Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Given the current state of the world, I have had a few more meltdowns than usual over the past month and a half or so. And this has just reminded me of how very much meltdowns suck. So let's talk about them.
[00:00:19] Hey, we're promoting safety and empowerment over here.
[00:00:24] My apologies to all New Yorkers and fans of Midnight Cowboy.
[00:00:29] Hello and welcome to the Trauma Informed slp. I am Kim Neely, a licensed speech language pathologist in the United States, also late diagnosed neurodivergent and queer. And I've had a lifelong hyper fixation with how people work. Like a lot of neurodivergents out there, I've been like, how do people, why do their brains work the way they work and how do they think? And Trauma Informed care has really given me a lot of insight into not just how humans behave, but also why they behave the way they behave. And it's really helped me develop a little more compassion and understanding. And so here on this channel, I use that paradigm and also my own experiences as late diagnosed neurodivergent to promote some kind of essentially understanding compassion, you know, healing through all this, all this pain that comes at us just from existing in this world. That's, that's what we're doing here. So welcome. And on this episode today, I want to talk a little bit about meltdowns.
[00:01:28] So I guess trigger warning, I'm gonna try not to go too far into, into all of how I feel with them and such, but I will be talking a little bit about my own version of self harm that happens while I'm in a meltdown. So little content warning for you guys out there. I will be putting chapters hopefully on this so you can skip over like the my experiences section. But what I want to do is so as a speech thing, speech language pathologist, I've worked with a lot of autistic kids, ADHD kids, neurodivergent kids in general who have meltdowns for sure. And we definitely play a role in helping with those meltdowns, helping to calm them, helping to kind of request their needs and like tell people what's happening. But I've also noticed if you don't have meltdowns, I've noticed with my fellow colleagues and other like adult friends of mine, they don't necessarily understand what it feels like to have one per se. And I've also noticed with a lot of adult advocates out there, I don't think people have been really talking a whole lot about how it feels. Some of them have, but not all. And so I wanted to share a little bit of how I feel when I have a meltdown, what it actually feels like to me, but also how this has helped me kind of conceptualize what I'm seeing when I see students or clients having meltdowns. It gives me that first person point of view to like try to help. You know, the main intention with this is not to treat or diagnose by any means. The main intention for this is education around meltdowns and how exhausting they are and how distracting they are, how disabling they are and how much they just plain suck.
[00:03:09] So let's get into it.
[00:03:12] So today what we're going to do is we're going to start by talking about some definitions like meltdowns versus panic attacks versus like what seizures are and also autistic shutdown, because people talk about that. So I'll talk about that a little bit too. Then the second part is I'm going to be talking about my experiences with them, but also I'm going going to do it under the umbrella of talking about how I think of meltdowns in stages.
[00:03:36] So I have my own personal little hypothesis that meltdowns happen in stages. There's a stage to like ramping up to the meltdown, having the meltdown and then coming down from the meltdown. So I'm going to talk about it in those stages and using my first person experience to explain those stages for folks. And then I'm going to end this with some considerations for caregivers of people who have meltdowns, but also maybe a few things to help out with like mental health practitioners if you have CL clients who have meltdowns or, or panic attacks. Some considerations there as well.
[00:04:10] So I've had panic attacks prior to getting my anxiety treated. I've had a lot of panic attacks. When I was a little kid, I would call them big cries. I didn't realize what they were were panic attacks slash meltdowns. So I want to talk a little bit about definitions here because it gets really murky and muddy. To be honest, I don't have a really great definition of the difference. I have looked into research literature and I don't see anyone really distinguishing the.
[00:04:35] And I have a knowledge of the physiology behind a panic attack. And I think physiologically speaking, at least from my own experiences, they feel very similar.
[00:04:46] The only thing I've seen out there are on like, usually often blog post on mental health pages like practitioner clinician websites, essentially where they talk about them as different things. And from What I've gathered the main difference seems to be panic attacks. It tends to be the like trigger for them, not so much what happens while you're in the middle of them. Physiologically they are pretty similar. But panic attacks seem to be considered things that are triggered by worry or fear of the future. Right? So it's that like something bad is about to happen.
[00:05:19] I can't stop something bad from happening. I'm unsafe all the time. Or I really messed up. So something bad's going to happen. Like it's that feeling unsafe. There's some sort of future threat or some sort of fear around something there. So it's when those thoughts start to spiral and get out of control. And then it kind of kicks your body into the really high fight, flight or freeze modes, the survival modes. That's a panic attack.
