Was it a shutdown or a meltdown?

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Some years ago I had to stay in a hospital for 2 weeks because my daughter was ill. We had no private rooms. I knew it would be like going to war for me because I had a severe trauma of hospitals. I put myself together and joined wathever I needed inside and there I was.

I had to share a room with all kinds of people, I could not sleep, I would cry the whole night in the bathroom and put a happy face and a calm forced behaviour because of my daughter every day.

Day 13th, late at night, I went out to pick a cup of tea and I suddenly did not move anymore. I sat down where I was, in the middle of the corridor, I did not want to but I cried and I don´t know what movements I dit but I was in this position of squeezing myself against a wall. There was a woman nearby and she held me by my arm and brought me to a room. She was the child psychologist of that section. The next days she would kindly offer me some 15 minutes of her time and would help me relax a bit.

I did and still do work those traumatic experiences to heal but if I remember well, there were many occasions where I felt more or less that way in the past (living with a very problematic father). Each occasion was something unique in a sense.

Leaving the hospital, I was still feeling very distressed and I discovered that something very bad happened at home during my absence. I´ve lost my mind and became aggressive for some minutes, than I felt terrible, I fell apart in tears and I felt miserable because I had lost control of myself.

These things don´t happend often at all, but I thought they were normal. Now I understand that they could be a shutdown or a meltdown, but I am still confused to understand for myself how which one manifests.

In a daily basis, if I feel very distressed I will do my best to tell people that I need space and calm if they don´t give me this, I may give an unpolite answer trying to push them away because I do need to be left alone to recharge but I don´t get to an extreme point (above examples). I think if other people are not giving us the space and quietness that we need they have a big problem with boundaries.

Was it a meltdown in the hospital? Was it a shutdown when I was back home? Or were both meltdowns?

One might use the illustration of an electrical circuit breaker. If too much electrical energy is drawn from a circuit, an element in the circuit breakers heats up. At a certain point the breaker is so hot that it disconnects itself from the circuit so that damaging amounts of energy are not allowed into the system.

In a similar way those of us with Aspergers can react to protect ourselves. When the emotional component is frustration or anger, a meltdown is usually observed. If the emotional component is fear, grief, or anxiety, a shutdown may be observed.