"What Are Autistic Shutdowns?"

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Hope this is the correct forum for this...great description:

She for the most part is describing me during shutdowns.

Here's the way I explain shutdowns and meltdowns:

In everyone's brain there is something functionally equivalent to the mixing desk at a recording studio:

Except that instead of it controlling how the sounds from a bunch of instruments and microphones get recorded, it instead moderates the levels of all the signals coming into the brain from all the various senses, so that the brain can focus on the ones it needs to pay attention to, with sections on the desk for things like sight (instead of the lead guitar), sound (instead of the bass), taste (the drums), touch (the lead singer) and smell (the rhythm guitar), but each of those been broken down into smaller parts, like instead of the EQ covering low to high frequencies, one slider might be for abrupt sounds like a dog barking, or complex things like crowds speaking.

In an NT all the nobs will work properly, so senses can be tuned out, allowing the brain to get the best inputs, but in an autistic person some of them might be broken off, or instead of going from 1>10, some might go from 5>15, 10>20, or -5>5, or worse. Which of those nobs don't work will vary between autistics, so they're never going to have the same sensory issues.

Now say you're the kind of autistic person who can't handle certain types of sensory input. It's like the nob to turn down the high frequencies on one instrument is broken off. Now you have this going right through to the recording, maybe even so loud that it causes feedback to come out of the speakers, that's where the signal coming into the recording desk is too big, and ends up going right through it, back into a microphone, and around and around while it keeps getting bigger and bigger, and you end up with a nasty wailing sound. The only way to stop this may be to turn down the volume on a whole section of a mixing desk, how big a section depending on which of the big control nobs are working fully too (that's like a shutdown). If too many nobs are broken on the section you're trying to turn down, then you just have to run around trying to unplug the guitars or the microphones to try and shut it up, which is just like how in a meltdown a person is desparately trying to get control of what's coming into their senses, and how it's going around in their head getting more and more intense.

@polarity: great analogy! Thanks!