[00:05:42] Meltdowns are essentially where from what people tend to talk about is where your brain is getting overloaded with your environment or maybe something inside your body, like if you're feeling really uncomfortable, so you get this like sensory overload. People might say essentially where it's like the lights are too bright, the fluorescent lights for me, fluorescent lights give me a headache. Way too bright. Or there's a certain sound that's driving them crazy. Or maybe just all of the above. They're just in a really busy space with a lot of people and it's just chaotic and Right. And so this overwhelms their brain or at least maybe their attention systems and sort of middle brain. Maybe that's what's really getting overwhelmed. I don't know. But somewhere things get overwhelmed with all this incoming information. And then that sends your body into this extreme survival mode, this fight, flight, freeze, like extreme sympathetic response. Okay, so both of them end up in a really extreme sympathetic response. High adrenaline, you know, all those big stress hormones, the rush of everything, the high energy there. But then it seems like the triggers are different. So it sort of seems like panic attack trigger triggers are more top down, like conscious, like spiraling of fear there. And that meltdowns are really more from like bottom up. Kind of like incoming information is overloading your brain and it gets too panicky about it. Now I also want to talk a little bit about seizures because I make some parallels here to seizures. And the reason I make those parallels is because I've had some experience with epileptic epileptics in my family, people with epilepsy and have been around for some tonic clonic slash grand mal seizures. And so in explaining how I feel about meltdowns and the stages I go through. I do make some parallels to seizures because seizures have known, like, stages. They have, like, an onset. Some people have an aura stage where they can feel it coming on and then they have the seizure. And then they have this called postictal stage where they're coming. Their brain's kind of booting back up again, essentially, especially if they lost consciousness. And so seizures are not meltdowns or. Or panic attacks. Okay? Seizures are not about the survival modes taking over. Seizures are electrical storms. That's literally what they are. Your nervous system runs on electricity, right? Your nerves fire electricity through them to send messages. So think of a seizure as literally a thunderstorm. Somewhere in the nervous system that is a seizure. And if it's like the big tonic clonic slash grand mall, depending on what way you say them. The ones that usually get portrayed in, like, TV and movies and stuff, those really big ones where someone's lost consciousness completely and they're having this big, like there's. Their muscles are really tight and maybe doing really repetitive motions and stuff, that sort of thing.
[00:08:27] Those kind of seizures are essentially storms that kind of go throughout the brain. For the most part. They. But they usually start in one area and then it, like, spreads. So anyway, so that's what my main first person experience has been. Well, not first person, second person, I guess, secondary caregiver experience, we'll put it that way. My caregiver experience has been with those. Those type of seizures. But I've made some parallels to them because I've had to explain my meltdowns to people, people who have had those seizures. So it's like. It's been a helpful parallel for us to understand. So I thought maybe this would be a useful, slightly useful parallel. And I just wanted to find that just in case you were unaware that seizures are electrical storms. And then the other definition would be shutdown. I've seen some videos on this, and I think this is mostly adult autistic advocates talking about shutdowns. I don't see it a ton in literature and, like, research, but shutdowns to me sound a little like moments where you're getting so overwhelmed that you get really quiet and really still and, like, it's impossible to focus, particularly the quiet.
[00:09:36] Some people say they experience it when they're trying to recover from things. Like if you go from overstimulated to quiet, it's like you want to just literally be alone and, like, stare at a wall, basically. You don't want any. Any sensory input for a bit. You Just want to literally zone out.
[00:09:52] And that's like a shutdown, which valid. I've definitely had that to recover from, like, high sensory environments. But then shutdown can also be, I think, like, kind of. For me, it can be a precursor to a meltdown. For me, I don't know if that's true for everybody, but it can be that feeling of overwhelmed where it's hard for me to focus. And, like, say, if I'm in a busy space or in a new place, I'll just look down at the floor. I won't try. I'll be trying to, like, focus on single things in front of me and get kind of a tunnel vision and, like, just staying really quiet and just trying to kind of push my way through the environment just so I could get somewhere quiet, you know, Like, I just. I can't be in the environment for very long because then I might end up in a meltdown.
[00:10:34] So in talking about the survival mode thing, I feel like this is another kind of physiology review. If you will fight flight freeze on my podcast, probably went into way more detail than you would ever necessarily want on this. But essentially, when you go into survival mode anytime, whether you're actually in a. In a survival mode, like, as in, you know, you're the. What's that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio where he has to fight the bear? Whether it's survival mode like that, or like, an actual, like, you know, emotional memory, trauma response trigger kind of thing, whatever it may be.
[00:11:11] When you go into survival mode, what happens is I'm going to grab a little. Grab this guy for some visual. Okay. So this is, like. This is like the side of a brain. Like, if you. Did I put that in there correctly? Yeah. It'd be kind of sitting like this in your head. Okay. But this is a little. Dude, I found. It's a little squishy guy I found on Amazon once. So here you got your brain. Okay. I will try to keep this guy in as much of a view as I can. Okay. But basically, in the middle area of your brain, in. In this area kind of. Oh, God, I can't. Okay, right, left, man. I can't do it. I can't do it, guys. Anyway, in this kind of area, you have all this, like, circuitry that helps you to focus and pay attention to things. And that's where you have what's called your amygdala, which everybody says it makes you angry. But actually what the amygdala does is assign a value to all the sensory information your brain's getting. So all the smell, sound, touch, sight, all that is going up into your amygdala and it's assigns a value to it. Whether it's like, yes, this is a good thing, we like it, or this is a threat, or whatever it may be. And if the amygdala assigns something a threat, amygdala also will assign it to top down stuff as well. So there is that too. But if it assigns something as a threat, it will send a message to your hypothalamus. That guy sends it out to your glands that release all those hormones, particularly the adrenaline, epinephrine, norepinephrine stuff, that whole cocktail that gives you that extra energy and like makes your heartbeat faster and like you're ready to either fight or run for the most part that guy does that. But when you're in that state, what also tends to happen in that state is your amygdala. Like these areas. Oh gosh, I almost dropped it. Okay. No, I can't get my finger in the right spot. Okay, there we go. All right. This is why I'm not a weather person. I could, I could never, I could never. I can't get right, left, right at all. And then when it's inverted, I have no idea what's happening anyway. So this area of your brain is usually talking to this area of your brain. This is your conscious area. Okay. Everything happening down here is happening without you being aware of it. It's just always in. You don't really know it's there, you know, but this is the area. Oops, sorry. This is the area of here. This area is where we are consciously aware of how we're feeling and what's happening. And that's where we have our little conscious thoughts of I wonder what I want to eat for lunch today. That kind of stuff all happens up here. Okay, so in this area, when you're in survival mode, this stuff is working really hard and making a lot of connections. But it kind of doesn't talk as well to this part because this part is kind of slow. So when you're trying to survive, you gotta be really quick with the decision making. Your brain needs to be really quick to tell your body what to do. So it doesn't really listen to input from this part of your brain and it doesn't really talk to it very well. So we call it down regulation where it's sort of shut down that connection a little bit more. So when I talk about survival modes, this is important for understanding how my experience of A meltdown is because this part of my brain is doing something and it's not really telling this part of the brain. And also, if this part of the brain tries to tell this part of the brain to do something, it doesn't listen. It's like, it's like the Mariah Carey. I don't know her. Okay. It's the new phone. Who dis? Okay. That's what it's doing. So the conscious part of my brain, I could be thinking things, I could be aware of things, I could be trying to regain some sort of control. And the other part of my brain is like, we don't know her.
