Memoir of a Hyporesponsive Child

The two of us never quarreled. For one week each year, I had that most coveted of possessions: a neighbor. For that one week, we impersonated mythical creatures and runaway slaves. I doubt Kris had been at her grandparents house two hours one summer before she'd made a dragon's nest in their closet and coaxed me into fitting her with a homemade leash.

A poet, a voracious reader, Kris excelled in school, and managed to play by the rules, but she did not fit in. Her grandparents whispered about her the way my parents whispered about me. Mother had started taking me to a psychiatrist each week, where I paced around the office, trying to sneak peaks at the case notes as I circled past. She must have said something about it to my neighbors.

Kris knew about the week I spent in the hospital when I was ten, and she broached the subject carefully. "I know what you were going through last year," she said. "I mean, I really do know." We were in the treehouse in her grandparents' yard, high above the ranch house, the dogwood trees, the world. "What you need is friends. If it weren't for my friends, I would have done the same thing. I'm not just saying that. It's the truth." I didn't say anything. We descended the ladder, her head turned 'round to look at me. "You can talk to me. I want you to." My mind went "Click... snap." I wouldn't analyze the scene until much later.

The last words I ever said to Kris were, "I'll give you a ring tomorrow." She gave the cliched response, "Gee, I didn't think you cared!" We never did have our phone conversation. She went back to wherever it was she lived the other 51 weeks of the year, and less than a year later, my family moved cross-country from Virginia to Arizona.

By the end of middle school, all the girls I sought as friends would be drama-school types for whom affection and wildness existed as two sides of the same script. "You know that girl who played Snoopy (in the play)?" I remember a girl whispering. "She acts like that all the time!" Oh, but it was because she acted like Snoopy that I enjoyed her company so much -- in my perfect world, everyone would have had the manners of Snoopy, or Tigger the Tiger. My female friends were hyperactive. And somewhere further down the line, it was ordained that my male friends, the ones I loved magnanimously, fearlessly, would have DSM labels.

What's the attraction to people who love and fear and live loudly? For a while, I wondered if it was an imprint from my early childhood. Now I understand a little more about the neurological basis, and I can express that things are not as they appear...

I've been reading about sensory processing, and I've been listening to music. A line jumps out at me, "Sometimes the silence can seem so loud." Yes, and sometimes the loud can seem so... quiet. I'm not talking about auditory processing when I ask you to envision a radio -- when I say that, metaphorically, some people have the volume of the world set way too high and others way too low.

Can you recognize, when you see them, the person who has the volume of the world set way too low? Most people would say it's the child like Kris was -- the wild child. But here's a line I came across the other day that clicked. It is from Regulation Disorder of Sensory Processing

These children require high-intensity sensory input before they are able to respond. They are quiet and watchful at times and may appear withdrawn and difficult to engage.

I am not hyporesponsive across the board, but in some area -- oh, yes! It's hard for most people to imagine a person who doesn't respond much to stimuli in the world around them... until it gets intense enough for them.Such a person may strike others as passive, and others can be surprised indeed when that very unpassive streak comes out. Think about this: In order to register a strong preference for Choice A or Choice B, a person has to perceive a significant difference between them -- one or the other of the alternatives has to meet some minimum threshold when it comes to attraction, disgust, or fear.

I'm not exaggerating a lot when I say that attraction, fear, and disgust aren't things I experience just every day, month, or year... at least not in response to things that I was't anticipating. The responses have gotten fewer and further between over the years. My parents told me that when I was a small child, I was very friendly and engaging. People have assumed that something happened make me fearful. But my arousal levels didn't shoot sky high -- no, they went too low. When I was little, I wasn't fearful of the unknown -- I was engaged by it. When I got older, I got to the point where the unknown simply failed to engage me.

But that which does get the neurons in my brain firing makes a very strong impression on me. I have some strong attachments. The attachments that do get very strong tend to be to things that actually managed to get my neurons firing hard at some point in time.

There was a time, last year, when someone tried to steal my purse, and I held on, even to the point of being dragged. My jeans leg was torn and my knee bloodied. I let go just at the point where I was being pulled through a gateway, I think, and let go not because of fear, but because I simply could't hold on. The assailant was a teenager, probably -- I didn't think he was going to hurt me -- but what I was conscious of was that I had to hold onto the keys. I held onto that thought, something I had drilled into myself, but failed to respond with the fear most people would have felt in the situation.

It scared me later that I hadn't experienced fear. I am not sure that qualifies as sensory underprocessing in the classic sense, but there is underarousal there. Over the years, people have tended to focus on the pockets of anxiety and obsessiveness (I must hold onto those keys!) and failed to see the greater context of underarousal in response to the world around me. One reason I think that I can 'hold thoughts' unnaturally, or be one-track... well, objects in motion tend to remain in motion until they meet up with enough friction from their environment to change their velocity.

