Daughter's unusual physical strength

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My DD just diagnosed with autism and is throwing violent fits day in and day out.
She just turned 3 this summer. When she is having one of her horrible freak outs i am not able to physically restrain her. She often hurts me when i try to hold her down with all my weight she manages to lift me off the ground and break free.
Does anyone have similar experiences with their autistic children? How can a 3 year old child develop such physical strength?

hahaha yeah I noticed that.. I think it's just that when we go nuts we're willing to go further than other kids usually do for some reason... like no reservations whatsoever. Watch out she'll probably be a freaky climber and escape artist too.

Yes, and I call it "Hulk Smash".

I've literally fought off several young adults before with ease when I was being forced into doing something I didn't want to (autism related); throwing them around like pillows. I did the same with nurses when I was around 3 (just not with throwing them around; I couldn't be restrained, and sedatives did nothing).

i have always been told that i don't know my own strength.

I'm not sure about people on the spectrum in general but I know that I was strong in comparison to my peers (male and female) until I hit puberty, I never really thought about the two being linked. I never had meltdowns as a child to my recollection but I was sometimes able to lift my Mum right out of the water when we went swimming (at approx age five as part of play).

What happens during her meltdowns? Do you need to stop her doing stuff (throwing things or self harming)? About the meltdowns, do you know her emotional triggers? If you have an idea about what causes the meltdowns you can see how they can be avoided and talking to her whan she's calm may help you both understand the meltdowns causes and learn coping methods that are more socially acceptible.

I know when I'm stressed or agitated it's better for me to avoid people because I sometimes get more agitated, this is a coping method I use to calm myself. I give myself space to deal with the stresses cause. Although, I'm an adult so this method is not suitable for a child of age three, apart from her needing to be supervised, she won't be recognising the feelings leading to a meltdown to tell you just yet.

Why are you trying to hold her down with all your weight? There are ways to pin someone down on the ground but I'm trying to grasp why you think this is a good idea. Have you though of simply forming a human block just to keep her in one corner of the room until she calms down.

My brother used to be a nightmare for this when he was small. But he isn't autistic. He's calmed down since he hit puberty.

Stop giving them Petits Filous.

I don't know for sure, but it sounds to me like holding her down probably isn't the right way to deal with her in particular. Sure, holding works for some of us to calm down, but for others it makes the situation so much worse. Maybe she is just very angry to not be allowed any freedom to move while calming down, and is having an adrenaline rush to some extent?

My son used to be okay with me holding him-he would fight it for a little bit, then cave and cling to me basically. Now there is no way someone could hold him down, and as far as I'm concerned, there is no reason to do so either... it is less stressful for me and him both if I just remove him from the situation that is bothering him and sit him down by something he enjoys, or if I just remove things he could injure himself with or somebody else. Lately, I just send him into his room, let him scream as long as he feels like he needs to, and then he is able to come out whenever he feels like he can behave (if he is being violent or something), or whenever he calms down and feels like he can handle being around us again.

Parallel talk helps a lot to remind him what he needs to do in order to get out of his room, or off of the couch, etc. Wherever he is at the moment for whatever reason, I just intermittently say things while out of the room, as if I'm talking to myself, just loud enough for him to hear it. "When Zack calms down, we can all sit down and watch a movie together", "when he calms down, he can come out of the room", "Zack needs to remember his breathing exercises so that he can calm down"... just things like that help him a lot. Especially if I refer to things as what HE needs to do, rather than what I want him to do... because he rarely will do something I want him to when he is upset, lol... but he will do a lot if someone is telling him what he needs to do for himself... it sounds more like he's getting a benefit out of it. But if I just say "I want you to stop right now"... it could take HOURS for him to calm down, because he doesn't care what I want-he needs to resolve what is bothering him and figure out how to cope with it.

That works really well with my NT daughter, as well... started it with her when she was 3.

If I remember correctly from when I was a little one, her strength may simply be the same sort of strength you have when you are absolutely terrified or out of your mind with anger... maybe you have never felt like that; many people never do; but basically, when you are in that sort of emotional state, your body will simply surpass all the usual limits which are there to prevent you from injuring yourself--at full power, your muscles can literally tear their own tendons. Your body usually won't let you access that strength, because of the injury potential; but when you get desperate enough, it makes sense to tap into it, because if you're that desperate, it must be a matter of survival.

Meltdowns--not just temper tantrums (we have those too--the usual manipulative sort--and as most parents would, you probably ignore those)--can sometimes make you feel desperate enough to trigger that kind of adrenaline rush. One thing that reliably escalated normal upset and overload into a full-out meltdown for me was being held down, or restrained (someone trying to hug or hold me still) while upset. That tended to trigger the fight-or-flight reflex. The last time I had a meltdown so bad that I didn't remember it afterwards was when I was about eleven years old. I remember banging my head, but I don't remember much else. I was always sore afterwards, and had bruises on me, some of them hand-shaped and some of them from knocking myself against walls and floors. It was triggered when I was having a normal sort of meltdown, because my schedule had been changed, and my stepfather roughly grabbed my arm and tried to make me stay still. I panicked, and the rest I don't remember. Actually losing some of the memory of it hasn't happened since then, though I've had normal meltdowns.

I was never violent when I was that panicked, at least not that I remember. What happened, for the most part, was me wanting to get away and get away NOW--like some kind of trapped animal. And my parents, especially my mom's various husbands, thought that the best response to this was to hold me down and occasionally hit me, because I was "being a brat". (I grew up undiagnosed because I had speech on time, and my mom didn't want me "labeled".)

There are other things that can create this sort of desperation. Unacceptable sensory input is one of them (the sort that feels like torture, not just the sort that is extremely irritating); so is some sudden and unexpected change in what you were expecting (if it's to the point that things are completely unrecognizable--for example, taking a trip with an aunt you haven't met to stay at a house you don't know when your mom goes to the hospital). In general, you have to have a stress level that's already high, or else you'll just get a normal meltdown/shutdown, with the usual loss of control of emotions, curling up on the floor to cry, or sitting and staring without the ability to really interact with the world. To lose control totally, generally you already have to be in meltdown, and then somebody does the worst thing possible to make things so unbearable that your brain goes, "This is a deadly threat. Pull out all the stops."

The younger you are, the less that takes. The older you get, the more you learn. As I said, it hasn't happened to me since I was eleven. Even people who still have them as adults tend to have them more infrequently as they get more mature. I think your little one's still learning this kind of self-regulation; the better she learns how to judge when she's getting overloaded, and the more you can help her, the sooner she'll learn... Personally, I think holding her down is the worst possible thing you could do. If it were me, I'd grab a pillow and put it between her and whatever hard objects she happened to be heading for, wait it out, and try to figure out what's been driving her nuts when things calm down a bit. One thing my parents didn't get--If you're going to randomly change something in a person's life, it's only fair to warn her first. Don't just say, five minutes before the fact, "Oh, by the way, I just turned your life upside down."