You are listening to Autistic Stuff for Autistic People, a podcast in which a few autistic friends talk about their lived experiences and special interests.

We are here to invite you into our world as autistic peers, sharing relatable conversations about life as autistic people.

This podcast is for autistic people and anyone that lives with, works with, or loves an autistic person.

I am Aradia.

I am the creatively autistic coach and also the podcast producer for Fox and Raven Media.

And I am Cheryl, a holistic empowerment coach who works with other late discovered autistic women and non binary folk, as well as autistic spiritual abuse survivors.

And I am Patrice and I am an internal family systems informed practitioner who works with autistic women and members of the Irish diaspora.

Welcome back to another episode of Autistic Stuff for Autistic People.

Today, we are going to talk about meltdowns.

What do they look like, what do they feel like, what are they for?

What are they not?

And some of our lived experiences dealing with them in the past and present.

This episode's purpose falls into the autism information and lived experiences categories.

Yet again, all autistic people have experienced some kind of meltdown in their lives.

We rarely, rarely, rarely make absolute statements like that, but I'm pretty sure we're safe with this one that said it would be difficult for us to cover what meltdowns are in comprehensive detail, so we're going to focus on what we understand about meltdowns from the inside.

I believe in our group chat more than one of us said we had meltdown stories to share, so perhaps we should start with those first and then get into the mechanics of what is physiologically happening and how to navigate those experiences when they come up in the future.

I could go first, or patrece Cheryl, you got something you want to all right, cool, I'll keep going.

So, Yeah, I had a meltdown pretty recently.

That was interesting in the sense that I was actually like watching and observing it with my coachat on even as it was happening, which was kind of new.

I have a pretty meltdown free life for the most part, so you know, this was the first one in a while, but yeah, for me, it was.

It was also one of those things where I came out of it being like, well, that was kind of like a meltdown, but not exactly, so I don't really know if it counts.

And then I realized I was doing that thing where I had like three paragraphs of caveat or I could just say that was a meltdown and put a period on the set on the statement and just be like, that was a meltdown.

Yeah, it didn't look exactly like meltdowns that other people have described that I've seen in media, But that was a distinct to me experience that I recognize that I have had many times, and it feels like a meltdown.

And for me, meltdowns are very external.

I have the internal meltdown experience as well, all the shutdowns and all of that.

That is a part of my experience.

But this was a very like returning to my roots as a child, where it is very loud, it is very explosive, it is very verbal.

I tend to get you know, I keep trying to explain myself and then like the words get all looped out, and then pretty soon I'm just in tea kettle mode where no one can understand me.

I am like shrieking at the top of my range and just like ugly crying collapse in the corner like it.

It's a meltdown, it's an explosion.

It's healthier than turning it inward.

But ah, it's so it's so much.

And then the tide retreats.

Eventually, inevitably, all that energy winds down and then I'm drained and tired.

And then I told Matt about the fact that I had a melt down, and he's like, so, how are you recovering?

You're taking care of yourself, and I just I realized I have no real meltdown aftercare built into my life.

I just always the tide runs out, I'm depleted, and I sort of dragged myself onto the next task and just kind of pretend it didn't happen.

And when he asked me how I was I recovering, I just sort of brushed it off.

I was like, oh, wow, if one of my clients did that, I would tell them that wasn't good.

Hmmm.

So I still have a lot to learn about handling meltdowns, but yeah, that happened to me just like last week.

Yeah, that's my experience recently.

That's identifiable and relatable.

Can I ask you a coaching question really quickly a radio.

Yeah, sure, let's do it.

You could say no, you can tell me to f off.

It's not a big deal.

I'm just wondering if it would help our listeners to understand.

And I can do the same for myself when it's my turn.

But like in very general terms, like what led up to that meltdown for you?

Oh, that's a good question actually, because it was very intrinsic to my intellectual, autistic self rather than like my physical needs.

I've been struggling with website creation.

It's not a skill that I want.

It is a skill I need, but I don't want it.

And all the tutorials I look at are profoundly unhelpful or rather too simple or too complicated.

And I've been working on this for a long time.

So I had gone through another work session and everyone feels like it's notching me up closer and closer to a panic attack.

And then I was attempting to describe my situation.

I was all wound up from hours of trying to work on this and being stressed out.

And then I went to try to explain my problem in very general details to my husband.

And once I started though the words just wouldn't stop, and then I ended up in tea kettle mode in the corner while he was like just trying to keep the mashed potatoes from boiling over.

But it was very much that intellectual, like I can't learn this thing and I should be able to and that whole loop of I should be able to learn this and why can't I learn it?

