Ever wondered why certain sounds feel unbearable while others soothe you instantly (cats purring, maybe?)? Or why a scented candle can wreck your whole day? (Or a steam cleaner revolutionise your entire LIFE?)
In this solo episode of Soles to Soul Care for Trauma and AuDHD, I explain all nine senses (yes, nine!) as part of the FEEL. LOVE. HEAL. framework, exploring how sensory sensitivity shapes life with AuDHD and trauma
Owning your sensory differences, rather than fighting them, can be genuinely life-changing.
We’ll cover vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, intuition, interoception, proprioception, and neuroception (with a little Polyvagal Purrs cat wisdom thrown in), plus practical ways to soothe what’s overwhelming and amplify what feels good.
🎧 Grab free meditations and downloads: solestosoul.ie/free-downloads
🐾 More on Polyvagal Purrs: solestosoul.ie/feline
💌 Get in touch: eve@solestosoul.ie
Le grá (with love),
Ev3
#AuDHD #TraumaRecovery #SensoryProcessing #Neurodivergent #PolyvagalTheory
CHAPTERS
0:00 Proprioception and the joy of movement
3:25 Working with sensory differences
5:06 Using sensory acuity (and NLP) to get more of what you want
6:54 Auditing your nine senses
8:02 Vision and hearing
10:57 Touch and taste
12:38 Smell, sensory overwhelm and the steam cleaner
15:01 Intuition and the sixth sense
16:56 Interoception and reconnecting with the body
18:00 Proprioception, movement and balance
20:35 Neuroception, safety and connection
21:52 Love, acceptance and sensory differences
22:54 Community, co-regulation and collective care
24:12 Grounding and listening to what you need
LINKS
If you enjoyed this, check out:
Episode 48: Cattitude: Purr! Hiss! Freeze! Polyvagal informed self care for trauma and/or ADHD. With cats
Episode 102: Navigating Dental Treatment with Sensory Differences
Episode 105: SuPURR! Cats Are Divine and So Are You
Episode 100: Dr Miguel Toribio Mateas on ADHD Body and Mind: https://solestosoul.ie/2026/03/03/dr-miguel-toribio-mateas-on-adhd-body-and-mind-episode-100-of-soles-to-soul-care-for-trauma-and-audhd/
Choose your own adventures at https://solestosoul.ie/adventures/
Book your free telephone consultation and access 100s of body-mind practices at https://solestosoul.ie/free-downloads
Find out more about trauma-informed and neurodivergence affirming yoga, yoga nidra and meditation (and book for the Living and Working with Neurodivergence Conference next month) at https://solestosoul.ie/yoga
Find out more about using NLP to support yourself at https://solestosoul.ie/nlp
FULL TRANSCRIPT
You’ve got the proprioception, the sense of where you are in space. So yoga is wonderful for giving us a better idea. I have dyspraxia as well, which is why I’m generally covered in bruises, bumping into things and what have you, but at the same time, having that understanding gives me more compassion.
It’s always been the case, but I’ve always loved moving as well. I’ve loved working that vestibular system. That was one of my ways of regulating, but I didn’t understand.
One of my happiest childhood memories was hanging upside down on a broken swing set when we lived in America. And I loved just being able to hang upside down. And even now I love my underwater handstands and I’m hoping that my cartwheeling days are not fully behind me.
Before we begin today, I invite you to take a conscious breath with me. And we’re talking about sensory differences and sensory glimmers and the painful sensory experiences, the ones that can feel excruciating. Mindfulness is a term that many people hate, but it has been really beneficial for me.
Mindfulness of the breath is a really easy way to connect with how you’re feeling in any given moment. And that might even be, “Gaaggh, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to connect. I don’t want to!”
That’s information as well. And you don’t have to, but if you would like to, I have lots of meditations on the website. You can sign up for hundreds of body, mind practices at solestosoul.ie/free-downloads and choose the ones that you enjoy.
But for now, just press into the soles of the feet, press into whatever you’re sitting on, assuming you’re not driving. You can keep your eyes open if that feels good, keep them closed if that feels good. You’ll realise as we go through the episode, this is connecting with the ninth sense, neuroception.
How safe do I feel? How relaxed do I feel in any given moment? Is it going to help me go inwards to close my eyes? Do I actually feel more relaxed if I keep them open? If I allow myself to not? Do I want to put an eye mask on if you’re doing a longer meditation?
Give yourself permission to feel how you feel and want what you want. And just take a few breaths, take one complete breath, whatever feels good for you. And throughout the episode, I invite you to continue to keep connecting with the breath.
