Senses & Sensibilities
Show Notes for Embracing Autism Podcast — Ep. 201

Introduction:
Lia: This season on the Embracing Autism podcast we explore our ‘Senses and Sensibilities’ and their relationship to autism spectrum disorder. We will discuss how senses and behaviors are affected in autism and the scientific theories on potential reasons why.

Lia: Welcome to Embracing Autism, a podcast for parents of autistic children seeking advice and support while spreading awareness and acceptance of autism spectrum disorder.

Lia: I’m Lia!

Matt: And I’m Matt!

Lia: And Each week, we’ll discuss our journey with autism and talk about how to embrace your child’s individuality while providing guidance, tips, resources and sharing our personal stories.

Lia: This is —

Lia & Matt: Embracing Autism!

Discussion:
Lia: Hello everyone and welcome to Season Two of Embracing Autism the podcast.

Matt: We’re back with vengeance!

Lia: Or love.

Matt: Oh, boy.

Lia: So we realized after doing an entire season of this that we never really mentioned in our podcasts that this podcast is brought to you by Autismwish? Yeah, So I don’t think we did that.

Matt: So for anyone who’s wondering, this podcast is brought to you by AutismWish.

Lia: If any of you have never heard of AutismWish this is our little charity, I think we mentioned it briefly at the end of the last season.

Matt: I think I reference it at least once or twice.

Lia: We never really made it clear. And our podcast cover says it and everything. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that. I’m so sorry, guys, we are dropping the ball here. But anyway, totally off-topic this season.

Matt: Season two —

Lia: This season, we are talking about ‘Senses and Sensibilities’. That is the theme. So season one was ‘From Weathering the Storm to Embracing Autism’. And we feel like we brought you guys from the beginning of the journey when you just suspect that there are red flags through the diagnosis process, how to process the diagnosis, and then going towards.

Matt: All the different therapies and financial institutions and such.

Lia: So we’re hoping that we got you through, you know, the roughest part there at the beginning, where you don’t really know what’s going on. And we kind of gave you a little bit of a lifesaver for hopefully a little bit there. So now the theme for this season, we decided to focus on ‘Senses and Sensibilities’. And the reason that we call it that is because we’re going to be focusing on the five different senses due to the fact that a lot of autistic kids struggle with sensory input, and then sensibilities, we are using that as a way to describe pretty much everything else.

Matt: I’m actually excited for this season because the first season was very — it was kind of rough stuff as far as like day one trying to figure out okay, where do I go from here, I might have a diagnosis on my hands, some red flags. But at least with this season, I think that this is kind of changing the perspective a little bit. So now you’re looking at the world through the lens of your son or daughter and how they’re experiencing the world through the different senses, being under sensitive or over sensitive, just how that world is impacting them. So I’m actually really excited just to kind of get into some of the discussions and flesh out some of these ideas.

Lia: And the other thing that we want to kind of touch onto is a little bit of some life experience examples for each of these senses. So we are going to go into each sense, I think we’re going to try to aim for basically an episode per sense just to get you guys really well rounded with that. And we’re going to give you examples on how that area can be impacted or affected in children and adults with autism spectrum disorder. So we’ll give you some examples from our experience with our kids. I can even give you a few examples personally, because I do have some sensitivities that I can also share with you guys, and just some insight so that we can get a little bit better of a perspective on how our kiddos are feeling and also give some tips on ways to kind of mitigate some over sensitivities or under sensitivities.

Matt: I think you’re also going to go into a little bit about the psychology, neuroscience, whatever, yeah, there is science behind it. And that’s for each of the senses that you’re going to kind of dive into a little bit right?

Lia: My background is more in neuroscience and psychology areas. So I’m going to lightly touch on a little bit of the neuroscience on each of these senses during these episodes, but I’m not going to get too deep, because I know that it can get really complicated and it can get very confusing. So I’m just gonna, you know, lightly season it with a little bit of science to the point where it’s kind of interesting, and you know, like a fun fact. But I’m not going to overwhelm you guys, because we don’t need our own overloads.

Matt: Right. And I’m probably going to chime in a bit when we cover taste because that’s kind of my expertise. I’m kind of a food person. So, I love food. So your expertise and mine.

Lia: Let me guess, sensory overload?

Matt: I just love food so much.

