High Pain Tolerance/Sensory Integration

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world in which you didn’t feel pain? Before I had Matt, I would have answered yes.

Matt has an incredibly high tolerance to pain. When he was a beginner walker, he would crash into the wall, get an egg sized bump on his head and never feel the pain. That is when I learned that we all feel pain for a reason: to stop doing harm to ourselves! For example, if it doesn’t hurt when you walk into a wall, you’ll not quickly learn to stop doing it.

Matt did and does feel pain. He certainly squawked from pain when Sally first started working with him. But he was oblivious to things that would stop most of us in our tracks, like walking full speed into a wall.

Although we are not sure why Matt started life with this high pain tolerance, his OT believed he had Sensory Integration Disorder as that would explain that and many of his emerging, worrisome behaviors and reactions to the world.

Having been given yet another piece of the puzzle, I went off to research and learn. In essence, Sensory Integration Disorder (also called Sensory Integration Dysfunction, Dysfunction of Sensory Integration and Sensory Process Disorder) is the neurological inability to integrate properly the seven (yes, there are seven!) senses. These include sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, proprioception and balance/coordination (vestibular sense).

We all come into the world needing to learn how to integrate the sensory information bombarding us constantly. Unfortunately, it seemed that Matt was not integrating the sensory information as he should. Beyond his high pain tolerance, some of the other behaviors believed to be linked to his sensory integration disorder are his hand flapping, batting at his mouth, need for movement – like spinning, tossing things in the air, and toe walking.

His OT also told us that while all of these behaviors are the behaviors exhibited by some children with autism that Matt does not have autism and to not let anyone try to tell us he has it. All of his other doctors agreed with her assessment regarding autism that although his behavior was autistic-like that he was not autistic.

With lots of therapy and work, some of the behaviors, like toe walking, have disappeared. And yet others remain. When excited, overwhelmed and/or tired, Matt will still bat at his mouth, flap his hand and/or spin (and tune out). Everyday he’ll attempt to find an unobserved bit of floor space, bed or couch in an empty room or somewhere we can’t see him throw a ball or toy in the air repeatedly. He knows if we see him doing this activity, we will make him stop. Hopefully there will come a point at which he no longer craves these movements. Until we reach that time, we’ll continue to redirect him to a more productive sensation seeking solution, like playing catch with us, that keeps him connected to the world while still providing him the stimulation he wants.