[00:14:47] Nope, not taking the call right now. We're busy. Okay. And that's going to become important when I talk about certain stages of the meltdown as I experience it. So let's go ahead and get into those stages now.
[00:15:03] These are my experiences with meltdowns and my stages. For me, this is what it feels like. It feels like I have a ramping up stage. First I'll have the full blown, slash, completely out of control stage. Okay. That's where I might start hitting myself or pinching myself. I tend to do a lot of self harm in that stage. It has a lot to do with that disconnect of my brain. And I'll get into that in a bit. Then I have the coming down stage. Okay. Because it takes a while to come off of those feelings and to have all those hormones wash through your body a bit. And then the fourth part is totally drained. I get so exhausted, exhausted by it. I saw on, I think it was the autism subreddit where somebody talked about having a meltdown hangover the next day. And it's like, yes, that's what it's like. It's like having an emotional hangover. Like it feels like my emotional system's like, we used up everything yesterday, so we're gonna take a little break while we recharge. And so it's like I got no emotional energy, like just super drained. And it. A really good night's sleep might help me to recover, but it might take more than that too. It might take more than a day, possibly. So. So I'm gonna take you through these stages now.
[00:16:16] How they feel for me as someone, first person point of view. So these are just my experiences. These might be very different from other neurodivergence who have meltdowns experiences. Okay.
[00:16:28] In the ramping up stage, what tends to happen for me is a couple of things. One can be a lot of overstimulation for sure, yes.
[00:16:40] It's usually, especially at this age because of how I'm in my mid-40s, so because of my age, it's less. Just one thing. It usually takes a lot of things all kind of coming together at once for me to start having a meltdown or start feeling the ramp up toward a meltdown. Okay. So at this stage I'm usually still able to talk, but I might be rude, I might be mean, I might be saying things like, I just need you to shut up. Like, like I might just be if somebody's like saying something that's not helpful or like if somebody's putting more demands on me when I'm trying to manage myself. If somebody's like, well, you need to hurry up, like, especially if they make me rush or something while I'm trying to actually calm myself down and I feel like all this pressure towards something, it's going to make it worse.
[00:17:31] So if it's somebody I feel safe with, I'm probably going to be mean to try to push them away because I don't want the demand. If they're, if they don't realize I'm. And this is what normally happens, they don't usually know I'm in a ramp up stage, right. So if they don't realize I'm there and then they're like, we gotta hurry, we're gonna be late, then like, that's gonna send me. That's gonna. That, that does not help. That does the opposite of keeping, of saving one off. But when I'm ramping up, if I'm given the right amount of space, the right amount of time, if the person I'm with is staying fairly regulated and is pretty calm, I can probably stave off the full meltdown. I can go to my stems, I can use my little glitter lava lamp back there, which I can't see my hands and see if I'm pointing correctly. There we go. Could use something like that. Or I have like the app version on my phone. I could do something like that to help me calm down and stave off the meltdown. But ramp up feels like I'm starting to feel tense. I get like kind of this, the tightness in my breath, especially my chest gets tight. That's probably the first place I notice it for the most part. Or maybe my stomach, my stomach might not feel right either. So I might either have a stomach ache or like it's hard for me to take a deep breath because my, my chest starts to feel tight when I'm ramping up to a meltdown. So that's my ramp up stage. And that's sort of my physiological sign that I really do need to do something to help calm myself down. And I have a bevy of stress strategies and I have stems and I have fidgets and I have things I can do without a tool or whatever. But sometimes either there either whether there be like a panic attack happening at the same time, or whether it be like just not feeling safe to have a meltdown or whatever, I might not be able to stave it off. And I guess another thing about it for me too is if I've been ignoring my stuff long enough that I'm in more of a shutdown, I might have a meltdown. It might go from ramp up to meltdown really fast because I've been ignoring my need to stop and process and rest and recuperate. And if I ignore that for long enough, I'll end up in sort of a dissociative kind of shutdown. And then it does not take much to go from shutdown to meltdown. Ramp up. The ramp up can be very small at that point. So yeah, that's just a consideration for me. And that's one of the things I'm still trying to get good at and still trying to learn how to navigate, like how not to go so far to shut down and ignore my problems to the point where I'm shut down such that a meltdown is inevitable and is going to happen quickly when it does happen. Because I don't like meltdowns, I like to avoid them. They meltdowns are very uncomfortable, they suck a whole lot and like I said, they're pretty disabling and I don't like them. So I do try to avoid them as much as I can and I tend to have them at home. But I have had a couple in public which are not fun, do not like, absolutely do not like anyway.
