Looking for some advice or shared experiences 🙏 My daughter has always been very sensitive with clothing, but over the past few weeks things have escalated a lot. Just before the Easter break she had what felt like a real peak where she couldn’t tolerate any clothing at all and we had to remove all dressing demands for a few days. Since then we’ve been slowly trying to build things back up again. It seemed like complete burn out to me.
Over the years we’ve managed things by adapting (e.g. different fabrics, wearing things like cycling shorts instead of underwear etc.), but now she’s older and much more socially aware (nearly 10), she doesn’t want to feel or look different to her peers at all and won’t accept those kinds of alternatives anymore — that pressure is coming from her, not us.
She’s now extremely overwhelmed by how clothes feel (especially underwear), to the point where getting dressed can cause full panic/meltdowns, and she sometimes says she “can’t” get dressed at all even though she wants to. She’s actually really desperate to find something that feels okay and is trying, but getting very distressed in the process.
There’s also a lot of anxiety around body sensations (e.g. not feeling “clean” after the toilet, things not feeling “right”), and she gets stuck in loops with that too. Once she’s calm she can often recover, get dressed and go to school, and she’s still social, bright and very emotionally aware — but the build-up and transitions are really tough.
We’re waiting on OT support, but I’d love to hear from anyone who’s experienced something similar — especially around sensory issues, anxiety, clothing intolerance or toileting sensations. Did anything in particular help your child move through this? Currently no diagnosis but I suspect anxiety although not obvious could be the real issue