You can control your "meltdowns"

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Sociopathy and being 'psychotic' aren't even related. Psychosis is a psychiatric term for losing touch with reality in ways that are not the usual ones condoned by whatever society a person is in. Sociopathy is a psychiatric term for not being in touch with a conscience. Very different things.

[quote="beautifulspam"]
I cannot stand to watch others behave like children while I struggle to become a responsible, self respecting adult. Many WPers cling to victim status. They hide behind the disability. They act like children and refuse to take responsibility. I have only contempt for such people. Maybe a little honesty will help all of us grow up a little. If not, I at least will feel better for having spoken my mind.
[quote]

Beautifulspam, if you are not a troll (& I'm not convinced!) can't you see that you are condemning us for what you consider our abusive behaviour, when the only person being abusive on this thread is YOU!! !! !

If I read much more of your holier-than-thou crap I will have a meltdown right now.

And I'm not joking - I am shaking with rage as I type this.

You say that expressing my anger makes me a victim - I disagree. I am only a victim when I am too afraid to express what I really feel, which is what you are trying to turn me into.

Griff, i was just trying to be helpful. I used to have melt-downs quite intermittantly. And no one liked me for it, or they were afraid of me. I started to control them, and now, instead of anger and frustration, i go to a quite place where i can be alone. Sorry, didn't mean to upset you.

Has anybody said that their meltdowns are often violent, angry, and in public??? Mine aren't, mine are at home generally, and alone often. I just meet shutdown in public.

I really don't understand you claiming that you have learned to control your meltdowns at all, and in the original post, you make it sound as if they are not real. If they are not real, then how have you learned to "control" them, and why must you attack others who claim they cannot... you know, since it's simply a made up excuse anyway to throw a tantrum. In which case, I suppose you have not learned to actually control a meltdown, since it is merely a tantrum anyway.

It is somewhat of a fallacy to attack others for not providing substantial evidence that their meltdowns are not controllable, simply because yours are. You are applying your own situation to everybody else's and denouncing their claims simply because you cannot see proof... yet you say you go home and scream at the wall, lift weights, etc... is it that controllable if you still feel the need to go home and scream at anything at all? Besides, I've seen no proof that you do this... I don't believe it, just as you don't seem to believe anybody else.

Well we can take a lot of behaviors and try to claim they're all the same because they look the same, but this would not be an accurate way of doing it. Why do you assume that all meltdowns (by which I mean explosive overload-related behavior that involves just about any action other than quietly shutting down in some way) even involve anger? They don't.

A tantrum involves anger and often manipulation, it's done to communicate rage or dissatisfaction or wanting someone to do something else. A spoiled 5-year-old doesn't get the toy they want so they scream and kick thinking that if they do that they'll get the toy, that's a tantrum. Most people end up learning that acting like spoiled 5-year-olds is wrong.

An autistic person screaming and/or banging their head and/or something else like that because nothing around them makes any sense and they are in excruciating pain from sensory input, is a totally different phenomenon, and is close to what most people here mean by a meltdown. Note: People with other kinds of excruciating pain behave very similarly, I know totally non-autistic people who have ripped out their hair, banged their heads on the wall, and screamed because of migraines. (And I use the example of migraines because they often involve a component of sensory overload.)

Equating that kind of overload-related behavior to a temper tantrum, is like equating crying after the death of a family member to crying crocodile tears to get out of trouble, or like equating being temporarily unable to speak to giving someone the silent treatment out of anger. The outward behavior might look similar but the internal experience is extremely different. If you said it was possible to learn to manage anger I bet a lot more people would agree with you. What you did was the equivalent of coming into a board that was a forum for people who experienced speech shutdowns during overload, and started ranting and ranting much like you did here, but saying "speech shutdowns" whenever you meant "silent treatment." If you want to talk about anger-related and/or manipulative temper tantrums then do so but don't drag meltdowns into it. You wouldn't say "speech shutdowns are controllable" and then go on and on about how you learned to stop being passive-aggressive and giving people the silent treatment, would you?

