The Navigator - A New Language
I didn’t expect to find the missing piece of the puzzle while writing this article. But I did.
Somewhere in the drafting, it clicked: a lot of my confusion in the early days of diagnosis wasn’t just about autism or adhd. It was that I’d only ever been taught 5 senses. Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. That was the whole map I’d been given at school, and for months after diagnosis I kept trying to fit new words onto that old map and wondering why nothing lined up.
Here’s what nobody tells you on the path to diagnosis: there are 8 senses, not 5. The 5 we all learned as kids, plus three internal ones almost nobody teaches, vestibular, proprioception, and interoception. I suspect this is still missing from most classrooms today. Once I had all 8, the puzzle finally had its full picture.
I wish someone had handed me a cheat sheet in those first few months. Your head is exploding with new concepts, new words, new ways of understanding your own child, and you’re trying to slot them into a routine that no longer quite fits. So consider this that cheat sheet, the one I didn’t have.
The 3 senses nobody taught us
Vestibular
The vestibular system lives inside your ears, tiny, sensitive organs that track your body’s position by working with your eyes, muscles, and joints to help you stay steady and balanced.
Noah could spend hours on a swing if we let him. The up-and-down motion soothes him; it sends signals to his brain that let him relax. It’s one of his versions of stimming.
Which brings me to a word that comes up constantly: stimming, meaning repeated movements, sounds, or actions used to self-soothe. The stim everyone pictures is hand-flapping, which convinces a lot of new parents that their child “doesn’t stim.” My reality looks different: chewing on shirts, rocking back on chairs, biting nails, humming, hours on a swing.
Proprioception
Proprioception is your body’s internal sense of position, movement, and force. The system sits in your muscles and joints, it’s how you know where your arms and legs are relative to the rest of you without looking, and it’s what helps coordinate movement.
Once I understood what proprioception actually meant, I could finally see what was happening when Noah rolled his body into a “hot dog” inside a rolled-up rug at daycare. It wasn’t just a cute trick, it was his body was seeking compression, a way of feeling itself in space. It also reframed the rough-housing that happens most nights on our living room floor with my husband and the two boys. I used to wince and walk away. Now I know it’s doing something genuinely useful for him, and that’s given me some peace about it.
Interoception
Interoception is the body’s ability to sense its own internal state, reading and interpreting signals like hunger, thirst, pain, tiredness, or the need for the toilet. Differences here make it harder to accurately notice and respond to those basic bodily needs.
Before diagnosis, this is often where parents quietly blame themselves, or their child gets compared to neurotypical peers over eating, sleeping, or toileting habits, and the fault can get laid on the child. It isn’t the child’s fault. Their brain reads internal signals differently, and because of that, they’ll often need more hands-on support for longer than we expect.
I wrote about the hunger side of this in a previous piece. In our house, it’s as if the signals from the gut aren’t strong enough to register until they’re overwhelming, so we miss every early sign of hunger and land straight in “hangry,” needing food immediately.
And the 5 senses we already knew, just experienced differently
Sensory processing carries a lot of weight in the autism and adhd worlds. It refers to differences in how sensory input is experienced, differences that happen in the brain, not the ear or the eye or the skin itself.
Here’s the example I give family and friends: picture yourself in the park. An ice cream truck goes by, a dog barks, kids are playing nearby, ordinary background noise. Now imagine the light suddenly gets painfully bright, the sounds become unbearable, and the smells turn your stomach. That’s closer to what it can be like for an autistic or adhd child. They have no control over the volume, the brightness, or the smell. What they do have control over is how they protect themselves, covering their ears, shutting their eyes, or running from the situation without warning.
Broadly, you can be hypersensitive, avoiding things that are too bright or too loud, or hyposensitive, actively seeking input to self-regulate, tight hugs, chewing on pencils. Once we broke it down sense by sense, we could quickly work out what each person in our family needed at different points in the day, and it changed the calmness in our house.
Sounds — we avoid hand dryers in public toilets, leaf blowers, and the smack of someone chewing with their mouth open. Smells — we avoid chewing gum in any form, and burnt toast. Lights — we avoid fluorescent lights; the old tube kind are obnoxiously bad. Touch — light touch sends shivers up our spines; a firmer touch is far better. Taste — we gravitate toward food that’s crunchy, with strong texture and flavour.
The full picture
So 8 senses, not 5.
Sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, taught to all of us in school. And vestibular, proprioception, and interoception, taught to almost none of us, despite doing so much of the work in a neurodivergent household.
That was the missing piece for me. Not a new diagnosis, not a new therapy, just 3 words school never gave me, sitting quietly at the edge of the picture the whole time, that help frame life for parents of neurodiverse children.
What term was new to you?
