Internalising.

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Do you ever internalise your emotions, reactions, or meltdowns? If so: is it something you do automatically/have always done, or do you do suppress things on purpose?
Do you just shut down when things get too stressful?

If either of the above, do people tend to not believe you when you actually try to tell them the amount of distress you are experiencing?



Or do you tend to not be able to control your emotional reactions to things and have meltdowns?

If this, then do people accuse you of whining or emotional immaturity?

I suppress my distress in public and may appear calmer and less distressed on the surface than I actually am. So, no, people don't always believe I am in distress when I tell them. On the other hand if I stop suppressing they think I am looney tunes and being a drama queen so I can't win either way.

At the end of the day I usually have to suffer alone. I am getting used to it.

yes, i do. and when i try to tell people they either say i need to get over it (which i suppose is true) or that i am just exaggerating and that i am experiencing it like anyone. when i finally do get upset...i dont melt down really. not from descriptions i have read of meltdowns or from meltdowns that i have seen. i just yell, which makes people angry and apt to say things like "oh suuuure, everything is just sooooo hard for you." and other sarcastic remarks.

My meltdowns are almost always internalized. I just kind of aggressively "zone out" and ignore everything around me. If someone insists on forcing me to communicate while I'm in that state, I'll respond back in a really mean & angry manner that might include shouting or piercing insults, and can easily progress to a full-blown conventional screaming meltdown if they keep aggravating me. However, I'm pretty sure that my zoned-out states themselves are meltdowns, and not necessarily just preludes to an aborted conventional meltdown, because afterward I have the same sense of exhaustion, depression, tiredness, and fatigue others report feeling after a more conventional meltdown that doesn't usually go away until I've manged to "burn it off" by sleeping for a few hours (often, overnight).

The post-meltdown sleeps are themselves kind of weird. The best way I can describe them is that during the hour or two it might take to finally fall asleep, I feel like a sparking Tesla coil. I'll toss and turn for about an hour (usually with a headache and simultaneous agitation+tiredness), spend about another hour half-asleep (the "sparking" phase), then a couple hours just vanish, and I'll wake up feeling normal again (but possibly still a bit tired).

I have always internalized my feelings, but do have an outburst from time to time not pretty when it happens. I image in my head what I want to do and it depends on the situation but I could obsess about this for a very long time but only in my head not pretty either.

I constantly internalize my reactions to things as well as most of my meltdowns. I have had people in positions of authority not believe that I was experiencing as much distress as I said I was experiencing. It's frustrating.

Yeah, I have a black-belt in internalizing. I'm not sure if it's nature or nurture, though. I was a very sensitive kid and when I was very young my home environment was kind of loud and scary, and I learned how to be quiet in order not to provoke explosions. It's probably nature & nurture both interacting with each other.

Yep.

No, people would never get it and in my early teens (or maybe it was even before then) I gave up trying to communicate my internal states to people. I'd always get how I felt trivialized and minimized which I really hated.

I have huge control over my reactions, but I think the cost is problems with dissociation and depression. And when I do melt down it's like an A-bomb.

I never complain, so people never get to accuse me of whining, which is how I intend it to be.

This describes me somewhat as well. I have severe stomach problems and depressive episodes as a result of holding in so much over the years.

I think the perception that I developed early on was that nobody really cared what I thought or felt at the end of the day, so it was useless to engage in the feelings. I just pushed them down as far and as hard as I could.

Though I am now more aware of how I react to stress, it's still hard for me to regulate myself. It's either too little emoting or way too much. Even having to think about it that much is hard!

I tend to be far less internalized at home and with people I'm more comfortable around and understand better, than at school or other public places where most people are just a little bit more than strangers to me. When I'm under prolonged stress, I've noticed that outbursts of anger tend to be far more frequent in both environments. I've also noticed that most of my outbursts of anger have been when I am incapable of being alone without hearing or seeing other people, so usually outbursts are a poor substitution for when I'm not able to go through my thoughts and feelings alone and logically calm myself. I think some of my most relaxed moments have been when I would walk to school in the morning, just before dawn, by myself; just thinking about everything and organizing my thoughts, plans, emotions, or whatever else that would go through my mind. Basically, if I'm given the option of being isolated I will internalized my emotions or thoughts, but if I am not, then I will have strong outbursts. My solution is to pace though. Often, when I'm pacing I can usually omit any other sounds, movement, or people in the room and this allows me to sort out my thoughts very nicely. This is why I pace when I'm on the phone, because I need to focus solely on the conversation I am having on the phone. This has been a habit of mine my whole life.

Just wondering from responses is this a female trait!

Last edited by Annmaria on 31 Dec 2011, 7:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Last edited by Annmaria on 31 Dec 2011, 7:16 am, edited 3 times in total.

Oh yes. I hold it in so well that a therapist I was rooming with had no idea that I was suicidally depressed.

I always keep my social bucket half full, so I can draw back whenever things are getting rowdy. I hide under a Christmas tree, which is great solitary fun, or just go off running laps. I rarely have meltdowns, even as internal ones. When I do get one of those I am in a zoned out state. My close friends call it the aspie state. I am catatonic but responsive, although speech become single syllabled and extremely monotonous. I get a sensation that's like floating out of my body but not quite. Usually I snap out of it the next day, but not always.

Thanks for the reply everyone. It's interesting to see situations both similar and different to myself, and thinking about causes.
Like annmaria I wonder if there is greater commonality among girls, which might also add to the trend of girls on the spectrum going undiagnosed because of it. It would be interesting to find out.

I tend to internalize things quite a bit......but then its garanteed at some point something will set me off and everything I have bottled up inside tends to get released. This was more common when I was a child I would be bottling things up and then something seemingly minor would set me off but it usually turned out I was actually upset about all the things I was internalizing not so much the thing that set me off in the first place.

I still tend to internalize things and it does still certainly build up at times, but I have found less obvious ways of letting it all out......then the yelling/crying that occured when I was a kid.