Working Together

- [Presenter] Echolalia.

- [Automated Voice] Some sounds echo in my head and are very loud so that you constantly try drowning out those sounds with other words. Sometimes words get stuck in my head, I call them words of annoyance, but technically the term is echolalia. When this happens, I say the words out loud and end up sounding foolish.

- [Presenter] Stimming.

- [Automated Voice] It sometimes causes me to do an activity called flappy where I flap my arms up and down or hit my ears at times, especially when I am overstimulated or am stressed.

- [Presenter] Overstimulation.

- People just don't really realize, how much is happening and how much it's affecting me in every waking moment of every day. Because, I'm really sensitive. I don't express it very much because, it's not like I can just go around complaining about everything all the time. Like now that I'm an adult, I can control a lot better how much I expose myself to on a daily basis and the kinds of environments that I'm in. But when I was a kid, I did not have very much control over that, and so I would just get so overstimulated, so quickly.

- [Presenter] Adaptation.

- In preparation for a surgical procedure. A couple years ago during the height of COVID, I put myself on lockdown before, the month before the procedure and I found that a lot of my chronic pain went away, and I realized that forcing myself to go out into the world was actually increasing my chronic pain. And so, my adaptation unfortunately, is I've, I've become agoraphobic. It's made me recognize that I have legitimate limitations and I need to honor those limitations, and if I don't, my functioning gets worse.