And I'm stupid because I can't learn it, And like it was very intellectual.

It was not sensory at all, but.

Like you said, still ane, yes, right, And that's huge to understand.

Like we have different categories of needs, right, mental, emotional, sensory, physiological, and they're all equally valid.

And I think sometimes for artistic people, I'm not going to say even more so, but just as much as any neurotypical person who really just wants to understand things and understand their world and when they feel like they're hitting those walls over and over and over again, right, that is that's a lot.

I really resonate with what you said, and I love your tea kittle analogy, and.

I was just actually talking in one of our other groups about that via test, the values test, and like that Matt has us do where you learn kind of what your most intrinsic spoon providing or spoon depleting things are.

And yeah, this experience was in direct violation of my love of learning and my curiosity, Like this was directly like sticking a fork in that all important aspect of my personality.

So yeah, very much.

So what you were saying, Yeah, do you have a story of Patrice or would you like me to go Yeah, Sorr, I can go next.

Yeah, thanks Aradia.

So much of yours was relatable too.

So mine happened in the last six months or so.

It involves a trip I needed to to my bank because there was a bank fee that I'd been told at one of the branches could be taken off.

But I needed to make an appointment for some reason.

So on my drive over to the bank, I was coming in retrospect, coming from an exercise class, so a bit fatigued.

It had started raining lightly, so a little bit more sensory overload.

I noticed on the way there at a red light, I looked at my phone and the banker had called me twice, once to ask to rearrange the time of the appointment, and then the second to say, oh, actually never mind that time works just fine for me.

And so by the time I got there, that was a lot of sensory overload, and I was also not looking forward to this task.

And it was also not the first time I'd made the effort to get this fixed.

So when I got over to his cubicle, there was his supervisor or someone standing there and they said, oh please, can you wait?

And his tone was a bit terse I experienced in my nervous system.

The lights felt very bright.

By the time our meeting actually started.

What I thought was going to be simply we made a mistake here, let me fix it for you, turned into a very at length interview of what my profile was as a client of the bank, and it asked very personal questions that felt very invasive about my financial information.

And the meltdown happens for me as my tone gets very tense as a defective mechanism.

So I must have said something to the effect of those are very personal questions.

That is not what I expected, something like that, and then I felt I saw his body language tense up and his fingers kind of hovered above his keyboard, and he said something like, you know, I have to ask these orrel's management will ask me why I didn't ask them, and then I was flooded with shame because I was so aware that my presentation was putting him on edge.

And you know, this is so much you know, female kind of socialization as well.

I'm here to make sure others are okay, and the meltdown for me, it was really about I lost control of my ability to perform niceness for people, and it was a total overwhelm of my nervous system and absolutely looking back, trying to protect myself against a sensory overload.

And you know, going from what you said a radia about that that via test, you know, one of the things that's most important to me is, you know, fairness.

It felt really unfair that I wanted to get something so simple changed and it was twelve hurdles in the way and none of it was what I expected.

And you know, as we know, as autistic people, we really do well with a lot of predictability, with a lot of consistency, and my system expected to be able to go to the bank and have this be a relatively simple transaction and when it turned into this whole ordeal, that was really overwhelming because I didn't have the spoons, and I didn't allocate the spoons because I didn't know why it was going to and need them.

So looking back, I have a lot of compassion for what happened.

And yeah, the kind of way I've started to think about this is building in as much time as possible for an errands like this and having a buffer on either side, knowing how stressful it can be, and allowing for as many unexpected tangents and hurdles as possible.

And you know that's not always possible for us.

Life gets busy, life is unpredictable, and as you were saying in the beginning, Cheryl, you know, really allowing the grace that this is what happens to me when I'm overloaded.

You know, I get kind of mean to people, and that I feel really bad about it.

So I think I'll end there for that.

Thank you for sharing that story.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, I got the need to have predictability can be It can be quite disabling because if you make your life so you own only know what's going to be expected.

It's like, well, I can't have an appointment for the next two weeks because I have other things scheduled and I don't have the buffer time to fit, but maybe I need the appointment within that.

Yeah, it's dealing with unpredictability.

It's such a lifelong hurdle.

Yeah.

And it's interesting that you say that because for those of us who are AUDIHD so autistic and ADHD, there's often a need for predictability and novelty at the same time, at different times, putting on how that shows up for you.

And sometimes, you know, not being able to have that predictability can lead to meltdowns.

And sometimes when we attempt to go for that novelty because we know that a part of us really needs something different and new and you know, feeling like we're stretching ourselves or getting that dopamine.

