You can control your "meltdowns"

Post Reply New Topic

Only ever had an angry outburst in front of someone once, and I was literally trembling with rage, all because he wouldn't answer my question with the answer that I wanted him to give

I disagree on that line I have had 'Meltdowns' before which was caused by stress and I have not been angry for example I was at work once and I sat on a chair and I fadded out into a Meltdown I wasn't angry I wasn't screeming at anyone it just happened.

This is silly. I believe this person has other issues if he can 'control' his meltdown, then goes home and violently releases his anger.

My meltdowns consist of this: I cannot speak or think logically and begin to cry. Period. No violence. No yelling. Never ONCE have I used this in any way. In fact, I wish desperately to control it.
As for the other comments about being a part of society, having children, etc. here is my response. Why not ask my 5 children (3 on the spectrum) whether they consider me a "danger" or a bad mother. I know I am one of the few who can function outside, but I h ave a lot of loving help and support from a wonderful husband who understands the ins and outs of asperger's. He knows my meltdowns, and can tell when I'm getting close, and sends me to a dark room to regroup for a few minutes.

There IS a way to help stop a meltdown or stave it off, but you need someone there who knows how. Do you know what deep pressure is? Pressure compressions on the joints can do amazing things. So can a really tight bear hug (from someone you can stand to touch you obviously). This is not foolproof, but it has helped more often than not. I use it on my kids. They start off screaming and crying. (btw, dumb to say kids are "using" this to control us. We have complete control over this household and my kids are respectful. They are not doing this ever to gain anything. This is no Tantrum. This is uncontrollable in children. They do not have the mental reasoning to see what is going to happen, to figure out why so they can remove themselves from it, nor the emotional control to have even a prayer of controlling it. You obviously know nothing about children or child rearing.) By the time I'm done, they are giggling and better and bounce away happily. Try this if you have someone to aid you. You cannot do it yourself unless you are a contortionist.

What's so special about meltdowns? I mean everyone gets those every once in awhile, including NT's. So the only criteria for that is that you have emotions.

Going with my own personal theory as to why I don't have emotions, or am insensitive, I believe that I've been able to keep this under control because my self awareness is so strong that it suppresses whatever emotions I might have, and I know quite well when I'm around other people. So I could not feel the emotions that lead me to thinking and doing things irrationally.

I don't know if this works for everyone with AS, but it does for me. I actually believed that people with AS might be the least susceptible to meltdowns because most of them are insensitive.

One of the most frustrating things about debate in an online forum is the way people skim the subject line, read a few entries toward the end of the thread, and then post an idea or objection that has already been thoroughly addressed in a previous entry. I would call what you did a shutdown, but if you want to call it a meltdown that's fine by me. In any case it's not what I was talking about in the OP.




So now you're making fun of my avatar?

Topato Potato is an imaginary superhero from an online comic by Jeffrey Rowland. i chose him as my avatar because I think we have similar personalities. Here is the URL:

http://jjrowland.com/wigu/20030912.html

Last edited by beautifulspam on 21 Oct 2007, 12:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.

who said anything about making fun of your avatar? if you'd rather i'd said "i am poison" rather than "poison man", so be it...

Everyone has anger. I choose to release mine in safe surroundings in a way that neither harms others nor disrupts the lives of those around me.


For those who may have not read the entire thread and are now under the impression, through yuor misleading use of language, that I go home and do "violent" things, let me repeat once again that my method for releasing anger is to max out the weights on my home gym and shout at the wall. Back when I was into marshall arts, I did katta for the same purpose. I suppose you could call this "violent" in some peripheral, technical sense, but anyone reading the above sentence would get the wrong idea if it were taken out of its proper context.

im living in facility and my meltdowns sadly i always have crying attacks

I can control my anger too, far beyond the capacities of that of an NT, but when I "shutdown" and can't remove the stimuli that caused the "shutdown" or the stimuli refuses hard to leave me alone, I get what I define as a meltdown. Lashing out in order to make the stimuli shut up, by whatever means. In these rare cases, my self-control is unfortunately a few seconds behind my actions for a time frame of a minute or two. I usually only go into meltdown modus when I'm seriously physically hurt by someone and trapped or forced violently and over a longer course of time to do something I will just not do (usually involves physical violence, but oh well).

I really hate touching people, and hitting includes touch and I hate loud voices, but in meltdowns it's not my consciousness that decides what I do and what not. I certainly don't like having a heartbeat that feels as if my chest is going to burst and I certainly can't control the shaking of my whole body that makes movement hard. Since I'm unable to use any means of communication whatsoever, because my mind just went on a vacation, I can truthfully say I cannot "control" that state.

My father was doing this for a while, but then my mother started shouting, "CROCODILE TEARS! CROCODILE TEARS!" and my relationship with both of them soured.

Like I said, if you can stave it off, you feel like a million bucks later on. It's amazing.

LOL me!

I had to acquire it, myself. It's the only thing that prevents me from sawing off my arm and sending it to Niger as food for the children. It keeps my pathological altruism in check.

No one's trying to be misleading here. We're a bunch of autists. We don't know how.

Again, anger isn't the problem. It's the solution, along with loathing and greed.