Keep noticing what feels right for you, what resonates for you. This is about building your toolkit. This is about helping you remember you are your expert on yourself.
You are the best expert on yourself. You have everything you need within you. And I’m delighted to be able to help you remember that.
Take care and enjoy the episode. Welcome to episode 126 of Soles to Soul Care for Trauma AuDHD. I’m your host, Eve Menezes Cunningham.
In today’s episode, we’re looking at working with sensory differences with autism, ADHD and trauma recovery. So with neurodivergent sensory differences and sensory processing issues, sensory sensitivity, they’re all a big part of what can make the world so challenging to navigate. Also what enables so many people to find their vocation, their calling.
Like you think of a chef with an exquisite palette and it’s that sensory difference with taste or an artist with a vision or a musician with hearing, or there are so many different benefits as well, but it’s about us paying attention and that’s really a huge part of it.
With trauma as well, we have extra-sensitive nervous systems and often heightened sensory perception in order to have learnt to keep ourselves safe, often at a very early age. So I’m hoping that this episode will help you own your sensory differences and soothe yourself, support yourself and develop the ones that you would like to build on.
In NLP, sensory acuity is an enormous, a huge part of how we move towards our well-formed outcome, what we want in any given situation. The idea is you’re finding something that you’re aiming for, your goal, your well-formed outcome, something a bit like a Sankalpa. It’s in the present tense, it’s phrased in a positive way, but then you’re essentially asking yourself, is what you’re currently doing working for you?
You’re using sensory acuity to use your senses to figure out what in your current approach is working, what’s moving you closer to what you want and what’s moving you further away from what you want.
Getting to know your senses and we’re working with nine senses today will help you get more of what you want in life. And the third leg of NLP is the flexibility to change your approach as needed. So, for me, a huge thing has been recognising the need to rest more.
In my head, I have a thousand loved ones and complimentary therapists and others, “We’ve been telling you for decades!”
But recognising the need to rest and then not after you’ve done something but before you do something or whenever the urge hits, have a nap, rest in whatever way is appropriate and possible in those situations, building more buffers, all the things.
I’m going to run through for the FEEL. part of the FEEL. LOVE. HEAL. framework, nine senses that we can work with.
I want you as I go through, if you would like to, to do a little bit of an audit for yourself according to these different ways of experiencing the world and asking yourself whether these senses, each one, whether it’s heightened or whether you’d prefer to develop it.
If it’s heightened, if you can, for example, the Loop earplugs are amazing or an eye mask for light sensitivity and sunglasses. I can’t tell you how much it’s changed my dental experience wearing sunglasses in the dentist chair instead of all those lights.
It’s giving ourselves permission to have our sensory needs and to own it and also to respect others. Starting with the vision, visual, how we see the world, how we like might struggle to discern the priority information and be very disturbed by something in our visual field that feels off until we’re able to then soothe our whole system by making our surroundings more harmonious, more peaceful. For some of us, that’s going to be maximalist, that’s going to be a lot of colour, that’s going to be a lot of glimmery things that make us smile.
I use a lot of visual anchors, ways in which I want to feel and having pictures or words or items that remind me of what I’m aiming for as constant ventral vagal anchors, reminders of what I can do to feel better in different situations.
Hearing, it could be playlists, it could be CDs, cassette tapes, vinyl, singing, playing music, talking in a tone of voice or listening to chat show hosts or just thinking about noises you like. It could be the sound of the waves, it could be the sound of the birds outside, it could be, I love hearing my cats purr and that’s one of the really soothing sounds for me.
Thinking for yourself, how can you use your sense of hearing in as harmonious, joyful way as possible? What are the noises that are really jarring? What are the visual experiences that are really jarring?
How can you mitigate against those while amplifying the sounds that are more glimmery, that are more, music has been life-saving for me over the decades and it’s just so wonderful being able to play certain pieces of music, either myself and on the piano by ear, like my own little versions of them or playing the same song over and over.
I didn’t realise this was a neurodivergent thing until it almost feels like I’ve integrated it and then I can move on to a different song or a different album or just go to kind of shuffle or just thinking for yourself, what are you craving to hear?
It might be you’re craving to hear a message from a loved one, or it might be that you are learning to talk more kindly to yourself and you’re recording voice notes to yourself, which you then can remember to listen to, to tell yourself that you’ve got this in whatever situation, but in a really lovely, soothing tone of voice. It might be meditations you enjoy listening to that support you with that.
