Sometimes, the only way you feel you can calm yourself down so I doesn’t last for hours is to hurt yourself because pain feels like a release of those extreme emotions.” - Kathryn B.ġ2. “In my head it sounds like a hundred voices all taking at once and wanting to scream.” - Richard T.ġ3. “It feels like I can’t handle things anymore, and I can’t stop my reaction to it all. Advertisementġ1. “It’s very intense and a build-up of extreme emotions all coming out at once. When I tell my friends, they think I’m weird because I just don’t want to be with anyone.” - Kasper M. I need time and quiet space to come around, away from people, where I can engage in a favorite repetitive activity such as artwork/fiber arts which I find very calming and which helps me move past how I’m feeling to think clearly and function normally again.” - Kath S.ġ0.“I feel like I just want to be alone, and usually that’s what i do! I isolate myself either in my room or I go to the forest just to walk. It can be a total shut down where I can’t speak to verbalize what I’m thinking, which can be several things at once. It leaves me completely washed/burnt out from head to toe, inside and out, unable to talk or sometimes even move. I’ll often break down crying or in anger or both - leaving people around me offended and/or confused. And all the while I feel like I’m watching myself in third person, and that tiny part of my brain that is still capable of rational thought keeps thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? Calm down, control it!’ But I can’t control it.” - Tiffany D.ĩ. “For me personally, it’s like a huge, overwhelming tidal wave of emotion and sensory awareness, building up and up, before crashing down horribly. I want to scream, and sometimes I do, just wordless screaming. I lose my ability to think or process, and can only feel. AdvertisementĨ. “Scary, like an out-of-body episode. If I am scared rather than angry I will lose the ability to speak and engage with the world and will feel the need to hide in a space for hours. Sometimes I have uncontrollable urges to throw things and make a psychical expression, but this decreases my ability to articulate the problem. Only then can it have the space to breathe to start to calm down eventually.” - Laura S.Ħ. “It feels like all the pressure that has built up in me (like a fizzy drink) explodes, and you can’t stop, and you lose control until all the pressure is out, and then you sleep to regain strength.” - Lauren H.ħ. “I lose complete control of my ability to regulate my emotions - the ‘filter’ has gone, and I lose the ability to stop obsessing over whatever is upsetting me. My primal base and flight-or-fight is on high gear, so I end up instinctively isolating myself to get anyway from any other living energy form. There’s a small section of me in the back that recognizes what’s going on and wants to stop it, but it can’t override the system. The blood in my head pounds, and everything in it magnifies more than it seems it can hold or handle.

It makes me feel like someone or something flipped a switch in my brain and took over my body, abolishing any rational thoughts, reactions, and communication. Advertisementĥ. “Uncontrollable, almost like Jekyll and Hyde. Your entire being is twisted by an outside force, and when people say ‘it’s just a noise,” “just an argument,” they show they truly do not understand. Painful, like razor blades, not over your skin, but over your soul.

Just because it shapes who I am doesn’t mean I have to let other people decide how it will. If i dwell on those too long, it becomes too intense, and I have another meltdown. My memories of meltdowns are usually erased by morning, and I can only remember vague feelings. I wake up with bruises and cuts and scrapes from grabbing onto anything, everything that may pull me back to earth.

My chest is hooked up to a vacuum, pulling through my chest. Either way I end up looking like some sort of ‘attention seeker.’” - Chi C.Ĥ. “It’s like I’m spinning out of control - no ground, no air, no sky, just me and fear and rage and desperation. Others would have forgotten what happened or wouldn’t care. By the time I come to the conclusion, it’s too late. Once the meltdown is ‘over,’ I can’t explain to others why it happened because it isn’t until later at night (or later than that) when I realize it was a meltdown.

Nonverbal autism meltdown