By the way, I also totally disagree with the person who took the idea of avoiding responsibility and turned it into sociopaths. Avoiding responsibility to one extent or another is a fairly common human trait. It is not a good one, it is in fact a character flaw that must be guarded against. But it is something that a majority of the non-sociopathic world has struggled with at one point or another. Sociopaths often freeload off other people, too, but that doesn't mean every freeloader and moocher in the world is a sociopath, and they often flatter people, but not every guy trying to flatter women into dating him is a sociopath either (most are not).

And yes psychotic has a colloquial meaning but that colloquial meaning means that people who bear that label in a clinical sense (whether I agree with psychiatry's divisions or not), have to deal with the prejudice caused by people equating "psychotic" with "violent and dangerous". (Most people who are out of touch with reality in those assorted ways that get called psychotic, are no more violent than anyone else.) It may be irrelevant to your topic of discussion, but for people who have to deal with people fearing them because of that sort of casual equation of their psychiatric label to something far more nasty and sinister, it is never irrelevant. If you'd said "ret*d" in a metaphorical sense to mean "stupid" (as many people colloquially do) or "autistic" in a metaphorical sense to mean "not noticing or caring about other people" (as some people colloquially do) believe me you'd have gotten the same response out of me whether it was "relevant" to the main topic or not.

And if you haven't figured out the difference between tantrums and meltdowns yet, this post goes into a lot of detail on the subject.

You seem not very nice. in fact you seem like a major ass to me. I have EXTREME trouble controlling my meltdowns. and no, a meltdown is not really like a tantrum. I know a tantrum. My meltdowns are worse. They get to an extreme degree. You have NO right to call anyone pathetic. Get a life!

This looks like a potentially very helpful thread, trying to separate out between tantrums, meltdowns, anxiety attacks, etc..

Before I escaped Asperger I used to have meltdowns/systems crashes/lock-ups when my communications and empathy systems were not really working, were knocked out. It did not really feel like me inside, but rather a wooden, broken person with little language or ability to feel anything - about their own life or anyone else's. The very act of forming words, inside to myself or externally, was difficult, if it involved any 'feeling' context (I could do fairly mechanical talking e.g. at work). It was also very noisy, crashing, I couldn't think (no awareness), the wrong routines were running; I couldn't seem to relate to the world or indeed anything. Recovery normally took some days, including periods of time when I could be 'in myself' (fairly alone, apart from others).

Some of the solutions mentioned in this thread look like applications of CBT, the thinking that is helping many manage and beat depression, by showing them that sometimes their thinking just take a false turn down the wrong tracks. (I personally have found REBT brilliant - http://www.rebt-cbt.net/)

Best wishes
JC
http://unlearningasperger.blogspot.com/

Yeah, OK, so I am willing to concede that many of mine are tantrums rather than "meltdowns" if it makes you all happy. (Although as someone said earlier, the really bad ones will end up in the shaking , crying type of meltdown).

I don't care what you call them - I still can't (always) control them.

And I would still rather have the tantrums than be a submissive wimp. Hate me if you like.

It is only social conditioning that makes people "grow out" of them. And I do not conform to social norms, neither do I want to.

In fact your kind of rigid thinking "You should be able to..." sounds exactly like I do when I am going off on one.

I hate to tell you this but you & I are not as different as you would like to believe.

Destroyed? Isn't that a bit harsh?

have a question? when do ya remember being able to somewhat deal with ur meltdowns? i have a five year old that absolutely I believe goes through a meltdown that he cannot control..... no one else believes this but I know my baby and he doesnt enjoy being that way.... he is not trying to manipulate the situation ....... not normally cuz those are the ones he can stop himself with the behavior management skills we have learned...... but sometimes there is just no winning and its kind of like he has days where he just doesnt want to do the day.....should stayed in bed days ya know?