When the World Hurts:
Understanding Sensory Trauma in Autistic People

"Stop making a fuss."

"You're being dramatic."

"It wasn't even that loud."

If you're autistic, or you love someone who is, the chances are you've heard something like this. Or said it. Or had it said to you so many times that you started to believe it yourself.

A position paper by Dr Rorie Fulton, Emma Reardon, Kate Richardson, Dr Rachel Jones and colleagues — Sensory Trauma: Autism, Sensory Difference and the Daily Experience of Fear — gives language to something many autistic people have been trying to describe for their entire lives. And it matters enormously.

Let me walk you through what it says, and why it landed so deeply for me — both as a therapist and as an autistic person myself.

Two worlds, one experience

The paper starts from a really important observation: there are two very different kinds of writing about autistic sensory experience, and they almost never talk to each other.

The first is written by autistic people — in blogs, vlogs, artwork, spoken word, books. It's personal, embodied, sometimes graphic, always honest. It describes the relationship between a body and a world that often feels relentlessly hostile. It says things like "the sound went through my skull" or "I could smell everyone's fear and it tasted metallic."

The second is written about autistic people — in clinical literature and research. It tends to use language like "hypersensitivity," "sensory processing disorder," "atypical responses," "dysfunction." It's brain-focused, category-focused, and largely written from outside the experience.

The authors argue — rightly, in my view — that these two ways of describing the same thing are so far apart they might as well be about different realities. And crucially: the clinical version tends to treat neurotypical sensory processing as the standard against which autistic experience is measured and found wanting.

This is the deficit model in action. And it has real consequences for how autistic people are understood, supported — and believed.

So what actually happens?

The paper uses a trauma framework to describe autistic sensory experience — specifically drawing on SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a US federal public health body whose trauma frameworks are widely used and cited internationally). SAMHSA defines trauma as arising from events, circumstances, or experiences that overwhelm a person's capacity to cope and have lasting adverse effects on their functioning and wellbeing.

The authors argue this definition fits the sensory experience of many autistic people — not as a metaphor, but as an accurate description of what is actually happening neurologically and emotionally.

The daily accumulation of sensory assaults — the fluorescent lights, the background noise, the unpredictable textures, the smells that nobody else seems to notice — doesn't just cause discomfort. Over time, it creates a state of chronic hypervigilance. The nervous system learns that the world is not safe. That learning becomes embodied. And that embodied knowing shapes everything: behaviour, relationships, capacity to learn, ability to communicate, sense of self.

The trauma connection — and why it matters

One of the most significant contributions of this paper is naming what happens to autistic people when their sensory experiences are repeatedly dismissed, minimised or pathologised by the people around them.

It isn't just that the sensory experience is difficult. It's that the response to the sensory experience — the meltdown, the shutdown, the withdrawal, the refusal — is then also treated as a problem. As something to manage, reduce, eliminate.

The autistic person learns, very early, that their nervous system's honest responses to genuine overwhelm are unacceptable. They learn to hide them — at enormous cost. And they learn that the people around them cannot be trusted to understand what is happening in their body.

The authors frame this clearly: it is not only the sensory experience that is traumatising. It is the sustained experience of not being believed about the sensory experience.

What this means for children, families and schools

I want to sit with this for a moment, because I think it's important.

There are children right now who are not in school because school — the noise, the lights, the unpredictability, the social demand, the sensory chaos of a corridor between lessons — has become genuinely traumatic for their nervous system. These children are not refusing school. Their nervous systems are responding to a real threat with an appropriate protective response.

And yet the system's response is often to try harder to get them back in — with increasing pressure, with interventions designed to overcome the avoidance, with frameworks that treat the behaviour as the problem rather than the environment as the problem.

This paper gives us language to push back on that. Not because school should never be attended. But because the question of how a child can be supported to access education needs to start from an honest acknowledgement of what their nervous system is actually experiencing.

For families: if your child is telling you that the world hurts, believe them. You may not be able to feel it. That doesn't mean it isn't real. Their nervous system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do in response to genuine overwhelm. The question is not how to stop the response — it is how to reduce the overwhelm.

What this means for therapists and practitioners

If you work with autistic people — whether you're a therapist, counsellor, support worker, teacher or SENCO — this paper is worth reading in full. But if there's one thing I'd want you to take from it, it's this:

Sensory experience is not a footnote in your client's presentation. It may be central to everything. The way your room smells. The quality of the light. Whether you're sitting in their eyeline or just outside it. Whether you're asking them to make eye contact. The fabric of the chair they're sitting in. Whether you ask questions before they've had time to settle, or whether you sit in silence long enough for their nervous system to realise it's safe.

Neuroaffirming practice isn't just about language. It's about environment. It's about understanding that the therapeutic relationship begins with the nervous system's first assessment of the room — and that assessment happens before anyone has said a word.