How Do Adult Aspie Meltdowns Feel? How to Manage Them?

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I think I've developed a fear/hatred of certain kinds of people (sociopaths, bullies). I definitely have a meltdown if I can't in some way set boundaries with someone who is offending me. What it feels like is this: dread, queasiness, even a feeling of tilting and disorientation. If the person, over days or weeks or whatever, will not leave me alone, I will have anxiety attacks, depression. Finally, I will blow up and have a fully unhinged rant raging outburst, unleashing tirades (e.g. by email) on the person and everyone responsible for him/her. This has happened twice. It has occurred to me that this is a long, drawn out version of a quick meltdown caused by some more immediate stimulus, except instead of taking a short time, it takes place over weeks/months. In the case of these long, drawn-out meltdowns, I wonder if it happens that way because of the PTSD & reliving the traumas while trying to problem-solve causing me to accumulate anxiety and psychic injury until they build slowly to meltdown level.

During my lifetime, I have learned how to pretend to be normal in many ways, but, frankly, it seems that my changes have not really improved my Asperger Syndrome, just changed the manifestation of the symptoms into less normal symptoms.

I'm trying to find information about adult Asperger meltdowns, but don't see much out there. I did find one blog that had this helpful list:

What makes an Adult Aspie in meltdown lash out at people?

-- Other adults being physical first
-- Other adults throwing objects first
-- Adults hurling abuse at the aspie in meltdown
-- Adults taunting or laughing at an aspie in meltdown
-- Adults refusing to leave the personal space of an aspie in meltdown

So the experience of having overwhelming emotions of distress that spin out of control is clearly exacerbated or prolonged by continued insults or violations of boundaries, which I would experience on a long, drawn out basis if the PTSD was causing me to relive the experiences.

Here is an extract from a book I found online through Google books (from Asperger Syndrome and Long-Term Relationships, pp 180-181 by Ashley Stanford):

"Meltdowns occur for many reasons, one being that the Aspie does not have hte complex communicative filter the rest of us do. An Aspie's brain can't filter out the irrelevant information from the relevant information, thus he is flooded with excessive input. As my Aspie children visualize it, "He blows a socket."

"Perhaps the way an adult Aspie acts out the meltdown process is influenced by incidents that happen in childhood. For example, if the child had kicking, screaming meltdown on the floor and a dog came along and licked him/attacked him, the child may have a permanent fear of having a meltdown on the floor. The child then self-adjusts to some sort of standing or running meltdown. Over the years, the person learns what works and what doesn't. Sometimes, the meltdown process is derailed and becomes especially difficult to identify in adult form..."

In "Asperger Syndrome And Difficult Moments" by Brenda Smith Myles, Jack Southwick, the authors spend a whole chapter on tantrums and meltdowns (in children), and describe, among other things, a "rumble stage" and "rage stage" and what to do and not do when an Aspie is going through these stages. For example, here are some entries from the table "Adult Behaviors That Can Escalate a Crisis" on page 33:

-- Raising voice or yelling
-- Making assumptions
-- Preaching
-- Insisting on having the last word
-- Attacking the student's character
-- Making unsubstantiated accusations
-- Having a double standard "Do what I say, not what I do"

I agree with these (and other entries on the list) when people act that way toward me when I am spiraling into a meltdown over some problem, I can guarantee that my meltdown will escalate.

I wish I understood better how to manage or defuse my meltdowns. What do others do? I wish I could find more info about adult Asperger meltdowns. Or how meltdowns evolve in some other individual Aspies as they develop in adult life. Ones that are difficult to recognize as "meltdowns"...

My meltdowns usually have a root cause in low blood sugar, and so they happen in the morning or right before dinner.

My most recent one was in the morning. My husband did something I thought was wrong, and I ended up screaming at him. This led to crying, and I just isolated myself until I stopped. I had to go into work 2 hours late to compose myself.

As an adult I have worked really hard over the last few years to control myself, and the only time I can't anymore is when I have low blood sugar. When I was a child it was also over simple things, but it occurred more often, at any time of day.

OMG, you're right about physical causes. I can get really bad when I have PMS and meltdown about 3 times a year just for that reason alone.

I don't know that diet has caused any meltdowns... but I get confused and more disorganized when I don't eat well. I am trying to work out an Asperger diet for myself in the past few months. I've noticed that when my diet is better, I become higher-functioning and can start doing more art and learning things better. If I eat a lot of junk food, I start getting really disoriented spatially.

Last time I had a meltdown, I was half an inch from striking an 55+ man who walks with a cane. This after he insulted and offended me quite thoroughly. Knowing that I have martial arts training, and that this man has had 2 strokes in the past, I did the only reasonable thing I could do: I exercised all of my self-control, turned around, locked myself in a toilet, and stared menacingly at the wall until the murderous haze weakened enough not to do something I might regret later on.