[00:20:29] So if I can't stave it off, I get to the full blown, slash, out of control stage. Okay. If the meltdown gets to that point or the panic attack, because panic attacks also have a full blown outta control stage for me. But the ramp up is different, I guess. Sort of. I guess a little, I don't know, it's very hard to distinguish. They feel very similar to me. But anyway, so when I'm in the full blown slash, full blown, slash, out of control stage, here's where the content warning comes in.
[00:20:58] This is where I feel and this is also where I tend to make parallels a little Bit to seizures in the sense that I feel completely out of control of what my body is doing. I'm not completely out of control because it's not a seizure, but it's absolutely not. But I could be consciously thinking something, and I could be thinking, I want to do this, or I want to take a deep breath, but I will not be able to do it. I will not be able to get that thought of, I want this to happen to my body. I cannot regain control of it. So at this stage, I'm usually like, I have that constricted throat, kind of gaspy kind of breath happening. That's very uncomfortable. My throat can feel like it's closing up. I can have a horrible lump in my throat.
[00:21:48] I'm probably crying, probably.
[00:21:52] I might be yelling. I don't know. Maybe I might be. And the only words coming out of my mouth is like, this very repetitive, emotional. Like, I might be thinking to myself, I want it to stop. I want to stop. I want to stop. And that's what's coming out of my mouth. But my thoughts are still moving, kind of in slow motion. But my conscious thoughts can be like, this is really uncomfortable. I really need to take a deep breath. Kim, it's going to end. You're going to be okay. But you need to take a deep breath. But what's coming out of my mouth is, I want it to stop, Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. I want it to stop. I want it to stop. I want it to stop. Because my mouth is not really listening to my conscious thoughts either. So it's this weird feeling of, like, your body's doing one thing, but it's completely disconnected or mostly disconnected from your conscious brain to the point where my thoughts are rational, completely separated from the emotions, and they can be very slow and very reasonable and analytical and all of this in my head. But my body's really uncomfortable, and I can't make my body do things. I just can't do it. I'm usually on the floor, can't stand up, usually, and have them. I usually have to be kind of crumpled somewhere on the floor. I'm usually, like, kind of turtling, kind of like really, like crumpled down really tight into a ball or something, typically. But this is also the stage where I might start hitting myself. Typically, I hit my. My thighs a lot of times. I'll just really wham them. Like, I can give myself bruises. Sometimes I slap my face, Sometimes I hit my head, depending. And sometimes I might start pinching, like, digging my nails into myself. I usually Target more of my legs more often, though, because I feel so disconnected. I think I'm. What's basically trying to happen when that does happen is it's almost like my conscious brain is like, we need to stop this. And my body translates that as hit the crap out of yourself.
[00:23:48] And I'm. I'm laughing because it's. I mean, it's an uncomfortable memory. So pardon my nervous laughter, but that's basically what it is, is that it's like my brain says, you've got to stop. You've got to. We got to stop this. We need to get more. You know, we need to get more control over our body. We need our body to just calm down and stop doing this. And then, yeah, whatever. Part of my brain translates that as hit the crap out of your body. And I think what's actually typically happening is my brain is trying to connect to a sensation. I can't feel the hitting in the moment or the pinching, usually. So I'm trying to hit enough that I feel pain, because when I start to feel pain, I feel like, aha, there's my body.
[00:24:33] There it is. There's that leg, there's that knee, there are my toes. You know, there's the little spot between my fingers that I've been pinching, like, this spot especially, because it gets very painful right there. That's typically what I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to stop it when I get enough, whatever, whether it be the pain that's enough of a distraction, or if somebody comes in and gives me, like, a big bear hug, or I get some kind of, like, comforting kind of sensation from something, but if I'm by myself, I'll probably hit myself or, like, start trying to move so that I get more connected to my body. Like, I might start crawling, honestly, sometimes. But when I get more sensation into my body, where it's actually listening, even if it's like, I can wiggle a toe, even if it's that level of control of like, hey, big toe, wiggle. And my big toe wiggled. And it's like, yes, good.
[00:25:29] That is where I start the coming down stage.
[00:25:33] I'm starting to regain some level of control. So then I'm able to start to come down. So that's when I can start to take slightly deeper breaths. That's when I regain control over. Okay, you can relax your throat and open it a bit, right? Or you can start rocking back and forth to feel a little better. That's where my brain can start to remind itself that this is temporary and it. I will feel better soon. I start to tell myself these kind of mantras of, you're uncomfortable for now, but in 30 minutes you're gonna feel a whole lot better. Right? That's the stage where I might be able to go to a sink and splash some cold water on my face, depending on how far down in that coming down stage I am. That's where I might be able to grab a weighted blanket, which could happen ramping up stage two. But if I've had them full blown, that might be where I'd be able to grab. That might be able to grab a stuffy or something soft of stem with. To help me continue regaining control.
[00:26:32] It takes a while though, for me to feel like my throat is relaxed, the lump is gone, and I can take nice, deep, calming breaths. And the waves of crying kind of stop. Because that's what kind of happens is that the vocal stems and the crying, they start to slow down, it starts to kind of go away and then it might kick back up again a little bit and then it'll start to go away again. And so I end up having kind of this like little, little resurgence of the crying or, or the screaming or whatever the vocal stuff is that's happening where the gasping, possibly the kind of feeling we might have a few waves of that, right?
