Make it make sense! Honouring Sensory Needs in Intimate Settings
Scroll down for Easy English I am writing this from the Great Barrier Reef where I have spent the last four days doing a mixture of swimming with sea turtles and enjoying the East Australian sun. I am about half way through my fellowship and this excursion has given me the time to reflect on my learnings so far. During my work with organisations across Adelaide, Melbourne, Gippsland and Sydney a theme that keeps resurfacing is the centrality of sensory needs in the intimate lives of people with intellectual disabilities (PWID). It feels obvious, yet it remains largely absent from mainstream sex education that if we ignore the sensory body, we miss a fundamental part of how people experience pleasure, safety and connection. At Thrive Rehab in Melbourne, occupational therapists recognise that PWID often experience the external world differently to neurotypical people, with everyday noises intolerably loud, certain materials unbearable to wear, and small changes in temperatures intensely...