People pushing you to communicate while you can't

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Does anyone else have issues with this, where if people push you to communicate when you can't when you couldn't for only a short period of time it turns into a complete non-verbal period?

Was in a short but pretty much everything affected shutdown (would have been out of it in 5 minutes on my own, but unable to even move or speak), kept having people push more and more trying to make me communicate (in any way), while I couldn't in any way. And I kept getting further and further into shutdown.

I regained the ability to move pretty quickly after they stopped pushing, but am clearly in shutdown still, and very clearly not able to speak.

I don't know when I'm going to regain speech. My guess is about 4 hours from now.

Did when I was a kid. Not anymore. Have a son, 16 now, that does this quite often. I'm getting pretty sick of his teachers calling on me for advice about what to do about it after already telling them the same thing for almost six years now.

Leave him alone stupid! He'll come out of it on his own when he's ready! Quit messing with him, your making it worse!

I just got an email for the third time this year about the same thing. I've given the same advice to the same woman three times already! When are they going to GET IT?! !

She wants a meeting about it. They always do. I wrote her back Friday flatly refusing any meetings about it anymore. Why? So I can say again what I've already said several dozen times over six years? READ HIS IEP YOU IDIOTS!! ! IT'S WRITTEN RIGHT INTO IT!! !

I can speak!

5 hours this time. New longest...

Constantly, when I was a kid. I remember my parents trying to bribe me with cookies to try to get me to verbally answer them. (It didn't usually work, heh.) I'm a little surprised that I never ended up with a "selective mutism" diagnosis. But yeah, people putting pressure on me to speak when speech was shut down made it much worse/deeper/longer-lasting. Nowadays, it hardly ever comes up, though (I rarely talk to anyone), so I don't know how it is as an adult.

Yeah- its horrible. Its actually painful to me, tho i cant articulate how... Being made to makes ir soo much worse- like running on an injury.

If you're at schOol or college- do people there know? Would it be possible to inform people one day, and say that youll maybe have a card or something to hold up, for when you cant speak?? I know itsounds weird, but it might work???
Like an answering machine message, ha ha- 'i cant speak right now but ill get back to you soon'.

Like apple, i now rarely speak to anyone so its less of an issue but im aware even now that i sometimes cant even move my face to raise eyebrows as a silent 'hi'. I def have long periods of mutism and being poked into speech is the LAST thing one needs.

Hope you can get people to chill out a bit. At least you know people here understand.
: )

I've had that problem before. It sucks. I've had a day of silence while my mother tried to prod at me periodically, each prod would just seem like a timer reset on my silence.

I really hate when people push me to speak when I can't. Sometimes I can get get a word or two out but it's often at the cost of a longer shutdown.

This happens to me very rarely, I only ever go mute when I'm bordering on panic attack; I gape like a fish and can't get any sound out. I also have a hard time talking early in the morning, it just feels horrible trying to get words out until I'm fully awake and engaged, which is why I only ever smile and nod when my teachers ask my class how we are in the mornings, I think they're used to it by now. One time one of my teachers paired up with me for a group discussion (she knows I don't like interacting with the other students) and offered just to read the responses I'd written so I didn't have to verbalize them, I thought that was very nice of her.

I sometimes go mute or nearly mute for a time when I get upset. It can last several hours sometimes.When my mom asks me later on why I wasn't talking and tells me I "shouldn't keep what's bothering [me] all bottled up," I try to explain to her that I can't help it. The words just won't come out.

I was diagnosed with selective mutism as a child, but I don't experience that sort of mutism any longer.

Yes, I have "selective" mutism too - though it doesn't feel like it's me who selects when to be mute!

I reach a point where it's impossible to speak, and anyone pressurising me to do so will just make it worse, whether they're being nice about it or not.

I am much better now than when I was a kid, so it can improve.

I think it happens when I just don't understand a situation or what's expected of me. I literally don't know what to say, so I lose the ability to say anything.

You lost the ability to move too? I've got close to that but never to the point of complete inability, certainly not for an extended period. Sorry you had to go through that for so long.

I wonder if writing/typing would help in situations like this?

I experience this quite badly in social situations where there are lots of people around me and they all try to include me in the conversations - it just exacerbates (i love that word) the situation and inhibits my communication abilities even more. It's like when I know I'm expected to communicate with people a fuzzy mist comes over my eyes and I can think of nothing; my mind is frozen.

Recently this happened with disastrous consequences (leading to a 11 day breakdown where I didn't even leave the house except for work) when I was at a "party" at a friend's house with some people I work with. I am bad in group situations because while everyone is connecting with eachother socially and emotionally, I am stuck sitting there hearing conversations from all over the place and it is just too overstimulating!! ! After about 1.5 hours of almost complete silence (apart from the occasional time I force out of my lips a "he's drunk" to the person sitting next to me), everyone was suddenly fixed on me as a topic of conversation. I was bombarded with questions left, right and centre. Even when they were trying to entice me into conversations about stuff they know I love (astronomy + skateboarding, etc) I just couldn't speak.

Eventually, since I had not really talked to any of the 3 girls in the room (of a total of 7 people), as I had nothing to talk to them about (I don't like clothes, clubbing, chart music etc. so what can I talk about? - sorry if that post sounds sexist, but you know the general NT female) and didn't come on to them or flirt with them in any way, they were all eventually just making badly veiled comments about me being gay. I couldn't reply - the stress and overstimulation, coupled with overanalysation made me almost mute. I have nothing against homosexuality, in fact I encourage it in society (who can hate diversity?) but you can understand that for a straight (possibly asexual) male, it is humiliating to be seriously called gay in front of your friends, work colleagues and people I don't even know that well.

One of the most scarring social nights of my life

Often when I'm with a certain friend, she often says to me, ''go and ask that man/woman over there for directions'' (if we are somewhere unfamiliar). I hesitate for a bit, then go and do it because I don't really want to stand there awkwardly.

Also I remember once at school when I was about 12, the teacher (who knew I had AS) was helping me with my work, and we needed a rubber, so she told me to ask the girl sitting next to me if I could borrow her rubber. I didn't want to moan and say, ''no, you do it please'', because (like most typical children of that age) I sort of wanted to be perceived as ''brave'' and ''not as unsociable as we thought'' by the teachers, so I confidently asked the girl next to me if I could borrow her rubber. It wasn't that hard, and she happily gave me the rubber.

It happens to me often. Keep pushing me to talk during my shut downs and I am going to cry or be extremely rude to you.Mostly the latter. I have gotten into loads of fights because of this.
I usually get out of shut downs after a couple of hours of alone time.

I also don't like to talk as soon as I come back home after work/socialising or whatever. I need to normalise myself in my familiar environment. But my family HAD to ask all these questions about how my day was.
Well now I live alone so no problems with that.

People still expect me to respond to "how are you" sometimes, though I've made it clear that I find the gesture insulting as it is a token exchange of complete nonsense and fabrications. As such, if they get pushy then I just say "fish" to them and refuse to explain.

I have more problems with the opposite.
Simply being ignored because I didn't follow their absurd protocols when I'm trying to talk to someone is a nuisance. To say nothing of all those times I was told off as a child for interrupting, only to then have people constantly interrupt me for the rest of my life as though I wasn't saying anything.

Easier to just e-mail them, even at close range. At least then they'll have to read it sooner or later.