When a too-keen sensitivity becomes a too-heavy burden

Laney Clore turned learning to live with a sensory disorder and the weight of being her family's first born into a career helping others with similar challenges

Laney Clore

Laney Clore was just a toddler when her parents realized that “something was wrong, but they didn’t know what.” She couldn’t stand brushing her teeth or her hair, cringed at bright lights and loud sounds, rejected certain foods for their texture and had little spatial awareness.

Her parents, who were “really on top of it,” took their only daughter and oldest child to an occupational therapist for an evaluation, where it was determined that she had a sensory processing disorder. A common condition in those with autism or attention deficit disorder (though Clore was diagnosed with neither) SPD has been likened to a traffic jam in the central nervous system.

“I’ve never been able to filter out all the sensory information like other people can and it gets kind of jammed up and overwhelming there in my head,” says Clore, now 25 and working as an occupational therapist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “From a very young age, that began to cause stress and anxious behaviors.”

From preschool well into elementary school, Clore worked with an occupational therapist, learning, through limited controlled exposures, to accept the textures, sights and sounds that disturbed her. When it became clear that her auditory processing challenges were increasing rather than diminishing, therapists also introduced adaptive techniques – like equipping her with headphones to filter exterior sounds and arranging for testing accommodations in school – which allowed Clore to flourish academically. (To this day, she still “religiously” relies on earplugs to focus.)

But her too-keen sensitivity to stimuli wasn’t the only factor fueling Clore’s early-onset anxiety. Because both her parents had active careers and demanding work lives, she and her only sibling, Aiden, three years her junior, spent their after-school hours into the evening with a caretaker who also took in other children. Because she was the oldest in the group, Clore was thrust into a supervisory, almost “parental” role, for which she was ill suited -- but which she assumed, as the oldest child in her own family, was “normal and expected.”

“These fearful thoughts, this feeling of lack of control started very young,” she says. “And then the pressure around middle childhood of just coping with that, doing well in school, trying to be in this parent-like role after school…it really started to put a strain on me.”

She began waking up every morning dreading the thought of going to school (despite it being a place where she excelled) and a pervasive “sadness” she had no label for began to take a toll on her friendships.  At 11, a peer cut short their relationship, saying she just couldn’t hang out with Clore anymore because “you’re so sad and you can’t go with the flow.’” In retrospect, Clore now realizes she was suffering from depression.

Belatedly recognizing their daughter’s emotional descent and her need for less pressure and more home time, her parents ended the after-school care routine when Clore was 12, which was “wonderful at first.” But the change coincided with the onset of a severe case of acne and Clore’s increasing concern with her appearance as she compared herself to her peers.

“By 12, I was definitely going into that depression again and that was largely based on my appearance,” she recalls. “I remember feeling very different from everyone else -- I was taller than the other girls, a little bit chubby and I felt so awkward in my own body. Acne…braces…typical adolescent things. But it started to wreak havoc on my mental health by that age.”

The anxieties and self-consciousness soon manifested in obsessive behaviors. So invested did she become in trying to reduce her weight and hide her acne, she would set her alarm to wake up before anyone else in the house to slather herself with makeup; not even her brother and parents were allowed to see her without it.

Once again her parents recognized the need to step in. Her mother, concerned that dieting could lead to an eating disorder, embarked on a weight loss program with her daughter, in order to insure it was healthy and not too extreme. Her father, who had suffered from acne himself in his younger years but had never been afforded treatment, took her to a dermatologist.

Yet, by the time she entered high school, her acne had resurged stronger than ever and the comparisons with her “beautiful” peers became more destructive.

“That was one of my lowest points, around 15,” Clore says. “That’s when I started to have thoughts of ‘I don’t deserve to be here, I’m such an eyesore, I’m simply a monster.’ I just starting spiraling. I would cry every day looking in the mirror. And it got to a point where I wished I wasn’t there.”

Still, she refrained from confiding in someone or seeking counseling, feeling that “if I couldn’t pull myself up by my bootstraps and get out of it on my own, then I just didn’t deserve it.”

“I had this idea that maybe it wasn’t bad for other people to get help, but for me it was like a thing of shame,” she says. “I think part of it was being perfectionistic and looked at as the leader in my family. My mom once told me, ‘You’re like an anchor compared to your brother – you have such a good head on your shoulders and you’re so stable.’ And I took that to heart so much, the need to be the rock of the family and help whenever I could. To be strong, to be perfect.”

After graduating from high school in Sarasota, a community of predominantly white, wealthy retirees on Florida’s Gulf coast, she chose to go to college at Florida International University in Miami, a much larger and more cosmopolitan city she felt would offer her a “fresh start.” She’d already decided on her academic path, after her mother suggested, “Have you ever thought about becoming an occupational therapist and helping kids like you?” Clore, who abhorred the thought of a corporate career or anything anything to do with “uniforms or cubicles” embraced the idea and immediately began shadowing therapists, well before entering college.

