Frustrating when people tell you what you feel is wrong.
A daily event in my life involves the temperature. It can be 75degrees out and I say “I’m cold”. I can’t count how many times the response back to me is “it’s not cold”. For you it might not be cold but it is for me!
Volume is also a problem for me. I will comment on how loud something is and the response is usually “no it’s not” or “you can hear that?”.
Being told that how I feel isn’t how I feel by a lot of people my whole life has been isolating, among other things. Having SPD makes me feel like I’m being called a liar all the time.
It’s telling someone you’re cold and they say it’s not cold. Thats’s loud, they say no it’s not. They don’t believe you!
Even family members. That’s what hurts the worst. Just because they don’t feel something the way I do they can’t believe it’s true.
I experience the world so much differently than almost everyone around me. I’m always cold when everyone else is warm. It’s always too loud. Sometimes there’s too many things happening at once. There’s something called “masking”. I didn’t realize I did it until I read about it. And then so many things made sense. It’s possible to “keep it together” while experiencing a sensory overload. Unfortunately the frustration comes out later.
Just recently I was leaving the dentist office and I stopped at the front desk to change some appointments. I was hot (I overheat easily also). They had music on that had a lot of bass in it. (I enjoyed listening to the music my whole appointment and I didn’t have an issue with it the whole appointment.) While trying to reschedule the appointments I began to overheat. Hearing a constant banging noise was too much! I felt myself “loosing it”. The whole time I was there it wasn’t a problem but when there were other senses affected I couldn’t handle the music anymore. I explained to the ladies at the desk what was happening and that allowed me to keep it together. I left immediately and called at a later date to reschedule. After I left it took awhile to feel “normal” again.
Sometimes a person with SPD can have no issue with something one moment and then a huge issue with it the next. It’s very confusing to live with SPD. Everything always changes except the fact that my brain responds to things differently than most people and a lot of times they don’t believe me.