I learned from a checklist that hyporesponsive children might not be able to feel whether their nose was running or if their hands or face were dirty or clean. Are you putting me on? I was thinking. An average person can distinguish between a clean face and a dirty one by how it feels? Most things, though, I think I perceive, but the perceptions aren't connected to anything -- there's neither aversion nor attraction. I am the kind of person that if you shout, "Look! You just stepped in green slime!" might look down, "Really? Green slime? I would have tended to describe it as more of a turquoise shade."

Thanks to brain scans, we know that many parts of a person's brain activate in response to even a simple stimuli, or before carrying out a simple action. There are some areas where I know my perceptions are fine-tuned, but I still feel like I need buckets of stimuli poured on top of me -- like I need to be deluded -- before it matters to me one way or the other whether the stimulus is there or not there.

Moreso than sensory things, even, it's human interaction -- human connection -- where the volume of the world just seems so low to me. Most of social interaction seems devoid of intensity to me -- like there's just not that much on the line. There are aspects of human interaction that people think of as being the epitome of intense... How do I explain to them that they just don't seem that intense to me? It's a particular type of intensity that pulls me in. If Kris had just been a 'wild child', she wouldn't have made such a lasting impression on me. She was also in tune with emotions.

Some people view parties and dates as high-stake. I perceive virtually no stakes in those things. I was at a wedding, appearing to others (as is frequently the case) as quiet and withdrawn. I was wrapped up in concern over one person, but also, as I commented later, "There was practically no one there that there was a chance I was going to change their life, or they were going to change mine. In fact, I was never going to see most of them again." In other words, the stakes weren't high enough to demand response. It was a 'low-risk, low-gain' social situation.

Some subgroup of people who hurt themselves physically do so because their thresholds for pleasure and pain are so off that they don't feel pleasure until they'e crossed the line where other people would feel pain. I don't do that -- yet I'm aware when it comes to emotion, my pleasure and pain thresholds are set different than most people's. Here's something that may relate: There have been times where I have been reading a picture book to a group of children (various books, actually) and am aware that my voice is breaking, and that I'm struggling to hold back tears. I may seem to others like I'm so swept away by the pain in the story. Some part of my brain is! The funny thing is, I don't feel like I'm experiencing deep emotion.

Apparently, sometimes I perceive, feel, and respond -- but subjectively, I feel understimulated, not overstimulated. I'm not dissociating in these instances; I truly haven't reached the point yet of being immersed. My explanation is that there are a lot of parts of the brain that are supposed to activate and communicate with each other in response to various stimuli. There are a lot of places along the way that the process can break down. I hear many people diagnosed as autistic have overconnected brains, and this leads them to think the world is too intense. Maybe parts of my own brain are underconnected; maybe there are too many receptors somewhere, and they have a hard time getting enough "juice". Some parts may be carrying on a show, and others, it appears, haven't yet decided there's anything worth attending to. When it comes to emotional experience, I am not good at feeling sated. The threshold for that is set really high. I hear other people say how overwhelming it feels to feel deep emotion -- yet I don't get it. I seek experience, yet fear loss.

(I want to emphasize that what I am describing here is not the most typical manifestation of underprocessing, but it is one that I experience.)

According to the University of Kansas Medical Center, sensory dysfunction can be classified in four categories based on whether a person's threshold is set too high or too low and what their regulation strategies are. A person with a high threshold and active strategy is a sensation seeker; a person with similarly high threshold, but a more passive strategy, has "low registration".

This line moves me to tears: "When a person has low registration patterns, interventions are directed at increasing the intensity of sensory input to improve the chances for noticing and responding to environmental demands." Why does that move me to tears? Because all my life, false intuition has led people to do the opposite! If someone has trouble meeting a threshold, it may be they need a disco light, not a dimming of the light that's already there.

There is indeed a point where the external world becomes more interesting than the internal one, but the threshhold is set higher than it is in most people

I have sometimes pondered why Kris never once turned that temper streak on me. I am not certain, but I believe it went beyond merely that I let her be the leader. I think it also might have been because I followed out of delight and not out of fear. I thought she was awesome.

I was bullied in elementary school, but I think it was generally not by strong willed children, but by weaker ones who felt the need to be tougher than someone. Coventional wisdom says passive children need quiet playmates. Not necessarily. It depends on what's going on inside them. There are children -- and adults -- whose attention simply can't be engaged by the low-key. We all know this -- but we fail to realize that sometimes the ones who experience this most strongly are the ones who appear most passive and quiet themselves.