My blog post on not being able to talk at times

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http://paulacdurbinwestbyautisticblog.b ... video.html

I am not a completely nonspeaking Autistic, of course. Many people have seen me speak and some do not even know that I lose speech at times. My loss of speech is temporary, and can last a few seconds to a few hours or the good part of a day. Sometimes it really is the good part of the day, as I often find talking to be exhausting and it's nice to not have to do it, even if it is because I temporarily can't do it.

The following short video clip is part of what is going to be a longer video.

Landon Bryce covers this at ThAutcast: http://thautcast.com/drupal5/content/trying-talk

I understand that!! I always thought that maybe nonverbal Autistic people felt all the time like I feel when I can't talk. That must be hard for them. I bet Neurotypicals cannot begin to fathom how nonverbal Autistic people feel, since they apparently do not even understand how I feel even when I can talk. Sometimes it feels better not to have to talk, like when I'm not under pressure to talk, but sometimes it's very frustruating when I can't and people need me to. That's why my mom taught me to nod for "yes" and shake my head for "no"--to give me a way to communicate basic information when I say it with words.

Very good, really interesting to watch. I'm only just on the spectrum myself (BAP) so I didn't think I would find your experience the easiest thing to relate to, but your description of how it feels is just perfect and gives me a far better idea!

With the help of your description and video I can say that I have actually experienced something a bit like this on rare occasions myself, however for me it's a problem with saying certain specific things under pressure. E.g. if I need to tell my partner bad news. When this happens, I'm willing the words to come out, but I just can't remember how to make my throat or voice work. But then if I give up and just say something else instead (e.g. "oh nothing" or "it doesn't matter"), that works fine. So my experience isn't very comparable, which meant I'd always assumed what happens to me must be fundamentally different to autistic mutism. It seems it's maybe not so very dissimilar after all, just with a very different set of triggers.

I remember being a non-verbal child, and I remember that I did not form thoughts into words in my head. I did not know how to do that until I was taught how to do it eggsplicitly and practiced a lot lot lot for a year or so. The rate at which I learned to speak once I was taught explicitly was verry merry berry fast. I did not learn to speak through normal speech therapy like Temple Grandin had. I don't know if that would have worked for me.

For me, being a non-verbal child was not eggsacly the same as losing speech temporarily as an adult who speaks. It is kind of similar to the problem that some autistic adults have with their minds going blank and not being able to come up with words to say, except that the adult might be searching for words, but the child is happily oblivious to there being words in her head to search for. The adult may display halting struggling speech, but the child will not speak at all. It is a lot easier for an adult who does speak most of the time to find the words during this kind of speech shutdown than for a non-verbal child or adult to find any words at all. It is true that the speaking adult tends to rely on scripts when this speech shutdown occurs.

The other kind of speech shutdown that speaking adults have is when they have problems saying the words in their heads with their mouths. In my eggsperience, that is part of a general shutdown, when it becomes a struggle to do anything, like move from this area of my room to that area. The same thing happens with speaking. In chemistry terms, I would say that the activation energy of speaking becomes eggseedingly high, and speech does not occur at a perceptible rate.

I preferred being a non-verbal child to having a speaking adult speech shutdown. There were no demands on me to speak as a child.

Part of the time when I lose speech, I can still type so have words but can't say them. Some times I have no words because I am thinking in images. Some times I stutter (which I finally managed to make a video of, but I am not posting it yet), and that seems partly to be motor skills loss, partly being tired or overloaded, and not at all about anxiety. Anxiety will make me not talk at all rather than stutter. When I was very little, like fewer than 2 years old, I used to make up words in my mind that were not real words. My mother says I started babbling at an early age but no one could tell what I was saying. But I also developed regular speech at the appropriate time, I think. I think what you wrote is very interesting. I like it when I don't have any words in my mind and am not required to speak. But, too often, I don't get that luxury.

I've only had this happen to me once; it was after a particularly stressful day at work (the demon family children were having a birthday party) where I running back and forth all day between the bar serving drinks to the moms, taking orders for their food, and then keeping the kids out of trouble since the moms were busy drinking. I came home, immediately wedged my head between the cushion and the side of the sofa, and took a twenty-minute nap. Even after I woke up it was like I had overloaded my social circuit from overusing it all day, and something just burnt out. I had to talk to my mom, who was in the same room, over Gmail. She would say something, and I would think my reply, but I just couldn't say anything. It was a struggle just to convey that I couldn't.