Preventing Self-Injury During Meltdowns

Post Reply New Topic

Hey guys. Today was a bad day at work. I'm a social worker (big change from my last job at Wal Mart!) and was faced with a novel and highly stressful situation involving one of my clients. Afterwards, I had a meltdown in a parking lot while waiting for my partner to run a personal errand. I was hitting and biting myself, and smacked my head repeatedly into a metal pole. A train horn nearby was what triggered it, crushing the last of my self-control, and the head-banging helped redirect the pain from my ears and my core, which are electrified painfully in the presence of loud noise, especially when I'm already overwhelmed.

The thing is, I hate the self-harming. It helps in the moment, but afterwards it just hurts, and the bruises make me feel ashamed and disgusted with myself for my juvenile behaviour. I was lucky that my partner didn't see any of this (though she would have understood as she knows my diagnosis and actually understands autism, being a social worker), but I was spotted by someone working in the building nearby, who came out to ask if I was okay just as the two of us were leaving. She said I looked very upset, which was an accurate assessment given that after the head-banging I curled into a tiny ball on the sidewalk and held my ears until the train whistle stopped. I've never had a meltdown in public before, and was humiliated that a stranger should have seen me behaving like that. After we got back to the office, my partner had to call her friend who worked in that building (the person she was running her errand with) and ask her to reassure the woman that I was fine, and that what she saw was disability-related so she didn't wind up calling the cops or child protective services or something (I look about fourteen, and people invariably assume I'm a child.)

The point of this long-winded post is to ask you all what you do to curb your self-injurious tendencies, especially in the middle of a meltdown. I still have a headache, and there's a sore lump on my forehead that's probably going to bruise in the next day or so. I just need to know what to do to make this stop