I was cruising around online and I found that on one of those blogging sites, someone posted a journal entry about Asperger's Meltdowns. I thought it was pretty accurate and I want to know what y'all thought of it.
..........
........
.........
..........
....
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
WARNING: If you're not in a good mood, or in a good state of mind right now read no further, it's very descriptive.
.....
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
..
...
...
...
Breakdowns leading to breakthru's
You ever seen a kid who belonged in Special Ed? He'll be complacent, sitting in class, or he'll be asked to do some minor-piddly thing, and he will just go absolutely bat-shit, f*****g loco? With an almost berserker fury he'll start damaging whatever he can lay his hands on, even himself?
I worry that'll be me someday. I have Aspergers, and I know first hand why part of it's diagnose puts it in the Autism family. Autisic people are incapable of truly commuicating with the outside world, especially all the thoughts and feelings, the brilliant sonnets, the righteous battles, and erotic fantasy's that flit thru their head on a daily, nigh hourly, basis. We want to tell these things to people but we can't, and that causes a frustration which, when tacked onto the stress of everyday life,(maybe more stress, since it's every day life with a mental handicap) and since releasing these stressors mearly by telling others about them can't happen (the basic principle is to find someone who could understand what you're going thru and that's not going to happen) eventually everything builds up until the pot boils over.
let me give you a clear view, at least for me. Imagine that every bad thing that's happened to you has crawled it's way out of your sub-consious and decided to use your imagination as a springboard into making you physically react to something that's going on inside your head, the effect being that you curl up into a ball, and start sobbing like your getting the worst beating of your life, and in all likely hood, there's nobody within 10 feet of you.
Don't forget that this amorphous muck that defies description in your head is not just made of your sad memories either, everything thats made you frustrated, mad, angry, furious, raging was taken along for the ride, and while your curled up sobbing on the ground, everytime you open your eyes anything you see is something that you want to break/throw/and hurt. Not to mention the self-frustration, everytime you did something that made you say later "what was I thinking?" that accounts for the desire to break something by smashing your head on it. Then again, that could also be because while this meltdown is going on you've got a head-ache like your own personal jack-hammer inside your head.
now while all this is going on, you'd think if you finally say the things that your feeling, it'd be like exorcising a demon, and leave you cleansed. Well, in order for your brain to make enough power to have you pinned to the ground by your own goddamn imagination, it's got to take the power from your other mental faculties, especially your ability to express what your feeling/thinking vocally, nevermind the fact that it takes every effort in you body to form a somewhat coherent sentence. About the saying what you feel or think being hampered normally? Well you can forget it when your in a meltdown, it becomes even worse. Even if you can say something to whatever nearby soul in order to explain what's wrong with you, too much effort is put into meerly speaking so that you can't adequately express what your feeling, leading whoever's nearby to misunderstand and offer assisstance/platitudes that you really don't need or want at that moment.
You ever tell someone something to have them misunderstand you? That is a frustration that happens 3 times a day for me, and I'd be willing to bet even MORE often for people worse off than I am. (I've got a mild form of A.S.) Now imagine the frustration if someone misunderstood you when you were in the middle of this meltdown (which was in itself, caused in part by frustration at inability to communicate, you see how vicious the cycle is?) That about makes you wish you'd never opened your mouth in the first place. In fact, the only reason you had spoken was likely because whoever was "helping" you had probably said the words "I can't help you if you don't tell me whats wrong". I swear to all that's holy, it takes EVERYTHING I have to keep from launching myself like a polaris missle at anyone who says that when these things are happening to me, I f*****g HATE That pop-psycho babble BS.
this is where the irony comes in. All these Violent, nasty tendencies are a HELL of a lot stronger than the sorrowful self-loathing that's got you curled up on the floor. the reason why you NEVER act on these tendencies is because a knot forms in your chest, which is made up of the other largest symptom of your A.S: Social Anxiety. You want to know how bad Social Anxiety is in and A.S. suffer-er? Imagine your with friends at a strip joint, and for fun, one of your buddies pays a stripper who looks like the hottest thing you've ever seen to pull on stage and give you a rub-down/lapdance. Now imagine whatever negative emotions from the experience (embarrassment, fear, shame, etc) outweigh the positives by SUCH a large margin that you briefly consider socking the buddy across the mouth, but settle for losing his number and never speaking to him again.
That level of fear toward being embarrassed, causing a scene, and a few other choice emotions forms a barrier that you can feel like a knot in your chest that keeps you from acting on every violent impulse, saying every hurtful thing, and letting fly with every repressed thought that would have any friends and family brought to tears.
Those last few shreds of emotion that are keeping you in check by keeping you pinned by your imagination are the thoughts of violating your societal norms, "You'll go to jail for Assault, Destruction of property, (and if it's a really bad breakdown) Manslaughter. Don't do It!" "She/He's your Brother/Sister/Mother/Father/Relative-in-law, you don't want to hurt them!"
....
....
....
....I wish I could finish this up but in truth, I was in the grips of a low-level versions of one of those meltdowns right now, and using the excess mental energy that would have otherwise gone to locking me in with every horrible thought I've every had, to right out this analytical article has helped me quite a bit.
Ja ne' till next time.
20 Feb 2007, 3:30 pm