Miami was, indeed, a change of pace, but one that sent her into a bit of culture shock. She enjoyed the greater community diversity and the academic challenges, but lacked experience and maturity in managing her first relationships. That eventually led to her being stalked by a troubled student who, she eventually learned, lived with schizophrenia, her first exposure to someone with psychosis.

Meanwhile, back home in Sarasota, her younger brother Aiden’s own mental health challenges were leading to his increasing experimentation with potentially dangerous illegal substances. Because they had always been close, he continued to confide in Clore, but as his disease evolved into full scale addiction – and eventually psychosis – she also started hearing from some of his worried friends who said, “You have to do something!”  

“I felt this overwhelming sense of protectiveness, over my brother and my parents,” she says. “From a very young age I’d taken it upon myself to mediate and figure out how much I could tell them that wouldn’t break his trust in my. My fear was that he would stop trusting in me and then nobody would know. And that’s a very stressful position to put yourself in from the ages of 15 to 21.”

Added to her own struggles to keep up academically, manage the stalking situation and deal with her obsessive compulsions and the acne, which flared with additional stress, “it just pushed me over the edge.”

In an effort to feel in control of something – anything – Clore began creating “rules” to help her cope, rules she religiously followed “even after seeing, time after time, that they didn’t do anything.” She would wash her face at exactly 8 p.m., before her roommates returned. She changed her pillowcase every day and would wake up instantly if her face touched it during the night.

She stopped going to the gym because “no one was allowed to see me without makeup.” Her body image became even more distorted, and she created absurd eating rules based on Internet stories that said certain foods could cause acne or make her obese.  She checked mirrors constantly and refused to leave her dorm without something covering her face. In time the rules only added to her stress, isolating her from friends and activities and turning her almost into a hermit.

“It felt like there was almost a hand pushing on my chest, pushing me back, as if there was a force that could not let me be seen in my bare face,” she recalls. “I had been depressed before, but this was new. And it was hell.”

Eventually, using the excuse of needing help to deal with her stalker, she went to see a university counselor. Very quickly the counselor came to the conclusion Clore was suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder and recommended she see someone more specialized. That led to a therapist practicing cognitive behavioral therapy, who helped her reframe her thoughts to avoid the absolutism of her black and white thinking. She was also prescribed anti-depressants which “were a lifesaver.”

“They got me to the point mentally where I was more receptive to therapy,” she says. “I needed the constant distress to subside before I could do anything else and that was the first step.”

As her brother’s began an uneven journey to recovery and her acne began to wane (thanks in part to being prescribed birth control pills to balance her hormones and prevent scarring), she felt the energy to embrace counseling and academics again. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and embarked on a master’s degree in occupational therapy. She and Aiden continued to talk frequently, sharing support and advice as they navigated their individual paths to more stable mental health.

After graduating, seeking another clean slate, Clore moved with her boyfriend to his hometown of Pittsburgh, where she is now in her first year as a school-based occupational therapist, counseling students from elementary through high school. Recently she endured the painful process of getting a large tattoo on her leg that is a visual reminder of her relationship with Aiden, who has a “sleeve” of tattoos on one arm and intends to get a similar one soon. The tattoo is of an antique street light wrapped in a ribbon with the words “Don’t forget your family.”  

“It’s a line from a song called ‘A Better Place’  Aiden and I used to play together on the guitar,” Clore says. “It’s by a group called Streetlight Manifesto, hence the street light design. It’s about encouraging someone to choose life even when they feel at their lowest.”

These days, with her brother well into his recovery and back in college pursuing his own goal to become a counselor, Clore is clear-faced, clear-headed and focused on serving young people who are struggling as she once did. The most essential counsel she delivers to them is this: What may seem like the end of the world as a teenager is, in reality, a mere blip on the screen of life’s journey.

“I tell them, ‘This is one period, one small chapter,’” she says. “’ You have so much life ahead of you, so much time. This is not the way your life is going to be forever. And you should never give up hope because of what’s going on in the moment. So many people go through this and everybody wants to see you succeed.”

Her own experiences, which she freely shares with her clients, not only make her empathetic and credible, she believes, but deliver an equally important dictum that “there is absolutely no shame in admitting that you need help.”

“Personally, I’m not ashamed at all of my experience or my family’s experience,” she adds. “Actually, quite the reverse. I want to reframe it and say that I’m so proud – not only of myself, but my brother and my parents.  I’ve seen the growth we’ve all experienced and I’m very proud to share our stories.”

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