and miswak sticks. And I tried lots of different toothpastes, natural ones and flavored ones, kids ones, and just plain baking soda (which was ugh), but I’ve tried so many different things.
And this is what I mean by solution oriented. When I started asking, what was it that bothered me, I had a useful question, and I could keep working at it until I found something that worked.
So when I figured out, “oh, it’s the plastic” and, separately, “oh, it’s the large head of that toothbrush that my body’s reacting to”, all of a sudden, I could try a child-sized head and I tried a bamboo toothbrush, and the combination was the best, and now I have no problem brushing my teeth.
(I also ended up with a lot of dental work, by the way, after about a decade of barely brushing my teeth. But for me, the threat of impending dental work was less of an issue than gagging on my toothbrush every single day.)
But once I figured out the right question, I could troubleshoot it, and I found a toothbrush that I can tolerate, and that doesn’t trigger my oral sensitivities, and I found a toothpaste that I like, and that’s natural, and feels OK to put into my body. So there’s no anxiety anymore. I don’t need to have anxiety because there’s nothing to worry about, and I don’t actually mind it.
(I don’t love it, but I don’t mind it.)
Living past the negative associations
Okay, when I say it like that, it sounds like it’s a done deal, like all of a sudden I figured this out and it was no big deal anymore, but I did still have strong associations with how brushing my teeth used to feel, that I had to work through because I still expected that I was going to gag and retch and hate it, even though I wasn’t actually doing that.
So it took a while to re-teach my nervous system that that wasn’t actually happening. It took months to get to the point where I really, fully realized that I didn’t actually mind it. That I was genuinely okay now. And there’s still some lingering unpleasant associations with it sometimes, but they’re not very strong anymore.
But when I notice them, and bring them into conscious awareness, it’s very easy now to remind myself that those are just associations from the past. They’re not actually my present reality anymore. And then they go away, and I can brush my teeth just fine.
And I can do that because it is actually okay now. I’m not trying to convince myself that it is, and no one’s trying to tell me that it is when it’s not. It actually is okay.
I’m not trying to convince myself that it is, and no one’s trying to tell me that it is when it’s not. It actually is okay.
It’s been about two years since I figured this out. And those lingering associations are pretty mild at this point, and I expect that, over time, they’ll eventually go away completely. But even at this point, I have no anxiety around brushing teeth anymore, because the associations aren’t the same thing as anxiety.
And the anxiety was never as amorphous as I thought it was. I thought it was unknowable and un-figure-out-able. But it turns out there was actually a very concrete reason for it. There’s plenty of other examples that I could give around showering, leaving the house, or certain chores that I used to avoid without understanding why, and now I either avoid it but understand it (and give myself the compassion to do so), or I’ve figured out solutions and can manage them better now.
There are all sorts of other things I had built up anxiety around, that there was actually an underlying concrete sensory issue that I hadn’t recognized as such. But I didn’t have the language for it. I never had the modeling to look at it in that way. I didn’t have people around me who could explain it in those terms, or figure it out.
And this was the case with a lot of things that I used to avoid, once I started looking at them in new ways. Not all of them were sensory, but a surprising number were. And either way, I was asking better questions, so I could figure out useful solutions.
If you want a few more examples, or ideas, here’s the recording of a workshop I gave on the five of the most overlooked, but common, stressors for Autistics. You can watch the recording of it, and I even made a handout that you can download with the quickie version.
Okay, take care and have a neurowonderful day.
