Rachel is a Jewish bisexual autistic woman (she/her) with ADHD in her twenties. She loves writing and can always be found with her nose in a book! Her plan for the future is to earn her Psy. D. in clinical psychology. This interested in psychology started as a way to help her understand people better and to figure out what it was about others I kept not getting. It is also something deeply linked with her self-advocacy. There is a gap in communication between the autistic community and providers, and she want to help bridge it and challenge others to see things from different perspectives.
View all postsThe Meltdown Blues
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At the time I’m writing this blog post, I had a meltdown not long ago. It was a short but intense one, frighteningly so. It happened in front of my dad.
The argument that led up to it was alarmingly mundane. I don’t think it was a single thing that brought it on. It was little things piling up, mingling with the background radiation of stress in my life.
I’m still not sure why it was that exact moment versus any other. I haven’t had a true meltdown in quite a while. And one outside the privacy of my own home? It’s been years. I’ve had moments where I’ve teetered on the edge, definitely where I’ve at least wept in public, but I’ve always held the worst of it in.
I do wonder if there was a conscious choice on my part, that I freaked out then and not so many other times. That I did it in front of my dad and not anyone else. Maybe I feel on some level that my dad is a safe person to have a meltdown around. I don’t think that idea would give him much comfort, unfortunately.
I started screaming in the car. The screaming wasn’t something I chose, I know that much. The emotions just welled up in me, and I couldn’t contain them. That scream was like a valve relieving pressure. In that moment it felt like I had no choice, I needed to let that rush of sound out. I was just so upset it couldn’t be contained in my body any longer.
My dad got upset too. I can’t really blame him, to have me start screaming in the car couldn’t be anything but upsetting. I realized later that he felt as if I was screaming at him, but it wasn’t like that for me. I was just screaming without a direction or target.
He freaked out a bit himself, demanded I stop screaming. I had to bite myself to stop at first, to give the emotions pouring out of me a different outlet. His anger at me only made me more upset, yet I also knew I needed to calm down. My thoughts were caught in a spiral, so I had to focus on my body, and even the pain as I bit myself. Grounding yourself is an important strategy to curb meltdowns, though of course pain is not a healthy thing to ground yourself with. Still, I’m sure I’m not the only person on the spectrum who has been down that road. Sometimes what we have to do in the moment is imperfect.
My dad was angry about the screaming, but he was also upset about me biting myself. Once I was calm enough to be coherent, I snapped at him that it was what I had to do and that there was no perfect solution. When it got that bad it was no longer as simple as just stopping the meltdown at will. I could tell he was troubled. It had been a long time since he’d seen me like that. He had seen me close a couple of times recently, it’s been a stressful start to 2025, but not at the point of full meltdown.
The fact he was so upset about my meltdown also upset me. Logically I understand how distressing it was for him, but I was coming down from those intense emotions and all I knew was that I hadn’t wanted it either. That it hadn’t been any more fun on my end.
I feel like he’s never understood the control it takes to stop these meltdowns, and that sometimes I can’t stop them with all the willpower in the world. It doesn’t matter if a meltdown will only make a situation worse; when those feelings rise within me, it’s almost like I have no choice. Even if I stop a meltdown once, that doesn’t mean I can stop it every time. In some ways, maybe even a stopped meltdown is only deferred. The emotions will well up again, eventually.
What made things worse was how difficult it was to reconcile our argument when it felt like he became fixated on my meltdown. He kept telling me how dangerous it was for me to have done that in the car while he was driving. He couldn’t understand why it had happened either, and I was in no mental or emotional shape to explain it properly. We just went home, both of us still silently frustrated with the other. Our feelings unsatisfied and unresolved.
Even though the meltdown had been brief, and quickly over, the physical aftereffects of it lingered. I felt tired, like you do after a big cry. A lethargic exhaustion that’s hard to fully shake for quite some time afterwards. The worst of it all was that even that brief episode of intense screaming had really messed with my throat. It felt scratchy the rest of the day, almost as if I was coming down with something.
Feeling awful physically didn’t help me out with processing the entire incident emotionally. I hated that it happened, I hate it whenever one of my meltdowns happen. I couldn’t answer the question properly of why it occurred, not in any way I knew would be to my dad’s satisfaction. And as angry as I was at him, part of me was also disappointed in myself. Why a meltdown then and not other times? The question led me to write this blog post out in an attempt to make sense of my thoughts. Yet I don’t truly feel closer to understanding it.
When you’re on the spectrum, the threat of a meltdown is like this lurking thing. Somehow both within your control and not. You’re a perpetrator and a victim of your own tantrums. Sometimes a meltdown trigger is predictable, and it can be avoided. But there are times, despite your best efforts, that the tidal wave of emotions creeps up on you. You can feel it when it does; there’s a sense of something rising to choke you, a realization that it’s all become too much at once. I’ve been out in public all on my own, terrified at the realization that I’m teetering on the edge of a meltdown. I feel a hopeless panic as I attempt to swallow it back down, knowing that I can’t fall apart when I have no one around to help me.
There are a lot of ways to try to head off a meltdown: breathing exercises, grounding, meditation, the right stim, etc. Yet I’ve never found a method that’s foolproof. There’s always that risk that this time it will all be too much to hold in. This time it will all come bursting out.
Some things you have no choice but to live with, and to manage. That’s not the most uplifting note to end on, but as I sit here writing this post it’s the only conclusion, I can find myself coming to. Meltdowns are just like that. If you’re on the spectrum, you have to live with them.
That doesn’t mean we have no responsibility for when we lose control. It doesn’t mean there should be no consequences for what we say or do in a meltdown. But sometimes I think it would be nice to see some more compassion. Meltdowns aren’t pleasant to witness, to be on the receiving end of, but it’s also absolutely awful to be the one melting down.