I may stay there cowering in the emptiness of that deep dark hole for a very long time. If it’s a particularly severe meltdown, the recovery is very slow. That deep black hole is the recovery phase, and it may be quick or it may be slow – I never know. That pinball is my thoughts, and that pinball machine is my head, until finally that pinball drops straight down into a deep dark hole of emptiness. My thoughts have no pattern and are unpredictably random, like a pinball bouncing wildly around inside a pinball machine. It’s like my brain is floating in the aftermath of a mega-tsunami of randomly competing thoughts, each colliding and combining together into an incomprehensible string of misinformation spinning violently around in my head. In my brain, thoughts are stilted as trillions of synapses audibly misfire, causing a loud snap-crackle pop-rocks sound effect that impedes and truncates coherent thought. Auditory and visual information becomes depleted, compressed and filtered into a muffled tunnel too small for the ingress volume. Tremendous pressure builds inside my head. I don’t know where you are, and I don’t know where anyone else is either. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know who anyone else is either. Thoughts in my mind become an altered version of reality it’s like being as totally out of control of yourself as you can possibly imagine. If I had to describe it with words, a meltdown is like a total assault on my mind and on my body – like having multiple seizures and blackouts at the same time. It is difficult to describe in concise words just what it feels like to have an autistic meltdown – it simply cannot be fully explained as it’s incomprehensible to most neurotypicals, plus everyone has their own unique experience. Related: How Being Autistic Is Like Visiting Another Country The traffic meltdown I described earlier was the latter. And they can co-occur – an explosion followed by an implosion, or an implosion followed by an explosion, or even simultaneous occurrence of both kinds. What people don’t know and don’t see is the steady build-up of stressors that manifest and grow exponentially, compounding over the course of the day, to the final point where any additional trigger, no matter how small or minor, is the last straw.Įvery autistic individual experiences meltdowns differently, but there are generally two broad types of autistic meltdowns: implosions and explosions. They see an autistic person seem to overreact over one minor incident, and they assume that one thing was the root cause. It’s ugly and the extreme fear of police finding me this way is very real, as if that did happen, they would certainly have detained me for evaluation in the psychiatric ward.Īlthough a meltdown can be triggered by one event, typically it is a combination of factors. What followed was an immediate reaction of furious fists pounding the steering wheel, shaking uncontrollably, screaming at the top of my lungs, and fits of inconsolable crying. Related: To the City That Fines Older Kids for Trick-or-Treating Then I slammed the brakes to a skidding dead stop on the shoulder of the road. I panicked - jerking the wheel, steering haphazardly, totally unaware of the presence of other cars. It wasn’t a situation where I calmly pulled over to the side of the road and casually decompressed. Heavy traffic is a common meltdown trigger for me – and it’s a very dangerous place to have a meltdown. In this particular case, the severe traffic jam I got stuck in after the appointment was the final trigger. You might assume this frustrating session itself was the trigger that sparked the meltdown, but it was not. The gist of it was that my therapist had mentioned my autistic traits, and in my attempt to clarify if I was on the spectrum, I was met with an unexpectedly apathetic response. Recently, I had a frustrating session with my therapist which resulted in my experiencing a serious meltdown afterward. There are things that can help, with the first and most crucial being to remove the person from the source of the trigger or the environment that is causing the stress. It’s analogous to an overloaded battery – its power dissipates due to the load, ultimately resulting in total depletion of all its stored energy. Related: Why I Made a Custom Trick-or-Treat Bag for My Son Who Is Nonverbal It has to run its course until it’s over, and the only thing that will end it is the passage of time. Once an autistic meltdown begins, there is nothing that can be given to the individual to stop it, as they were never seeking anything in the first place.
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