Moving to the feeling sense, the third sense we’re talking about today, thinking about what kind of sensations you like to feel and what are jarring. The typical one would be labels on clothing that can be really icky or certain fabrics. Other fabrics can be really joyful to touch.
I have a lovely rug that’s all kind of a bit ’70s, very fluffy, very lovely on my bare feet or the sand or certain things, just noticing for yourself what feelings do you enjoy and what feel more jarring? Again, how can you do more of the things that feel good? How can you have more of those delightful sensory experiences? It might be fidget toys, it might be anything at all, but in your immediate environment at any given time, so that you can help yourself feel good.
Moving to taste, what are your safe foods? What are the flavours? What are the textures? What are the things you love to taste? What are the things that you don’t want anywhere near you? What are the things that you’re trying to acquire a taste for?
Thinking about how you can support your sensory differences, your sensory needs around taste, nutritional needs as well, where you’re missing certain nutrients because you just cannot stomach the taste of certain things. What might be other ways in which you can get those nutrients? It might be supplements, it might be something else.
Smell is a huge one for me. I feel really self-conscious when I have to leave a room because of my pepper allergy. It might be the smell of peppers and I don’t want my head to start expanding.
I have an anaphylaxis allergy, but I’ve had to leave. I remember decades ago, not decades ago, nearly two decades ago, going to someone’s home and they’d been roasting peppers and I took a step towards and I had to leave and they opened all the windows and about half an hour later, the smell had dissipated enough that I could go in and I felt like such a diva. I was so mortified and it was a work-related thing.
Looking back, I just feel so sad for myself that I felt so self-conscious when it’s something I have no control over. Asking people to blow out, you know, the scented candles because they give me an immediate migraine. Recently I bought a steam cleaner and it has revolutionised my life because I’m now cleaning the floors and I’m learning how to clean other bits, use the different attachments.
I’m like, oh my God, I don’t have a migraine after cleaning. Thinking, oh my God, I’ve spent 50 years feeling ill and that’s me using mostly, well, almost entirely natural cleaning products or more eco cleaning products over the past several decades and still the joy at not having a migraine after cleaning.
It’s like neurotypical people or non-traumatised people, do they go through life and never feel ill after cleaning? Like when you think about some of the things we struggle with, when we struggle to motivate ourselves to do certain things, have you considered that it’s not, it’s far from laziness, it’s not even to do potentially with transitions and struggles there, but it might be the association with I do this thing that everyone has to do and I then feel sick and it’s so normal and natural, I didn’t even realise that until in my case.
Steam cleaner, no headache, no migraine, life transformed. My house has never been tidier or cleaner, I’m loving it.
The sixth sense is the intuitive sense and thinking about the ways in which, and again, it can be a trauma response, it can be that deep attunement to danger and that gut knowing, but think about what helps you connect with your intuition and where you can discern to make it a more enjoyable process and where you can soothe yourself.
I’m thinking of Alison DuBois who Medium was written about, the TV show starring Patricia Arquette, amazing TV show, but based on a real woman. And so many people with psychic potential, with very intuitive, like with those skills, they often self-medicate with alcohol, with drugs, because it’s too much of a bombardment.
If that’s you thinking of how can you be open to your gift, how can you enhance your gift, whoever you are, we all have intuitive capacities. One thing I used to do coming into London on the train was just connecting with my sense of what platform the doors would be, what side of the train the doors would be opening on, depending on what platform at Liverpool Street station the train would be coming into and now I understand the next three senses we’re going to talk about.
They all and all of our senses connect with our capacity to be intuitive, to use that sixth sense, to go with synchronicities, to go with the flow, to feel helped and held by the universe.
The seventh sense I’m going to talk about, interoception, and something we often struggle with, with trauma histories, with neurodivergence, where we’ve been so disconnected from being able to tune into our bodies, we might have been punished for our sensory differences and we then dissociate from them.
With AuDHD, it’s very common to not notice you need to go to the loo until the last minute or to get issues to do with food and drink, not knowing when we’ve eaten enough or when we’re hungry, not noticing when we’re thirsty, getting dehydrated or drinking too much.
Other people recognising with alcohol or food when they’ve had enough and it being literally tougher for us in terms of those sensory differences. So, having empathy, having compassion for yourself there, then you’ve got the proprioception, the sense of where you are in space.
Yoga is wonderful for giving us a better idea. I have dyspraxia as well, which is why I’m generally covered in bruises, bumping into things and what have you. At the same time, having that understanding gives me more compassion.
