Forgetting how to talk when very emotional?

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Does anyone else do this? Or know why?

If I get really emotional, like extremely upset, frightened, startled, or angry, I forget how to talk. I'm not completely shut down, I just can't remember any words for anything or speak. I can only think in pictures or feelings. I sometimes wind up doing some sort of frantic charade, gesturing wildly trying to get my point across, hoping i can find the words for what I want to say again. It's REALLY annoying and upsetting, and I often get so upset about it that I burst into tears. It's like a switch has turned off my language center and i'm waiting for it to boot back up again.

My therapist calls it "cognitive disruption", but so far everything I'm finding on that is really technical. What causes it? Any suggestions on what to do?

Thanks for bringing this up. This is the first time I've heard from someone else with this issue. When I'm confronted with someone or something that puts me in a lot of fear or strong emotion I can lose the ability to talk or to understand what people are saying. That can be a really, really terrifying place to be. Even at 58 years old. I still remember like it was 30 seconds ago how it was before I could talk as a child - I would get totally scared to death - I hope parents of ASD kids today can understand that panic in their little ones... Sometimes when I can't understand speech and only hear the sounds it can be mildly interesting - hearing your own language but not understanding a word of it. I don't know if it's from my autism or the specific callosar problems I have that greatly limit communication between the hemispheres of my brain. It's like I'm all chatty with people and then something is said that pops me over into my non-verbal side and I don't have access to speech. Like my speech center is just not there - not connected to anything! Words are just not going to come out. At those times I'm more operating from my right hemisphere and the feelings are intense and I can communicate non-verbally, like with my hands or signing or facial expression. If I'm not too freaked out, I can usually pop myself back in certain ways - like counting coins, or talking engineering, or writing with my right hand. But if I'm at work in a meeting, or talking to a doctor or person in authority, etc., it can get scary when I don't understand them and they're asking me something, waiting on my response and all I can do is look confused or sheepish. In my case when I have those large feeling reactions that can affect me, I first lose my working memory and can't remember what is being discussed, and if I really try to force myself to talk I stutter so bad I can barely get out words and I get large motor tics. When it's over I go through about 5-10 seconds of transient cognitive impairment, where about all I can do is stare. My corpus callosum is largely non-functional based on functional MRIs and seems to produce discharges into my left hemisphere at times interfering with my speech and working memory and attention/focus. I'd love to get that functionally tested because it affects me a lot. But autism in general is characterized by atypical neural connectivity and many with ASD have alexithymia - impaired ability to put together speech with physical or emotional feelings. So this might be a more general problem for autistics. Thanks again for posting about this, learning how others deal with it could be helpful I never talk about this with NTs - it's a scary, sensitive point for me. It's a point of great vulnerability and when it happens I can no longer pass for being neurotypical. And I was bullied - "What, little baby, cat got your tongue?" "What can't you talk, are you ret*d?" And the fear from that bullying, that it could happen again even as an adult, adds to the freak-out and can make the situation worse.

I've read quite a few posts by people who describe trouble talking when upset. Try to be patient with yourself, stressing about trouble talking when upset only makes it worse. I have found being quiet even briefly helps.

I guess I do something similar to this, but only when I'm anxious, so it mainly manifests when I'm talking to people I don't know. I generally end up ignoring them because I have no idea what to say or do. I'm just realizing how bad of an issue this is for me, so I'm trying to force myself to just say something.

This happens to me too. When I get quite upset or angry, I find it very hard to speak coherently. I tend to stutter and not be able to figure out what words I want to use.

Yes, and also if I'm very sleep deprived. It's like my mental dictionary disappears so I have the thoughts but not the words that go along with them.

It's not that I forget how to talk when I'm very emotional, I just prefer not to talk when I'm very emotional because I am afraid that talking will make me more vulnerable to crying or going into a meltdown.

When I get upset I often get non-verbal. I just figured it was part-and-parcel of being autistic. Kind of an autistic shut-down thing.

This happens to me, but usually if I'm surprised (like seeing somebody I'm acquainted with walking down the street); people always take it the wrong way. Trying to form words out of pictures and tie it up with my body language is hell. I've resorted to sort of making a sort of articulated hunch when I go past them and grinning in a silly way. They seem to think it's funny so it works for me:]

I get something like that too.

I read somewhere (I can't find it now, which bothers me) that broke down AS kind of like this: The back of the brain in NT people processes emotion and serves that processed emotion up the the conscious part of the brain for it to deal with. In an AS brain, the back of the brain does a shoddy job of that and the leftover processing that the back of the brain does is picked up by the language center.

It clicked with me pretty well, because that means that in part, AS people (me) learn/deal with emotion like a second language, but it's never your first language. If it comes too fast the language center gets overwhelmed and doesn't have time for languagey things. My voice goes flat, I stop being able to string together complex sentences, I stop being able to process anything but the basic meaning of the words said to me, and on and on as my ability to handle communication just grinds to a stop. Soon it gets to where I could speak, I know I know how, but I just don't bother, that's just a mess and I would rather not.

Then after my brain has gotten done chewing on whatever is bothering it at the moment something dings, and like toast popping out of the toaster everything works again, and somehow I understand something that my therapist wonders how I figured it out, and I never really know. It's like having the little computer busy spinning whirlygig that macs use in your head.

So there's my theory.