After that, I went down, called our boss, and sat down to have a talk (including a third guy who had pretty much wronged me the previous day, in a related incident). The elderly man dropped some comment about blood stoppers might be needed before we went into the office, a comment I chose to ignore, lest the haze returns...so anyway: two people who have wronged me, our boss and me sitting in the boss' office. The elderly man pulls some BS about me yelling when he was on the phone. the other guy pulls some other BS about me getting worked up over trivial matters (when "people telling me to do a lot more work than I'm instructed to do" was included under trivial matters, I'd like to know).

My boss decided that the (pretty rough) insults directed at me from the elderly man was "just those things you say when you're mad, no biggie" and chalked everything else that happened up to "my problems", thus making it all me and my aspiness' fault....yay!

Good thing I had Kung Fu that evening...

This all sounds like the stuff in that one book... "Asperger Syndrome and Difficult Moments". The book, as always, talks about Asperger child meltdowns as a problem the child has, but in its lists and text, it's pretty clear that the "don't do this or you will make it worse" stuff consists of bad, immature management. I.e. it says "don't get into a power struggle" with the child, etc. If you take a second look at the list of stuff it says you're not supposed to do when a child is having a meltdown, it's the kind of thing a petty, insecure or stupid teacher would do. Like attack and belittle the child, make insults, make up double standards so that the behavior that was directed at the Asperger child is okay but the Asperger's behavior is not, etc.

It sounds to me like the old man in your story is immature and in a slapfight with you, having to get in the last word and being petty and personal. And your manager is taking the easy road and excusing the other people's behavior because to do otherwise would force him to tell the "normal" guys that they're immature as*holes or petty jerks who are bickering with someone with social disabilities. I think I can see something maybe more charitable in your manager's words. Maybe he was saying (without actually saying it) that you have a social disability, so that is why you were in the dispute, but the other guys were acting out (acting the way people get when they get mad). So he was basically saying both sides were wrong in fighting, and then stating why each side was in the fight.

I think it's awesome how you were able to prevent yourself from escalating even though the old man continued on violating your boundaries and attacking you.

I had some Kung Fu once. Maybe some more mind-body training would help me get that meltdown cycle under control more.

I am 48 and am quite mellow. It takes a long time of injustice and frustration build-up to provoke a meltdown. It is the result of intense frustration and rage that no matter how long or how much or in how many ways I communicate a very obvious blatant glaring radically injust FACT, it is ignored. This takes years of effort and then finally it blows. I never knew what it was or what it was called until last week.

Now that I know, I will be able to never have one by refusing to make that much effort and by refusing to get upset. I will know that the person I am trying to help or convince has a blind spot and is a hopeless idiot about the subject matter and won't change no matter how much evidence is shoved into his/her face.

Knowledge is power, including the power of self-control.

Thank you so much for your post. That is so relevant to me. My last meltdown, which took months to build up, occurred in a situation where I simply couldn't enforce boundaries I attempted to set. No one wanted to believe that this woman was harassing me, to the point where she was never (to my knowledge) ever even told to leave me alone. I recognize now that when normal people ignore obvious facts of some injustice, it is because they are invested in a delusion about what they are doing. So professors were having sex with this woman, who was spreading it around for free in the department, and no one would touch the notion that she was a sadistic bully because they had a good thing going. For them to act on what I said, it would have pricked the bubble of their little fake social reality that they were getting something (sex) for nothing from a harmless sex addict. The sheer inability on my part to enforce personal boundaries against this bully and her disruptions of my academic environment, led to a build up over months to a pathological meltdown.

The ability to set a boundary or enforce your rights, when no one wants to hear or acknowledge the facts that you are stating, has to exist at some point.

I stopped working altogether for several months, but this morning prepared a note that I would like to add to a cover letter in applying for jobs. I would like to ensure that in the future I get into an environment in which I can set boundaries and enforce them if needed. It sounds kind of stupid to me, but I guess I'll work on this some more:

"Dear ... I have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. I will work best in a workplace where the rules are clear. It is important to my performance that I be able to set personal boundaries when needed, so an ethical and transparent management structure is important to me. The reason for this is that it is sometimes necessary that I get assistance enforcing personal boundaries, and do not want to be in an environment where I would cause resentment for going to a manager for help in enforcing a boundary with another individual in the workplace. Unfortunately, there are also some people with whom I cannot work even on a limited basis. For the foregoing reasons, my hire would be a disability hire, and I am willing to start out at an entry level or intern position in order to find the right fit... "

it feels like a tapir being trapped by amazons. the slow moving of the earth knows

My husband, who fortunately doesn't do any of those things that the books say not to do to a person in a meltdown, just told me he's intimidated by me when I get into a temper. But for a long time, he's told me they don't bother him because he understands that my tantrums are temporary and blow over. I guess I understand better now what they are.