It’s always been the case, but I’ve always loved moving as well. I’ve loved working that vestibular system that was one of my ways of regulating, but I didn’t understand.
One of my happiest childhood memories was hanging upside down on a broken swing set when we lived in America.
I loved being able to hang upside down. Even now I love my underwater handstands and I’m hoping that my cartwheeling days are not fully behind me as I get stronger and I’m less scared of damaging my shoulder again but the being upside down, yesterday I had the best snorkel I’ve ever had in my life, snorkelling to a blowhole and meditating in Sligo, totally worth the 6am start.
Having that sense of letting myself be held by the water and just being so joyful. It felt like a hug from the earth being in this kind of cave. You could see out from the top where the blowhole had created the hole in the earth and also feeling hugged by the water.
I kept spontaneously doing somersaults underwater, which is something I do in the pool, but I don’t generally do in the ocean but it was just such a beautiful thing to be doing.
Thinking for yourself, how do you enjoy your body being in space? What are your favourite things to enjoy? It might be lying on a hammock, it might be sitting in a rocking chair, it might be standing on one leg, whatever it might be, just connecting with those joyful balances are wonderful with AuDHD in terms of supporting the cerebellum.
That can be a really helpful way of supporting our brains. Finding balances that feel delightful to you. If you’re struggling with them, building on the struggle, going really easy on yourself, but it will really benefit you as you get older.
Balance is really important day to day. All these things can be really helpful.
The ninth sense I’m talking about is neuroception, which is a term coined by Stephen Porges when he developed Polyvagal Theory.
You can look at solestosoul.ie/feline for some of the information I have. Other older episodes, there’ll be links in the show notes to podcasts around the Polyvagal Purrs approach I developed to help make Polyvagal Theory more accessible with the help of the rescue cats. You think about a cat, a cat is not going to judge itself for getting scared and running away or enjoying the sun puddle.
Our neuroception is basically our connection with our nervous system and our honouring what our nervous system needs in any given moment. So again, the more we connect with this, the better we get at attuning to how we’re feeling, not arguing with it, not judging it, recognising all of the states are adaptive survival responses, but learning to hold ourselves, to soothe ourselves, to support ourselves and your life will be transformed for the better.
Moving to the LOVE. part, and it’s a very quick part because the FEEL. part of this episode has been so long, but with all nine of the senses, accepting we’re all different, even neurotypical people, there are huge variations.
Get to know yourself, get to know what’s yummy and delicious and glimmery for you and what’s intolerable and put as many things in place as possible. I noticed the other day, the hairdryer and the hand dryer at the changing rooms after my swims is excruciating and the spin dryer for the swimsuits doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I don’t know why, but it’s just interesting. The more curiosity and compassion you can have for yourself in those differences, the better.
You’ll be better able to ask for what you need and want. You’ll be better able to hear what others need and want and you deserve love, you deserve support, you deserve acceptance.
Moving to the HEAL. part, the community, the co-regulation, the collective care, the community care.
Noticing when you have audited or as you audit, think about the people in your life or the groups in your life that support you in owning your sensory differences that don’t make a big deal out of it and that support you and that help you feel safe. Also red flags for people who diminish you, that minimise you, that shame you.
Let me know how you’re getting on and I look forward to hearing from you, either email eve at solestosoul.ie or let me know in the comments what would you say if you had a magic wand and could have, like it might be a smell you wish were everywhere that you love so much and you can carry it with you or something that you hate and you wish it were never around.
Connect with some of your sensory differences, own them and let me know, share them and I look forward to sharing more next week.
Before you go, please take a moment to ground the episode by just pausing and scanning your parts, all your parts from the soles of your feet to your soul. You may want to keep your eyes open, you may want to close them but planting your feet firmly on the ground, lengthening through the spine if that feels comfortable for you, letting yourself feel held by the chair or whatever it is you’re sitting or lying or standing on and taking just a moment to scan your whole self, your whole body, your whole energy field and ask yourself what you’re going to do for yourself right now.
It might be as a result of listening to the episode, it might be something else, it might be a nap, it might be something to eat, it might be some kind of movement but let yourself ground, let yourself get into the habit of connecting with your inner wisdom and notice what you need and give yourself what you need.
Thanks for listening to this episode. If you haven’t already and would like to, please like, subscribe, comment, engage across the platforms wherever you may be accessing this and you can also email me eve at solestosoul.ie Thank you for listening.
I look forward to sharing more next week.