Lia: Yeah, that’s not quite what that means. But, yeah, don’t worry. He’s our food expert. I don’t know how that’s relevant. But it If anyone needs a food expert, we have one.

Matt: You’ll thank me after that episode.

Lia: So we will go over all of those. And then we’re going to touch on a few other topics in the sensibilities category that are not quite, they’re not quite all sensibilities, but it’s kind of things that are more behavioral related. So we’ll touch on things like tantrums and meltdowns, and how to try to determine whether one is a tantrum versus a meltdown. We’ll talk a little bit about synesthesia, which is actually kind of, actually you could explain this, you’ve actually experienced synesthesia.

Matt: So yeah, I’m not sure this is the technical way to describe synesthesia, but it’s kind of the blending of the senses. And it’s kind of a weird situation. But we can definitely dive a little bit deeper into that when we cover that episode.

Lia: Yeah, you definitely have a funny story there. So you guys will hear about that in that episode. And we will also be touching a few other topics as well. So again, the theme is ‘Senses and Sensibilities’. And I’m sure some of you are wondering, where did that come from? That doesn’t sound like a familiar name at all, you probably will get a good hint of what type of books I like to read when I was young, or still like to read. And then for those of you who are like Matt, just staring at me blankly, you’re either a male, or you have no idea. No idea what these types of books are, I guarantee you half our audience knows what I’m talking about.

Matt: And we’ll just leave it at that. But I think another key area that we’ll also touch on is kind of the idea of transitions. So Lia mentioned before that we’re going to talk about meltdowns versus tantrums, which I think there is a big importance to actually reference the two and try and tell when you’re having one versus the other because it can make a world of difference. But then also the transitions as well, which I think is key. We use transitions, what a dozen times a day?

Lia: Yeah. And I mean, the two are closely linked, if the transitions aren’t done, well, it leads to meltdown, right?

Matt: Right, I just think of when I tried to do a transition and it doesn’t work. And you’re like, No, you didn’t do the transition right. There’s multiple versions of the transition.

Lia: There’s just one version. But then there’s the versions of the steps we missed. But there’s only one correct version.

Matt: Right, so there, there is a right way, I guess, in our family to do the transition. And then there’s also the wrong way to do the transition.

Lia: Which, again, everything that we tell you guys in this podcast, please just take that as our personal advice from our personal experience. Always, always, always consult your doctors, your therapists, especially occupational therapist, and your developmental pediatrician, because everything that we’re telling you guys are things that have worked for us and our kids. But we have these things specifically tailored to them through the occupational therapist, and all the other therapists. So if you feel like these things, either aren’t working for your kid, or you have some concerns, run it by your therapist or your doctor first, like don’t just take our word for it, just run it by them first, right?

Matt: Right, and if you do try them, and they don’t work, don’t shoot the messenger.

Lia: It wasn’t us, we put the disclaimer in.

Matt: We’re not professionals, we’re just trying to figure this out together.

Lia: So yeah, but I will say this stuff has worked really well for us, which is why we’re such huge advocates for them especially with occupational therapy. And a lot of the tips and resources that we’ve gotten has been through that. So again, we highly encourage that you guys work really closely to your children’s therapists and make sure that you are having conversations with them about any concerns you have or anything like that. Because these tips, you can get custom tailored by going to your child’s therapist.

Matt: Right. And I mean, definitely get their input and their recommendations and try it at home. And then I mean, I think you’ll be in a much better situation. And —

Lia: And hey, refer them to our podcast and be like, ‘Hey, I heard this on this podcast. What do you think? Are they legit? Are they just making this up?’

Matt: And that’s when they’re gonna be like, ‘these people are totally off their rocker.’

Lia: But I guarantee you that we have had all these things at least run by our occupational therapists and speech therapists. So we at least have it cleared on our end.

Matt: Right. And then I think another area that we wanted to also focus on was eloping a little bit. Yeah.

Lia: Yeah, so we will be talking about eloping, some people don’t know what eloping is — eloping is the word that is used for children who are autistic who run away without regard to danger or spatial awareness and can kind of get into harmful situations. Both of our children are elopers. So we thought this would be a really important topic, we will have lots of cool tips on eloping and some ways to get around it and some awesome resources. We’ll be doing that for all of these.