[00:27:09] And so it takes a little while for that to, for me to come back to where all of that has actually stopped. Okay, now, pro tip, when you're working, especially even with like little, little kids, even like preschoolers or even toddlers, if they're having some kind of a meltdown, give them at least 30 minutes to come down from the peak meltdown. Give them some time to recover a bit. This is not the time to add more demands because if somebody added more demands on me when I'm in the comedown stage, it's going to ramp back up again. I'm. I'm going to go back into. I could become back to. I could go back to the out of control stage pretty easily. If I'm not given the space and the time to really come down.
[00:27:53] Or conversely, if I've been out of control for so long that my body has no energy left, then I'm just going to go like straight up into like a dissociation, numbness, shut out, like complete shutdown stage. And I might skip the coming down stage because I might just be done and drained, but that's going to take a longer time to recover from. So those are the ones that last hours, sometimes I've had meltdowns last like upwards of three hours before, especially by myself, when I'm by myself. And so typically for things that were that bad, I will have this completely totally drained stage, stage four. So I might come down, I'm not crying anymore, I can get my face clean, I can blow my nose, do all that sort of stuff, maybe get some water. But now I'm in that exhausted stage where my brain feels completely drained of energy.
[00:28:41] It's almost like I'm, I'm out of dopamine. We got, we gotta create more. Like I'm out, I'm out of my neurotransmitters for like feelings and stuff. And what is disabling about it? This is the stage where it's particularly disabling for me, especially if it's the kind of day where I needed to do something high level with my brain, like I needed to write a report or I needed to analyze a test or whatever. Maybe, you know, I need to do something clinical with my brain, some sort of assessment or something, or I needed to write a research thing or whatever. It will get, it'll. I could maybe push through doing those things, but it's gonna be hard because my brain feels incredibly foggy. It's incredibly hard to focus. I do not have a lot of mental effort left for stuff like that. So it's kind of disabling. If you're trying to use your brain at a higher level. If you have a meltdown, then you have to like just kind of take those high level tasks off your plate for the rest of the day and just do them later. Or you have to go and take a nap and do them in the middle of the day or middle of the night, you might have to do that. Whereas like, you might have to take, I might have to sleep for a couple hours to get, get my brain back and then I could do the tasks, but then I'm also sacrificing sleep. So then I'm going to have more of like a meltdown hangover. The next day it's going to be a little worse, right? Might take me a little longer to recover. In the ideal world during the totally drained stage, if I can just kind of zone out and chill and stay really relaxed and calm the rest of the day or the rest of the night and I get a good night's sleep, then the next day I might not have very much of a hangover. Might still have a little bit of one, but not very much of one. But if I have to push through it and do more things. The rest of my day, the hangover is going to be worse. And the, the, the meltdown, hangover the next day basically feels, it feels kind of like you've taken too much cold medicine. I guess that's my biggest like connection. Like when you have a cold and you take the medicine and you're just foggy and you feel super out of it. That's what it kind of feels like. And nine times out of ten, like my sinuses are still stuffy from the crying and my eyes are still dry and itchy, which is very. I, I don't like that sensation, right. And all that sort of stuff. So that might be what I feel like the next day still too. And it's like I just feel really tired and groggy and kind of out of it. So those are, those are my experiences and those are my stages in my mind. Ramping up stage might be able to stop it if I can't go to full blown out of control stage.
[00:31:01] Hit, pinch, get myself more control over my body at some point. And once I start getting more control, I can start coming down, I can start doing more things to relax myself out and my throat open up more and take deeper breaths and stuff like that. And then I end up that, in that like super drained exhaustion stage where it's like, it's hard for me to get to feel ready to go the rest of the day. Especially depending on how long the out of control stage was. If it was a really long outta control stage, the drain will last longer. Basically it'll take me longer to recover. I hope I gave a decent picture of how blech it is, but as you can imagine from all that blech feeling, this all results in this net kind of fear and or avoidance of having meltdowns as much as I can. I try to avoid it, avoid it, avoid it. However, if I avoid it too much or I push through too long and I get to shutdown stage and I keep on pushing through or I'm pushing through a level of exhaustion that's making like sensory regulation very hard.
[00:32:06] It can end up in this snowball effect of I keep avoiding the uncomfortable feelings, the uncomfortable sensory stuff, I keep pushing through or shutting down through it and then I just end up in this like snowball of anxiety over having a meltdown and that makes me more uncomfortable, like the anxiety is uncomfortable. Then I get more of an overwhelm from that discomfort and then I get meltdowns. So it's not very helpful to just avoid Avoid, avoid and push through and push through and push through. But like, like, like, listen, it's like when people throw up, okay? Like, I'm sorry. True. I guess contra warning on that. But like, if you get a stomach upset, okay, and you throw up, other people are like, just throw up, you'll feel so much better. I'm one of those people who hates the sensation of doing it so much that I'll avoid it to like the last second, right? I will avoid it, avoid it and try not to do it because I hate it. Same thing with meltdowns. I hate them so much, they are so, like, uncomfortable that I try to avoid, avoid avoiding. But sometimes if that avoidance goes too far or I push too far or for too long through sensory overwhelm or something, I'm guaranteeing I'm gonna have one. So sometimes the avoidance can become more of a detriment, you know, and even using techniques to try to avoid them or try to stave them off won't really help. If I've just been in shutdown for too long and just pushing through that, that's the exact opposite really of what I should be doing. But that's the way I coped with things for so long before a diagnosis and before kind of therap, therapizing myself a little bit. And honestly, when things get really bad in the world and I'm really, I. I have really high empathy and I can definitely still have that overwhelm from that, you know, it can turn into a meltdown. So that kind of gets into the considerations. So let's get to that next section here.
