Not being able to speak at times?

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Im not entirly sure what happened to me but a fews days ago, I was with my family and my service dog in training. We are in a city in New York, the cars were loud, the people were loud and they kept brushing against me and touching me. It was very crowded. My heart started beating faster and I got sweay, it was very hot outside. My family kept trying to talk to me but I was so stressed out I couldnt look at them, I couldnt even speak to them. I was getting ready to run away I could feel it. Thats normally what I do when that kind of thing happens. But my service dog in training started poking me with her nose to get my attion. She dragged my on her leash to follow my family. She also pushed me around so I didnt walk into things. I finally sat down and put her in my lap. After sitting with her I calmed down and I was able to talk again. Why couldnt I talk for that period of time? Has that ever happend to you guys?

Yes I sometimes lose my ability to speak. I think it is like the brain has shut down for a while and talking is too much effort.

Yeah that's not uncommon among autistic people if I'm not mistaken. I have a vivid memory of going completely mute once when I was eight. I was MUCH "more autistic" (whatever that actually means) when I was a kid. It's not usually that bad these days and most of the time I can get one or two words out no matter how overstimulated I am, but I know that if I were stressed enough I might go totally non-verbal again one day. It's not a good feeling.

There are loads of threads on here about people losing the ability to speak when stressed or otherwise overloaded. Definitely happens to me. Going by the threads here it doesn't seem to be unusual amongst folk with ASD. I'm not sure how common it is among those without ASD because I've never asked anyone ...

I hate it when that happens. It doesn't happen to me very often but it is extremely frustrating when it does.

Stress does it. Confrontation, definitely. Angry person -demanding- I speak? Not remotely possible.

It's not even not WANTING to speak or being afraid to or whatever other reason, I just can't get the white noise to form into words I can force out of my face in those times.

Sometimes happened, during high stress moment, especially social stress

When my wife's father died, I drove to her work to give her the news. I worked it out in my head how I was going to tell her. I was going to have her leave her desk and go into the other room so I could tell her there so she could have some privacy. When I got there, she totally knew something was wrong and demanded to know on the spot what was up. It took me a long time to cough up the words and I totally confused her. It became a guessing game and I totally messed it up. That was last February and she's still very upset about my poor notification.

Yeah, you were just too stressed out to get your brain working well enough to speak. I think it happens to just about everybody on the spectrum sometimes.

There has only been two times i got so stressed that i started having a hard time speaking. One time i was at work and had a conversation with someone. he kept asking me questions that i didn't really want to answer. I said i didn't want to talk about it and he would not stop asking me questions. After a while i was getting so stressed and angry, i just totally stopped responding to him. I was surprised when someone else asked me something that i had trouble getting the words out.

The other time i had to call my bank's customer service because they didn't cancle a transaction that i asked them to the day before so i wouldn't overdraw and get charged a fee. They did cancle it, but after they charged me an overdraft fee. I was very mad when i called them i was stuttering and finding it hard to find the words i wanted to use. Again it came as a surprise. I'm rarely THAT angry and stressed so i haven't had this issue often.

Last edited by jetbuilder on 28 Jul 2012, 8:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes I lose my ability to speak quite often and have been discussing it with my counsellor. I've been able to group it into 3 different kinds of situations: 1: because of high stress I become "blank minded" and am unable to formulate any kind of a structured thought and as a result am not really able to speak 2: I become too afraid to speak and despite knowing what I want to say an overwhelming fear makes me unable to express myself 3: I understand the gist of what I want to say and am not necessarily frightened but am unable to figure out how to say what I want to say
Maybe one or some or all of these apply to you.. or not.. but anyways I do lose my ability to speak quite often

Yes, I go mute from stress and overload somewhat frequently. Fortunately only once in the past couple of months, but it's happened to me all my life.

If I'm going through a severe panic attack, or I'm confronted by someone like a family member, it's the emotional equivalent to stabbing myself repeatedly to try to speak.

And it's always annoying when people don't seem to understand this. My sister never understands when I don't want to talk. No matter what, she always thinks I'm playing something just to get out of trouble or whatever she's angry at me about.

This.
It didn't help when things started breaking down between me and my stepmother.
My parents refused to believe I couldn't speak, and just kept getting angrier at my 'Game Playing', even misinterpreting some of my embarrassed and stressed grimaces as smirking.

My stepmother only speaks to me when she wants something now, it seems.

Sometimes I can't always be bothered to speak. Like when I'm in a room with some relatives and I'm happy doing my writing, and everybody's talking but people keep asking me pointless questions, it really gets on my nerves. By ''pointless questions'' I mean when people are talking, say, about winter coming, and then suddenly someone looks at me and says, ''do you want winter to come, Jo?'' when everybody knows full well that I DON'T want winter to come, I say that almost every day, but people still have to ask, which distracts me from my writing. Or sometimes when I'm enjoying a lovely dinner, then somebody asks, ''is that nice, Jo?'' ohh, that annoys me! Just let me eat my dinner in peace without asking stupid pointless questions what you already know what the answer is, if you want to talk to me then ask me something worth asking or talk about something interesting!