Matt: And I don’t know about you, I find that is one of the most terrifying realities just in general. Our daughter’s therapy was right along like a major highway so just the idea that at any one moment, she could choose to kind of run towards traffic. It’s kind of just a terrifying.

Lia: Yeah, honestly, Matt and I have this conversation all the time. We love our child’s Therapy/school but who in their right mind builds an Autism Center on a major highway, like literally within, what three yards of the highway?

Matt: They have had the sidewalk to walk into the building, and then they have the other sidewalk right next to the highway.

Lia: It boggles my mind knowing the fact that autistic kids have such a high rate of elopement that I cannot believe that they build this building right on the highway. Well, that’s, you know, that’s something else, elopement is a big deal. So for us in particular, because again, both of our kids are elopers. So it’s definitely something we want to be talking about this season with you guys.

Matt: But I think it helps that if you have that in your mind, then you’re aware of it constantly. So you are constantly thinking of fear, danger that could happen in all of a split second. So I think it does help being terrified in a sense. I don’t know that’s the right way to phrase it. But I mean, you know what you know, and that kind of helps I think.

Lia: There’s also a delicate balance between being — yeah, you don’t want to go into like the paranoia territory.

Matt: I guess that’s true.

Lia: So see, in case you guys can’t tell from us talking to each other, we kind of balance each other out. So when I get a little bit too much, he kind of reins me in. And when he gets a little bit too much, I kind of rein him in. And that works out for our kids benefit because we neutralize each other.

Matt: As long as we’re both on opposite sides of the spectrum, where you’re doing one thing, and I’m doing the other thing. If we ever get on the same page, and we’re working in the same direction

Lia: We’ll just be really aggressive at that thing! And that is how you ended up having an AutismWish charity and AutismWish podcast because we’re on the same thing and we go we go full speed ahead.

Matt: And then I think the last thing that we wanted to touch on this season is just kind of body awareness. And I think we touched a little bit on this when we’re talking about the therapies I think in last season. Yeah, I think it was physical therapy a little bit.

Lia: Yeah, we touched it lightly. But we want to get into a little more detail about body awareness and spatial awareness and all of that, and kind of a little bit of the science behind how it’s possible that that may happen and things to do to avoid it. Because we talked about it briefly, we basically just mentioned that it is a thing that happens with our kids and a lot of autistic kiddos, but we didn’t really go into details of how to work with it.

Matt: Right, I think it was mostly our experience that we it was just kind of like a cautionary tale about ‘Okay, be careful if you’re on the playground, for example, because they might not see the edge and fall right off’. So I mean, it was more of just a personal story that we had encountered. But I think it would be nice to kind of dive a little deeper into that and just kind of analyze, ‘okay, if this is an issue, is there anything else?’ And how would you start to be aware of the world around you a little bit. I mean, that’s kind of an ongoing endeavor that we’ve been kind of working on as well.

Lia: Yeah, and that’s kind of the general trend a little bit with some of these topics that we’ve chosen. There are topics that we may have already kind of touched lightly on in season one but we feel like we didn’t really get to do a deep dive because season one was all about giving you guys kind of like a sampling of everything. Because our focus was really just getting you through as much as possible in a short amount of time through that initial processing of ‘oh my gosh, my kid is autistic, what do I do’. And now we feel like by this point in time, you’ve had a little more time to digest. So a couple of weeks have gone by, you’re probably more curious and more capable of taking a deeper look into things. So now we want to go a little bit deeper into each of these. And we will be a little more explicit with our examples and get more detailed scenarios and things like that, so that we can cover things at a little bit deeper level than before.

Matt: I think we’re set up for our next episode of focus on sight, I believe, right?

Lia: Yeah. So our very first sense that we’re going to tackle is sight. So we’re going to go over all the senses first. And then after the senses, we’ll go into all those other topics that we put under that sensibilities category.

Matt: And I think from there, we should be all set.