And then there are the irrelevant, random comments from trolling loons who haven't read the thread or don't care to address the main point.

Wrong. They are are relevant. You just haven't read the thread. Start from the beginning, and, this time, actually read my posts.

Let me try to put this in simpler terms for you. You don't have meltdowns: meltdowns have you. Try to engrave this upon your consciousness. It's literally a schizophrenic breakdown without the delusions or break with reality, and it's all the more frightening because we can't get away from it. Many of us are receiving medication and therapy for these issues, and some of us are paying for it out of our own pockets. Maybe we should start babbling about invisible aliens and star fairies, so perhaps the government will give a slice of Hell, but, unfortunately, Aspies have never been very good at duplicity. If we were, we'd have had an effective treatment for it on the market years ago, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

In any case, I advise you to get an idea as to what a meltdown really is before thinking to lecture people on controlling them. It's not as simple as you think, and no one here is going to give a yard of f**k what you have to say about it until you've demonstrated yourself to be the least bit knowledgable on this subject.

People are correct that catatonia and meltdowns are not the same. However, catatonia has almost nothing to do with schizophrenia (which it later got attached to), either. It's a name for a neurological-motor impairment that is far more complex than most people give it credit for. The diagnosis for "catatonic schizophrenia" (which usually just means "idiopathic catatonia") has gone down as the diagnosis of the usual conditions that cause it has gone up (psychiatry hijacked the concept of catatonia somewhere along the way, it was never meant to be psychiatric to begin with). Autism shares many of the same features as catatonia and some autistic people experience an increase in catatonic/parkinson-like features as we get older (yep I'm one of them, diagnosed and everything, had a few features from early on but nobody but a specialist in that area would have picked up on them until they became more apparent).

That said, most of the things catatonia has to do with apply more to shutdown than meltdown, so I'm just as confused as anyone as to what is being described here.

I also definitely agree that there is a point of no return with meltdowns. If a person has the right skills and enough energy, it is possible to sometimes divert it before it gets to that point of no return. But this does not mean that everyone has that ability at all times. Sometimes I can consciously decide between two options, freezing in place or being unable to understand my surroundings, but that hardly makes catatonia (and remember I have the real thing) a voluntary state (and also remember that it's more than just freezing, elements of it affect me at all times). I also totally disagree with the idea that meltdowns are primarily anger. For me they're primarily overload, a total assault on my senses. If I don't get out of the way in time, there's that point of no return, and I may end up melting down, or I may end up shutting down, or I may end up running around in circles uncontrollably until I have an asthma attack or collapse or someone stops me or it winds down on its own, but there's not that much control left by that point.

People might be interested in the paper Shutdowns and Stress in Autism which covers some of the possible neurological basis for shutdown.

Also it might be important to note that as I have this movement disorder (variously described as catatonia or parkinson-like), the stress on my body caused by voluntary movement is outwardly measurable. Wiggling my toes raises my galvanic skin response appreciably. The equipment was not malfunctioning, we tried it on someone else. This is objectively measurable.

By the way, it's possible to avoid some seizures too. You can avoid certain kinds of sensory or emotional stimulation, eat and sleep regularly, take certain medications, whatever. But the fact that I am nearly seizure-free from a combination of these things (whereas before I wasn't), doesn't make my friend whose epilepsy is more severe someone who just doesn't have enough self-control, and doesn't mean I didn't have enough self-control before I was able to implement some of these things.

I have also greatly reduced, but not eliminated, my number of meltdowns (have them way more often than seizures though). That is possible for some of us. But it has taken years to do this, and not everyone has the resources (of many kinds) to be able to implement some of the strategies I have. I can't imagine blaming a person for having meltdowns unless they were constantly putting themselves in avoidable situations that they knew they could avoid and that caused the meltdowns anyway (and they were fully aware of and capable of avoiding the meltdowns). I imagine that situation to be extremely rare, because meltdowns are highly unpleasant.

And, er, I tried babbling about invisible aliens and star fairies (I grew up in California, what can I say? Yes there's a logical reason but I'm not going to get into it here ). All it got me, in combination with the meltdowns, shutdowns, and so forth, is a kind of medication that is vile and evil when given to someone with a pre-existing movement disorder of the kind I had. Not cool. Don't do it.

Obviously I have minor ones - not always involving anger, but I have been advised on other message boards to count to 10 before posting.

For the record (and if you read my PREVIOUS posts) I have read each and every one of these posts on this thread. Furthermore, I seriously doubt you suffer any auti-ness at all if you don't realize fixation on a particular part of a topic or discussion is normal in autism. Your comment at the very beginning was cold hearted, rude, and showed a complete lack of understanding about this disorder you claim you have. My main issue with this entire thread is that it was started by someone who, knowing nothing of the posters on this board, or their lives, or what they face and deal with on a daily basis, chose to pass judgment on the people who have meltdowns and accuse them of basically using them as an excuse to not control their emotions. Ridiculous! If I can control my meltdowns, I should in theory should be able to control my social issues, my anxiety problems, and my unusual topics of interest, should I not? You need to read up on Autism and Asperger's more. When you show you have acquired more knowledge on this topic, maybe you will be taken seriously for your theories. Until then, you are seen as another ignorant bully and nothing more.