[00:33:53] Considerations for anyone who's around, anyone having a meltdown or if you yourself have meltdowns, but especially for people who like, like treat people, teach people are caregivers in the home of people, family members of people, friends of people who have meltdowns. These are some considerations. My first consideration is especially for adults of kid, little kids, like when, when kids are small enough, okay?
[00:34:17] And that is something I should have probably defined in the first, the first section, which is tantrums are different from meltdowns, okay? Tantrums are typically thought of as when a kid is completely in control of themselves, but they're trying to make it look like they're really upset, but they're actually completely in control. That's the main difference. Meltdowns, you have no control over your body. Tantrums, full control. I. Being in special education, I did not see a very many honest tantrums. I saw meltdowns more often. I Think I saw one genuine tantrum in the sense of a kid doing the kicking, screaming, crying thing and then stopping and looking at me, right? It'll be like, I don't want to clean up the toys. And then he, like, had this big breakdown about cleaning. But then I would kind of do an a purposeful, planned ignoring of the tantrum. And he would just sort of be like, ah. And if I was looking, he'd be like, ah. You know, and if I wasn't looking, he would just stop. So he would stop until I looked again, right? So that's like what a tantrum is. It's the fully in control of it. They're really just trying to get the adult's attention and get their way.
[00:35:23] My big pro tip here is to treat a tantrum like a meltdown. You don't have to worry about which or which people always want to talk about. How do I can tell which is which? Honestly, treat them both the same way. I just said I did a little planned ignoring of the tantrum. That was after I had already established that what we're gonna do, I had my little emotion scale. I brought that in with me because this kid, we knew he was gonna have tantrums. He was new to the school and we did the intake, and I knew this kid was gonna have an issue, so I was there to help. So I had my regulation, like, visuals to help this little, like, energy meter scale of, like, how does. And what can we do to help calm ourselves? And like, little visuals that I used for all the kids in the preschool. And it had helped so many kids. And at that point in the year, like, the teachers knew how to use them. Like, everybody knew my little tools, right? And people knew what was up. But to help with the teacher and the paras, I just wanted to do it myself with this kid because I was like, he's going to take a long time. The first time, like, laying down that this is how we handle this. It's going to take a while. So that's what we did is when he started having his tantrum, I grabbed my stuff, brought it over to him while he screeched, screaming and crying. And I did my whole spiel of you're, you're right here, looks like you feel like this. What can I do to help you feel and, like a little more calm, right? Like, I might point to a different scale and be like this. What can I help? What can I do to help you feel a little better in your body, right?
[00:36:47] Can we do deep breaths? Can we do this, can we do drawing, glitter, bottle, whatever, you know. And so like that's what I was doing and he kept tantruming and the ignoring I was doing was I didn't engage with his request to not pick up the toys.
[00:37:02] What I wanted was he has to, you know, show me how your body feels. Either point to how you feel or point to something you need to help be more calm so you can use your words. You know, it's like what do you need from me? And he'd be like, I need no cleaning. And it's like that's here's the choices. Your choices are here, right? Like we need your body to be more calm first. Okay, we'll talk about cleaning up in a second but let's talk about how to make your body more calm first. You need to tell me. And the tantruming kid did not want to tell me. He like, he didn't want to engage in my boundary of like you have to talk about how your body feels and how I can help you feel better in your body. He didn't want that. He wanted not to clean, right? So, so it took him a while but eventually he gave in because I didn't let him budge and he ended up pointing to how, how he felt. You can tell it's very upsetting that you have to clean, right? We could talk through that a little bit. I explained why we have to clean up in the classroom because people might step on the toys, they might break, then we don't have them to play with. And we also have to clean because we're all here to help each other. We can play with them tomorrow. Like, like explaining all the little things, the rules of the classroom. Here's how it goes. And then I did help him clean up. Like admittedly I didn't make it do him do it all by himself cuz like he's a little kid and he made quite a mess mess while he was tantruming. So, so I was like I will help you clean, but you have to help me, right? So I just made sure like because I didn't want the cleaning because the cleaning process can become overwhelming to a kid. Especially if they look at this huge thing and they think, oh this is going to take forever. You gotta remember in like a 3 year old brain, 5 minutes is like 3 hours to an adult. You know what I mean? It's a long time to them. It can be overwhelming, you know, so it's like, okay, like and we did it together and we stayed calm. Doo doo doo and he got kind of that like, situation going on. On. The other thing I have seen is kids who start out with a tantrum, they might start out with the I don't want to clean up. I don't want to clean up. But then it becomes a meltdown.
