A common stereotype of autistic people is that we aren’t very hygienic. This is often depicted by scenes of parents struggling to get their autistic child or teen to take a bath or shower, brush their teeth, or wash their hands. It’s supposedly easy to do, so why don’t we do it?
In a neurotypical’s checklist, “take shower” might be one task. However, for any neurodivergent that struggles with this, it actually looks more like this:
- Check that shampoo, conditioner, and body soap are where they’re supposed to be in shower
- Check that you have towel, get towel if not
- Turn on water, know which direction to turn the knob
- Make sure it’s warm, but not too hot
- Make sure door is closed else heat/steam will leave room keeping it cold (meanwhile hope nobody comes in while you’re in the shower and if they do, close the fricken door)
- Mentally prepare to be cold
- Take off clothes (remember socks, hairties, and watches)
- Mentally prepare to be partially wet
- Test water, mentally prepare if it’s too cold or hot on hand
- Mentally prepare to be warm and wet, the feeling of wet hair. Do you have hard water? Does it smell of iron? Water in hotels feel slimey to me. Basically a face punch to the senses.
- Locate shampoo
- Put shampoo in hair
- Wash hair
- Rinse hair
- Locate conditioner (when distracted, I accidentally put body soap in my hand—not wanting to waste it, I just held it in my hand while conditioning my hair because I couldn’t break my routine)
- Condition hair
- Locate body soap
- Wash body
- Rinse conditioner from hair and soap from body
- Check all soap is out of hair
- Double check all soap is out of hair
- Check that shampoo, conditioner, and body wash are put back with labels facing out to make next time easy too
- Prepare to be hit with cold air. God help us if someone left the door open and the room is even colder.
- Turn off water, but avoid getting hit with the cold bit at the end.
- Locate towel
- Dry each foot before stepping out. Yes, we know the bath mat is there, but let’s not get it wet.
- The air is making the hair feel cold against skin. Take a minute to cope with it.
- Can’t get dressed for at least 10 minutes because skin is too moist, clothes will pull. Either mentally prepare to cope with it or allow yourself to air-dry.
- But also somehow too dry? It feels itchy as it dries. Take a moment to cope with this feeling now.
- Still cold. I’ll never be warm again. Cope with this existential dread.
- I have moisturizer for my lizard face. It gets itchy and flakey after showers. But it must be a specific kind of moisturizer because it better not feet wet, waxy, slimey. I’ll deal with it being cold. It also better not have a bad or potent smell.
- Skin feels funny with moisterizer on it now too, but not as bad as dry skin. Still gotta cope.
As you can see, there’s a lot of coping going on in the later steps. For an autistic person, anticipating this can cause debilitating anxiety. For an autistic child or someone who can’t tell you why, it might look like defiance, a meltdown, or a tantrum.
Taking a shower is a multistep process, and anything that takes multiple steps means it requires a lot of executive function and focus. There are also a lot of sensory transitions that happen in a short amount of time so anyone with sensory sensitivities will need to mentally prep for them. Autism affects an individual’s executive functions and nervous system, so thinking about all that is needed to accomplish this task can cause anxiety and lead to a meltdown if pushed.
When I was a kid, I remember lying about taking a shower. When I was caught in the lie, because I only ran the sink for a bit and put a towel on my dry head, I only learned how to lie better. The discipline I received did not teach me to actually shower because it was never about not wanting to, but that there were too many sensory barriers that made it so I couldn’t. And those weren’t addressed so I continued to avoid it.
When talking to my own mother, she said the only way she got me to shower was to take me to the YMCA for swimming, which meant I showered there to get the chlorine off. We’d go swimming twice a week.
I used to shower maybe once or twice a week. I remember dreading it when thinking about it. However, I decided to use the Explosive Child technique to figure out what my barrier was. Why did I specifically hate showering? Besides all of what I listed above.
I stood in the shower, closed my eyes, and did a body scan. The water pressure. It was too hard. It hurt just to be in it. So I put energy toward getting a different showerhead, one with adjustable settings.
I nailed it.
I removed that barrier and now I’m able to cope and tolerate the lesser issues so much easier than before. I’m no longer spending unnecessary spoons to shower. I don’t dread them like I used to. I don’t particularly love or desire them, but it’s now a task rather than a chore.
Whether it’s you or your kid struggling to shower, take the time to analyze the situation, identify a barrier, and try a solution. Keep going until you find what works to remove as many barriers as possible. It’s not always a “won’t.” It’s more often a “can’t.”
Featured photo by Majestic Lukas on Unsplash.
