An Autistic Meltdown Is NOT a Tantrum!

What Meltdowns Feel Like to Me As An Autistic Adult

A Detailed Description of the Reality of Autistic Meltdowns

This can't be said enough…

An Autistic Meltdown is Not a Tantrum!

Sure, some of the outward exhibited behaviours may appear the same, but the causation of an Autistic Meltdown is vastly misinterpreted.

So, what's the difference?

A Tantrum is intentional manipulative behavior that someone exhibits in order to get something they want that they are told they cant have. Once they are given that which they can’t have, the unpleasant behavior ceases.

To the extreme contrary, there is nothing manipulative about an Autistic Meltdown, nor is it in any way intentional.

An Autistic Meltdown is a physiological autonomous response caused by prolonged exposure to cognitive distress, conversational difficulties, social pressures and anxieties, transitions, sudden and unexpected change, and sensory integration issues that any one, or any combination of each or all, overloads an Autistic person’s mental and physical abilities to cope or compensate.

Once an Autistic Meltdown begins, there is nothing that can be given to the individual that will stop it, as they were never seeking anything in the first place. It has to run its course until it’s over, and the only thing that will end it is the passage of time.

It’s analogous to an overloaded battery – its power surely dissipating due to the load, ultimately resulting in total depletion of all its stored energy, until it’s completely dead.

There are things that 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.

Recently, I posted a story about a frustrating session with my therapist which resulted in my experiencing a serious Meltdown afterwards. You can read the full story here, but 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 unexpected apathetic response.

You might assume that this frustrating session itself was the trigger that sparked the Meltdown, but in fact, it was not.

It never is. In this particular case, for me, it was actually the severe traffic jam I got stuck in after the appointment that was the final trigger.

Heavy traffic is a common Meltdown trigger for me – and it’s a very dangerous place to have one.

It’s not a situation where I calmly pulled over to the side of the road and casually decompressed, but of a sudden panicked unthinking jerk of the wheel, steering haphazardly, totally unaware of the presence of other cars, then a slamming of the brakes to a skidding dead stop on the shoulder of the road.

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.

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 an extended staycation at the nearest psych ward.

They’ve got beds and they’ve got meds – that’ll fix everything. Right? – Wrong!

Note

It is important to note that the driving incident where I had a Meltdown in traffic occurred pre-diagnosis. The Meltdown was a single occurrence and had zero to do with road rage as there was no rage involved, and there never is with any Meltdown that I have ever had.

Many people with Autism do not drive, and while I still do have some Autistic challenges with driving, the fact is that I have a perfect driving record, no accidents on my record, and with absolutely zero negative points on my record, and in fact have a +5 on my record for voluntarily taking an additional driving class. I have never been in an accident in my entire life that was my fault. I passed my driver’s test on the very first try flawlessly.

Many, if not most within the Autistic Community either chooses not to drive, cannot drive due to the severity of their Autism, or try, but fail to pass the drivers licensing paper test and/or road test per the requirements of the Department of Motor Vehicles for the state in which they live, or are delayed in obtaining their learner’s permit and their driver’s license far beyond the age of the non-Autistic person.

According to a 2012 Study and scholarly article titled, “Longitudinal study of driver licensing rates among adolescents and young adults with autism spectrum disorder” (Curry, Yerys, Huang, and Metzger), only 1/3 of teens with Autism are licenced by the age of 21. The following is an excerpt from the Discussion Section of their Abstract:

“While adolescents with ASD are licensed at rates much lower than adolescents without ASD, approximately 1 in 3 teens with ASD are successfully achieving licensure by age 21” ¹

In addition, when I finally received my correct diagnosis of Autism, I quickly learned to be ever aware of early pre-Meltdown symptoms and triggers, and take the appropriate measures to work through the Meltdown prior to ever getting behind the wheel. I am a responsible adult and I am a very good driver for someone with Autism.

Although a Meltdown can be triggered by one event, typically it never is just one trigger. This is what confuses people. They see an Autistic person seem to overreact over one minor incident, and they assume that one thing was the root cause. That is rarely the case.

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 that any one additional trigger, no matter how small or minor, that even a stressor no bigger than the figurative size of a hair is enough to be the final rapidly firing trigger that ultimately sets it off.