[00:39:05] So that's another consideration for caregivers, which is why I say treat tantrums like meltdowns, and it's a win, win, win. You're not giving into the tantrum, but you are making it very clear to that kid that you are there to help them feel safe and to take some of the pressure off of the task. And like, right, like you're a safe person to cry around, but it doesn't mean you're just gonna let them get their way. It means you're here to hopefully help them feel okay in their body and to be able to communicate what they want in not having a tantrum kind of a way. Basically, like calmly communicate what we want. Okay. Be it with pictures or whatever, you can tell me what you want, but do it in a, like a calmer, kinder way. You know, essentially we'll be a little more kind to each other, you know, so tantrums can definitely become meltdowns because I think some kids, they can work themselves into such a state of upset that that feeling of being upset ends up overwhelming them and then it becomes a meltdown. So that definitely can happen. Which is why I like to handle tantrums like they're meltdowns anyway, because at some point, if they stop looking like they're in control. Like if you keep. Look, they, they, they stop doing the ch. The stop and check in and they're actually just full blown hitting themselves or throwing things or whatever, then they've hit a meltdown point. Their tantrum has become a meltdown. So, you know, they still need the same help of like, how to help their body calm down and how to alleviate that awful feeling. So that's one of my big considerations there is go ahead and treat tantrums like meltdowns. Think of them as essentially the same thing, even though the root cause is different. And you still end up at the same place of they can stay a little more calm, a little more functional, and be a little nicer with how they request things. And then you can compromise and talk through it and, you know, establish more boundaries and stuff within that way. It takes. It takes time. But that's sort of the pro tip. If you're a parent with like many kids in the, in the house and you don't have that time. I don't have an awesome tip for you. If you are one of those parents who does has a tip, leave a comment below because I don't. You probably would need another caregiver to take care of the other kids while you're addressing the kid who's having the meltdown or the tantrum, which once you establish a pattern it becomes a faster, easier thing to handle. But in the initial stage it can take a really long time, especially if it's a tantrum. Another consideration, especially when it comes to just in general, I mean it applies to adults too. But with little kids, if you're dealing with a girl, I have noticed people including teachers, para educators, like AIDS essentially in classrooms think that if a girl is having a meltdown, they interpret it as a manipulation, they interpret it as a tantrum. Basically they interpret it as this girl is trying to get her way when what's actually happening is the girl is having a meltdown or she's ramping up to a meltdown because she also is autistic and she also has meltdowns or whatever it may be. And so that is another consideration is the misogyny tends to show itself even with little kids. In terms of how we treat a little boy acting one way versus a girl acting the same way, we tend to treat those, those kids differently. And I would encourage people not to don't treat it like a meltdown. If you want to know how to treat meltdowns, I will leave some links below. There are some great like kind of outlines of how to help. But I could maybe do a different video on like, like how to think through things to help people with meltdowns. That'll probably be a different video. Another consideration is that avoiding meltdown can actually be a really big reason for a lot of really big stimming behaviors you see, especially in little kids who don't have a lot of other things to do. If a kid is constantly vocally stimming or if they're eloping when kids elope, when autistic kids run away from a situation, okay, that kind of avoiding of something, those kind of behaviors can be a kid trying to avoid an overwhelm. They're trying to avoid a meltdown. So a lot of times those really big stimming behaviors we see in young kids is like their last ditch effort to stay in control and in connection to their body, in my opinion. And my, it's kind of my, my working theory of that, okay, my working hypothesis I guess is that you Know like a three and a half or four year old. The stems they do, if they're really big stems or they do a loping or whatever, they're probably trying to avoid some kind of overwhel meltdown so you can give them more things to do to hopefully help with the discomfort. Right? And the shift in their body's energy without it being this big. Like especially the eloping, because that can get pretty dangerous. Especially if a kid is like running out into traffic, you know, we don't want that. That can be pretty dangerous. So, you know, trying to think of ways to help them before they get to that stage is. Is good. You know what I mean? Understanding or helping that kid to understand what their body feels like in terms of what things make their body feel good versus what doesn't feel good. What's like a yuck versus a yum, I guess, or something, or like a yay or what's kind of neutral is important because that stuff leads to overwhelm. That the yucks are the things that tend to overwhelm the most. Hey, voiceover editing. Kim Neely here. Just to let you know, the final consideration I have here for caregivers is to take a cue from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and don't panic. If you're helping someone who has a meltdown, one of the most important things you can do is to remain calm yourself. Because meltdowns are hard to watch. They're hard to watch. They're hard to. It's hard to be the person to stay calm and relaxed and help someone through it. That can be hard because it can be heartbreaking, especially for little kids. You can see them having these huge meltdowns and they're just so uncomfortable and it's just so heartbreaking and can be. It can be dysregulating to the adults as well. It's important for the person doing the help to stay calm. If you're going to help someone come down from a meltdown, stay calm. If you cannot stay calm, you're not the person to help and you probably should just excuse yourself from the space for a little bit. If a meltdown. If you see somebody having a meltdown and your brain goes to like, you're angry or you're uncomfortable or you're way too upset watching it that you want to stop it immediately. If you have like a timeline in your head of how quick this needs to end, you're not the person to help. Okay, that's, I guess, my last consideration for caregivers is that that is the time for you to take a break. Hopefully if you're in a situation where another adult can step in to help, that's great. Especially if it's like a little kid, but, like, it's not time for you. You're not the one to help with this, this meltdown. Not until you can calm yourself. You need to work on ways for you to stay calm. Calm and for you to stay and not put yourself on a timeline and not put that meltdown person on a timeline either. Right. Because it's going to take however long it's going to take for them to feel better. Like I said, I've had meltdowns last upwards of three hours before. Especially when I'm like in an apartment by myself as a young adult without any mental health treatment or anything. In my 20s, I was a hot mess. In my 20s, guys. Hot mess. Mental hot mess in my young adult days. And so in that state, as a, as in my hot mess state, yeah, I would have like panic attacks turn into meltdowns that could last like hours.