Lia: Yea, so I just wanted to let you guys know, though, just some housekeeping because we seem to have forgotten to do this all season one. But if you guys could just take five seconds if you’re enjoying this podcast, we are so excited to have so many listeners so quickly. This podcast has just totally exploded. We only have season one — not even. At the time of this recording Season One has not been completely launched in about two months. Yeah, we’ve only been about two months in at the time of this recording. Now, by the time you’re listening to this, that’ll be a different story. But we’ve already broken into the top 100 podcasts in the United States for our category in parenting and we’ve done it a couple times. I think our highest ranking at this point was like 76 place or something like that. So this podcast is doing great, which means I know that you guys are getting good, good information here that’s helpful to you. And I just want to make sure that we continue to bring you helpful information and I want this podcast to be for you guys. I want it to be something thing that continues to be helpful. And I want it to be something that you guys feel comfortable accessing us with. We do a couple of events like we do some live Q&A is on our website. So if you guys aren’t familiar with that, you can follow us on facebook.com/autismwish. And we also have our website, autismwish.org. I host a couple of Live Q&A’s and during those Q&A’s we are happy to answer any of your questions.

Matt: I also want to mention that I was hoping that this podcast will kind of grow organically. So if there’s any particular area that any of you want us to touch on, give a little feedback on message us on Facebook, which Lia what is the URL again?

Lia: Facebook, it’s just Facebook @AutismWish. So you know how you can tag with that app, you just @AutismWish and it’ll come up. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way and go to facebook.com/autismwish.

Matt: And don’t forget to hit the ravishing like button

Lia: The Follow button.

Matt: Oh, I’m sorry

Lia: You can do like or follow — either one. And also, I just want to let you guys know, if you aren’t familiar with AutismWish and our mission, we mentioned it a little bit before, but we really focus on gifting autistic kids with sensory therapeutic items, we get a lot of our sponsorships through reviews and Facebook page likes. So if you guys could take five seconds to just give us a Facebook follow or page like and just leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify, that goes a long way for us and getting sponsors so that we can continue to gift a lot of autistic little kids and older kids because we gift them up to age 17. So, as I was mentioning briefly before, so we do a lot of like Q&A’ s and other live events on our Facebook page. So if you follow us there, you’ll see those events when they’re coming. And we also do have a parenting group, which was linked in our show notes. That’s another thing that I’d like just to mention to you guys really quickly as the season begins, each of our episodes has show notes linked to the episodes. And in those show notes, we have a transcript of everything we talked about in these episodes. And we also have linkable content to the things that we’ve mentioned. So if you ever feel like you’re missing content, or you know, you can’t remember what we mentioned in this in the show, and you really want to remember some of those resources we mentioned, you can always go to our website. And again, autismwish.org. You click on podcast under there you go to the season that you’re interested in, and then the episode that you want. There’s a Show Notes button, and that’ll bring you to all that information right there.

Matt: Definitely a shorter route if you needed to get any useful information versus hitting the rewind 15 or rewind 10 seconds — 15 times.

Lia: And then take out your pencil, start writing it down.

Matt: Definitely, definitely go to the show notes so you don’t drive yourself crazy having to listen to the same phrase from us over and over again.

Lia: Yeah, although, again, if you want to loop this podcast, we’re totally okay with that. I don’t mind. I don’t mind the extra listens.

Matt: But this is for the people, for the people for us.

Lia: Alright. And so that’s pretty much all the housekeeping I have for you guys. I just want to let you guys know that again. We do do those live Q&As. So if you guys are interested, get up on our Facebook, join the live Q&A, always ask us any questions that you like, shoot us a message anytime let us know what topics you would like for us to discuss in future episodes. We’ll be happy to try to accommodate those into our future seasons. We are always planning future seasons out. So it’s never too late to give us some feedback. And I know, we didn’t give you too much autism specific information in this episode. This was really just an episode to kind of prep up the season so you guys know what to expect. I promise you the future episodes will be jam packed full of information just like season one was.

Matt: So stay tuned for ‘Senses and Sensibilities’. Yes, I got it.

Lia: Do you get the reference now?

Matt: Yes.

Lia: Do you?

Matt: Yes.

Lia: Awesome! look, there’s a win.

Lia: Alright, everybody, thank you so much, and I hope you guys tune into our next episode of Embracing Autism.

Outro:
Lia: To review, in this episode we discussed the theme of season two as Senses and Sensibilities. We give an introduction to topics that we will cover the season to include the five senses, behaviors and possible connections to autism within neuroscience. Tune in next time as we answer questions such as How is vision affected in autism? What are some common vision comorbidities? And what is visual stimming? This has been Embracing Autism.

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