Above all, when I'm in that mood I want the cause of my anger to be taken seriously. Absolutely nothing makes it escalate like me being mocked or belittled about it.

I've always been like this from childhood. If I became frustrated about something - often, about the fact that I was being treated unfairly in the first place - nothing was guaranteed to escalate me into screaming, crying rage like my mother saying 'Don't have a paddy'. My parents had real anger with real causes (this was especially clear if I was seen as the cause of their anger, you'd have thought the world was about to end); I just had 'paddies' caused by nothing at all except my immaturity. (This treatment lasted right into adulthood, too. And that baby word still enrages me.) Net result is that I still have buried rage about some things I was genuinely angry with back then but was never allowed an outlet for.

These days, my worst rages are, I find, not so much with people as with inanimate objects. Stupid, I know, but I get annoyed when I expect something to 'work' and it doesn't, and anger then builds up if other people don't realize how much this distresses me. I rarely blow my top with people unless they're being unusually nasty or ignorant.

One very, very annoying thing...it may be hormonal, but I find that as a woman I get more distressed at things pre-menstrually. It really does not help if you tell me my distress is 'just my time of the month'. It doesn't mean it's not real. I've had to train my husband very carefully in recognizing this, and if another male said it I wouldn't like to think how I might respond.

Not sure if these things count. Doesn't everyone do these?

I want to destroy my comp about 2-3 times/day. One day, it will have a terrible accident. Involving a sledgehammer. lol.

I am the only person I know that, when service at a restaurant is not coming along fast enough, will get up and leave. Not angrily, just walk. I'll be vaguely angry, just not display it, and won't go back there. I will also drive off from a fastfood drive through line if it is taking too long. Just did that two nights ago. It's supposed to be FAST food, not sit-in-my-car-for-15-minutes-while-the-obese-whale-person-in-front-of-me-orders-takeout-for-twenty. (/rant)

If people piss me off, they are done. I won't have anything to do with them subsequently. I will tolerate quite a bit, but if they step over a clear line, I am gone. This has happened several times in life. Whole social circles just vanished in an instant.

This is good. You are able to walk away before internalizing the problem, and maintain your balance. I have had real problems where I couldn't enforce the boundaries I tried to set, but then for special reasons, I couldn't walk away but had to stay in the situation. The two really bad meltdown problems I had were in situations where I had no exit strategy or way to walk away.

For someone who has limitations to my tolerance of bad conditions, it's good to always have an exit strategy.

Thank you for your comment!

I don't leave while waiting for my food but I will get very irritated, especially if I don't eat at a proper time. I was once waiting in a restaurant at 1pm for my lunch. I almost turned the table over, and not just my table but the people sitting next to me.

As for meltdowns if I feel one coming on I will leave before anyone notices, because usually tears are present at that time.

Tell me about it! When I was younger I used to cry when professionally frustrated. That was so embarrassing.

Now I am a monumental blast of righteous fury when frustrated. Esp. when angry. I think the difference is that I am more cynical.

Oh, you Ephemerella, you hit the nail so exactly in the crux of the matter!

Your realization of this fact of humanimal nature pinpoints an ongoing cause of perplexity and frustration for me. Thank you! Puzzle solved.

About your letter ... I think maybe we Aspies should not disclose our disability when applying for a job. Legally, we don't have to ever disclose, and can choose when and if we want to. My boss partner who has been in charge of hiring and firing for over 30 years says that such a letter would raise concerns and risk management red flags to administration. Most ppl do not even know what Aspergers is and may have a vague association with it to some lurid autism story they heard years ago in passing.

We might be better off researching and matching ourselves to a good job and putting our best foot forward during the application and interview. Get the offer, get the job. Then decide when it feels right to disclose.

Employers are lazy and first and foremost want us to do all the work for them. That means knowing ahead of time exactly what reasonable accommodation we will need, thinking of it from their perspective, and informing them of it in writing gently and succinctly, assuring them that this will guarantee they get wonderful service from us and will not be hard for them or exact a huge cost.

Also, phrases that make perfect sense to us may baffle them, like "personal boundary." That may need to be defined in simple language because otherwise they get alarmed and their imagination runs wild as to what all this could mean.

NTs are scared of difference and we have to baby step them through our reasonable accommodations.

Wow! Your advice is so professionally pragmatic and insightful. It's pretty valuable feedback, worthy of a consulting fee... Thanks!