[00:46:24] So important not to rush a person. Um, and also if they're in that coming down stage, don't put more demands on them suddenly. Don't be like, oh, now that that's over, let's go and do coloring or let's go and do this, or let's get up and go to the grocery store. Like, that is not the time. Okay, not the time. This last consideration is really more for late diagnosed neurodivergence particularly, but. But could also be teenagers too and stuff, where mental health practitioners, for counselors out there or for people who are getting mental health help.
[00:46:55] There are a lot of ways that it can be a bit of a barrier for us neurodivergence to access mental health. Some of it can be even the language they use, if it's really figurative, if it's really big imagery or whatever they have a certain way they're taught to think about things and conceptualize and talk about things. And that might not gel with you and it might be hard. But the other thing to consider, this is something I've noticed with a few. I've had a couple of counselors in the past that have done this where they want me. Like, I got called out by a counselor of like, don't laugh off awful things, which I do that to diffuse myself sometimes too. Sometimes the laughter is a regulation tool for me of like, I don't want to go that far into this trigger. I don't want to go so far that I get super upset. So I'm going to kind of diffuse it for myself. And sometimes it's also diffusing for other people. So it's like, I'm not going to trauma dump on you. You know, like colloquially in society it can be like a. I know where you're coming from, but I'm not going to dump on you. So just like, you say one thing and you're like, yeah, that was a great time, you know, and you make a joke out of it. It's like a diffuse thing, which I think is a good thing. But sometimes for me, especially if it's like near the end of a session, if we're heading towards something and I'm starting to feel so uncomfortable in my body that I get concerned about a meltdown happening. Because I can get a meltdown from an overwhelm of uncomfortable emotions in the sense of my body sensation can create and like, can be a trigger toward an overwhelm meltdown. Because of the internal sensations in my body, like especially the tight chest thing and the closed up throat, it starts to mimic the ramp up stage of my meltdown enough that I might end up in a meltdown.
[00:48:34] And so if it's happening near the end of a counseling session, if it's like the last 15 minutes and this person is pushing me past where I'm comfortable, I will probably really not appreciate it.
[00:48:46] Because if I'm gonna have a meltdown, it's gonna kind of ruin my day. I'm gonna have the exhaustion later, you know, I'm gonna have that brain drain and I might not have time that day for that. You know what I mean? So I think that's a consideration. Now that I've reflected and I know that more about myself.
[00:49:04] The next counselor I see, I will probably want to establish that with them where it's like, if we're going to go deep into some kind of deep painful em.
[00:49:13] Painful emotional trigger, can we do it in the beginning of a session and make sure, like hopefully they monitor and Mimi and make sure check in with me and see how I feel at the end so that I'm not like I want to be relaxing away from a meltdown rather than heading toward one. Because if I'm heading toward one, I'm going to resist the emotional processing because I'm heading toward a meltdown and we're almost over with the session, which means I'm going to either go to my car or turn off the online whatever, whichever way you're doing it. Telehealth thing or whatever. And I'm going to have a meltdown and then I'm going to try to go about my day and it's just going to kind of ruin my entire day. So depending on what I have planned, I might not have the energy for it. I might have too much going on and so don't want to do it, you know. So that is a consideration, I think, when it comes to people who have meltdowns, especially if adults have meltdowns or anxiety attacks or panic attacks.
[00:50:05] Yes, we don't want people to constantly push off their emotional processing. Yes, diffusing emotional processing can really hinder progress, progress in mental health. But at the same time, make sure that that emotional processing is happening in a safe way for the person, I guess would be my main encouragement. And if you are a late diagnosis and you're divergent and you're starting to recognize if you are relating to this story a little bit, maybe it's a conversation to have with a counselor where it's like, if we do this kind of processing, it needs to be earlier in the session. Like, I can't do this right at the end. I need to start relaxing and getting back to like, like functional emotional state, you know, by the end of it, you know. Just a thought.
[00:50:47] That's all I have for this, for this whole meltdowns suck because they do. And I hope you found some of this helpful though. Thank you for watching. If you've made it this far. Thank you so much. I super appreciate it. And I hope that you did find some of this helpful or informative or maybe it just helps to explain to other people. If you yourself have a similar experience, maybe you can use this video as a way to help explain your experiences to other people. And if you are a caregiver, if you're someone who works with people who have meltdowns, maybe this gives a little more perspective on what they're physically going through in those moments. Feel free to share this around if you feel like it would be helpful to educate others in your life on what meltdowns feel like. If you have similar experiences with meltdowns, let me know in the comments, the comments below. Or if it's incredibly different and you have the spoons and you're able to share, feel free to share. You could also message me if you wish to share more privately. That's totally fine. But I would love to learn other people's experiences and point of views with these things. And yeah, hopefully this will help people to feel a little more compassion maybe toward people having them and a little more understanding and help us kind of care for ourselves and for each other a little, a little nicer in a little, a little more effective way hopefully. If you would like me to do a video on kind of my own experiences with helping kids go through meltdowns and helping to reduce the number of meltdowns they're having and helping them to kind of figure out what to do for themselves to try to regulate and avoid a meltdown, let me know also know in the comments below if you would like a follow up video on that. I would be happy to do so. In the meantime I hope you all can take care of yourselves, be kind to yourselves as much as you can and in the effort of reclaiming weirdness and using it for good, for the sake of connecting with each other and building some safe community here, I wish for you all to keep it weird and until next time guys, bye.