Every Autistic individual experiences Meltdowns differently, but – There Are Generally Two Broad Types of Autistic Meltdowns:

• Explosions –These are the type of Meltdown where an Autistic person may become loud, agitated, argumentative, aggressive, et al. This is the type that the Media at large only focuses on, and falsely sends the message that all Autistic Meltdowns are like. This could not be farther than the truth, as, in fact, this type of Meltdown happens only on very rare instances, and it is harmful, exploitive, and creates a stereotype of a false belief in the eyes of the population, who watch and believe everything the Media reports.
• Implosions — These are inwardly focused and loss of cognition is obvious as the Implosion Meltdown includes an inability to speak or respond to questions, Anxiety consumes the individual, and their only need is to be removed from the environment that was the final trigger that pushed the individual beyond their neurological ability to compensate, and then be taken to a silent and dark place of solitude and to be alone to handle the Meltdown themselves as most have their own routines that they used to battle the Meltdown. Sleepiness is sure to happen during the recovery phase as the Meltdown is a total assault on their minds and bodies.

Important Note: In both types of Meltdowns the Autistic person does not do any of this willfully, as the occurrence of any type of Meltdown is an autonomous neurological response that the individual has zero control over.

Implosions and Explosions can co-occur – an explosion followed by an implosion, or an implosion followed by an explosion, or even simultaneous occurrence of both kinds at the same time.

The traffic Meltdown I described earlier was the latter. But, it is very very rare for me to have an Explosion type Meltdown, as 99.9% of mine are of the Implosion type. As well, this Implosion type of Meltdown is what I describe in the next section.

What a Meltdown Feels Like to Me

Implosive Meltdowns: If I had to describe it with words, I will say that a Meltdown for me is like a total assault on my mind and on my body – like having multiple seizures and blackouts at the same time – thoughts in my mind become this altered version of reality – like being as totally out of control of yourself as a person as you can possibly imagine.

I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know who you are anymore, and I don’t know who anyone else is anymore either…

I don’t know where I am anymore. I don’t know where you are anymore, and I don’t know where anyone else is anymore either…

Tremendous pressure builds inside my head, auditory and visual information becomes depleted, compressed, and filtered into a muffled tunnel too small for the ingress volume. 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.

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.

My thought pattern has no pattern, and is more like the unpredictably random pattern of a pinball bouncing wildly around inside a pinball machine – and 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.

That deep black hole is the Recovery Phase, and it may be quick or it may be slow – I never can know. If it's a particularly severe Meltdown, the recovery is very slow. I may stay there cowering in the emptiness of that deep dark hole for a very long time. Hours or days may go by while my body and mind try to recover.

Cognition is very slow to return. Words at first merely partially patterned rhythmic syllables – phonetically formed groupings of letters that seem to float in the air then suddenly fall – an alphabet soup of magnetic letters then strangely arrange like ransom notes stuck to the frig. A cerebral perception of polarity pulls the groupings ever so slowly across the surface towards each other, each movement met with varying intensities of resistance, but eventually, I do then become, to some degree, aware of their presence.

At first, just single letters I see all at once – a 500 piece jigsaw newspaper jumble puzzle of letters that somehow find each other, almost by rumor, to then finally join together to form coherent words that then mysteriously morph into complicated combinations of word pairings, marching in curious cadence, with final comprehension somewhere to arise in the uncertain future – if at all.

Although the words are now there, I’m utterly exhausted from this assault. I collapse in a heap, and I sleep until I’m finally ready to tolerate being amongst the humans again and throw the dice one more time in this game that is the Meltdown Monopoly of my Game of Life...

Games usually end – but oh no, this game’s not over yet. And, it’s never really over, because I only lie in wait until the next one comes. It’s not a matter of “if” it will come again, but of “when” it will come again – because Autism is a lifelong condition for which there is no cure.

That is as close as I can describe to what I experience when I have an Autistic Meltdown.

I can’t speak for everyone, as this description is only my personal experience, but one common theme to everyone Autistic is that a Public Meltdown is extremely embarrassing for all of us on the Spectrum.

If you’ve ever witnessed an Autistic Meltdown, you know how disturbing it is to watch – but you may not know that it is exponentially more difficult it is to experience one.

The thing is…

As horrific as an Autistic Meltdown can be, it’s a good thing…

It’s a much-needed release, a rebooting of the system, and it is essential…

We just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, dust ourselves off, and Continue on with Life on the Spectrum as if nothing happened… :||

Related Links

• An earlier version of this story has been published on The Mighty
• An earlier version of this story has been published on the Art of Autism
• An earlier version of this story has been published on Yahoo!

Citations

¹ NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information), PMC (PubMed Central® ), NLM (US National Library of Medicine), NIH (National Institutes of Health). (Published online 2017 4 Apr 4). (doi: 10.1177/1362361317699586). “Longitudinal study of driver licensing rates among adolescents and young adults with autism spectrum disorder”; Authors: Allison E Curry, Benjamin E Yerys, Patty Huang, and Kristi B Metzger; Retrieved 06:18 EST, 22 Apr 2021 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5767541/