The Lifespan of a Household: Shared Living Space (EP 66)

Join Dr. Regan for this third episode in the "Lifespan of a Household" series. This episode highlights topics important to living in shared space, including the sensory environment, alone time, and control over objects. Also, check out links to resources on her website and a transcript of the episode below. 

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Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me for this third episode in our series on autism and the lifespan of a household. My name is Dr. Theresa Regan, and I'm your host. I'm a neuropsychologist, a certified autism specialist, and mom to a young adult on the spectrum. This series is the result of listener requests about living as a couple or as a family within a shared household. And as we've touched on, one of the challenges of tackling the topic is that households can take so many different forms. And I know that I can't do them all justice in just one series, but I wanted to touch on some important life seasons within a household.

So our first episode was about dating, and the second covered the topic of physical intimacy and relationships. And today we're going to talk about sharing physical space with other people. So joining households, living in the same space. I'll also let you know that a lot of my website renovations have been completed. There are still some things I'm tweaking and trying to make work better, but lots of the pages are active and working. And I also now have the new service of video visits for people to consult me about the topic of autism or how that impacts you in your household. There are some geographic limitations and there are some specifics about payment and if you are interested in that type of service head on over to my website at adultandgeriatricautism.com and look under video visits.

So there are many different instances where physical space might be shared in a type of household. So we may be talking about a traditional couple or a family household or even other situations like having roommates or renting a portion of someone else's home. And sharing living space can be complex for lots of reasons, but for the autistic, there may be a few specific challenges that we could cover in the episode today that would help people navigate those things. So in particular, we're going to cover the sensory environment, alone time, and having control over objects.

So let's tackle the sensory environment first. First, because the autistic individual may have sensory sensitivities, living in the household with other people may be overwhelming because people bump into each other or reach over each other or they brush against each other to navigate the physical space. Noise can be another sensory input that's elevated in a household, and the noise could include voices, babies crying, arguments, even just surround noise like television or music. How things smell can be important to someone on the spectrum. The scent of food cooking or aftershave, candles, cigarettes, cleaning products, taste and texture can come into play if we're talking about shared groceries or family meals, does everyone have to eat the same thing?

Let's not forget about visual inputs. So not only does this include lighting, but a very common issue that I hear about is concern for the visual space or having visual chaos. So for some on the spectrum, the sight of a visual messiness or overcrowdedness or chaos can be overwhelming. And this could include things like decorations, messy work areas, things on the floor, clothes, garbage, food, strewn about various surfaces. And this visual chaos can feel overwhelmi