We're faced with an unexpected situation, We're faced with something new, not just out of our comfort zone, but like in another state.

Right, Like there's a joke for some of us that you know, just getting out of bed is out of our comfort zone some days.

Right, So this idea that you know, oh maybe you should like buy a ticket and go across the world.

You know, like that's not just out of our comfort zone.

That is for some of us impossible, Patrice, the way you kind of told your story, just all of those elements you can, I could feel it all coming together to lead to that meltdown for you.

That's another interesting point too, Like some people want to know, can you predict a meltdown?

Do we know when it's about to happen?

Can we feel it for some of us?

Perhaps for some of us we say, oh, no, it took us by surprise.

But afterwards, if we're kind of looking back, we might be able to say, oh, Even at the beginning, I was feeling my chest tighten, Even at the beginning, I was feeling my thoughts race, Even at the beginning, I was having hard time forming words.

Even at the beginning, I was kind of like clenching my hands and like kind of putting my nails into my palm to try to like regulate.

Right, So, like whatever happens to you, you might be able to notice it in hindsight, it's just in the moment it can be really tricky.

And when I was trying to figure out, like what story should I tell, I was like I don't know, Like literally my brain kind of went a little blank, and I'm like I had spent so much of my childhood and teenagers having external meltdowns and like there's no one real story, and like you, Alradia, many of them were external, specifically in the week leading up to my period.

So I have PMDD and that can lead to a lot of imbalances and mood swings to the point of for some of us even like psychosis and disassociation because of the pain and other things.

And I would hit walls, I would hit my hand.

I would often like smash my one fist into my other hand, so I didn't destroy property and get in trouble.

But there were times when I thought, oh my god, did I just break my own hand?

Right?

And then then my first thought was then I'm going to get in trouble, not what led me to this point, not oh my god, Like there's a part of me that obviously feels so overwhelmed and cannot cope.

But I'm still worrying, like you said, Terce about everyone else.

Right, I come from a really big family.

Was not acceptable to destroy the peace of the whole home.

It wasn't until years later, until recently actually, that I started looking at like what was leading up to those meltdowns.

It's like, well, there's eight people in my house.

I often didn't have space and time to myself.

I often had a lot of responsibilities from a very young age to take care of people's physical and emotional needs.

A school, as much as I loved learning, was very just regulating, having to be in a space where you can't really express yourself.

You're masking all day long.

I was bullied quite a bit, never fitting in, never really being able to make friends right, and then coming home and feeling like maybe I can be myself for a little while, right, So there's a lot of pieces that go into meltdowns.

And then years later again I realized that I also have internal moltones.

I didn't even know that that was a.

Thing, right that part.

The first time that Matt said that in a group, I was like what, what?

They're not just like throwing things and like punching walls, Like what?

And the internal of feeling like the whole world is about to fall on top of me, feeling like I can't breathe, feeling like I can't find the right words or the right thoughts because everything's just spinning out of control.

Right, everything is happening inside, So it's not really an inconvenience for anyone else.

Nobody else has to deal with it.

Nobody else has to understand why it's happening.

Nobody else has to understand what needs I have that are not being met, that have been completely violated.

And now my nervous system is trying to protect me from further damage.

Right, Which is what a nervous which is what a meltdown is.

Right.

Think about a check engine light your car, right, it's warning you.

And that's what I'd never understood.

I just thought I was a bad person because I couldn't control myself.

I couldn't regulate my emotions.

Right.

How could I be so out of control?

Too sensitive, too much, too much of a burden?

Right?

And it wasn't until I was this year's old when I realized what was actually what was actually going on.

I'm going to stop there, because there's a lot of emotions that go along with these meltdowns that I'm sure we can all identify with that, Like there's like there's guilt, and there's like anger that nobody even understood how to help us what was going on, and anger that none of our knees were getting met in the first place.

Yeah, nodding to all that, especially as people socialize as women that whole.

Well, if you can put it on the inside and make it not inconvenient for others, then it doesn't really count as a problem.

Now you just need to like journal about it and be sweet.

Yeah.

So those are so expressions of how meltdowns can manifest coming from three individual people.

Hopefully you and the audience can recognize some parts of yourself in that.

So moving from that, let's talk about why meltdowns happen, because you know, we can talk about why it individually happens to us, you know, bank tellers or web hosts or whatever.

You know, that's just superficial individual experiences, but what is going on under the hood that is more universal to all of us.

And Cheryl, you were mentioning one of Matt's analogies that really worked for you of a burglar alarm.

Oh yes, right, the.

Meltdown is the alarm, not the be and E.

Right, So maybe explain that again, because you had a good explanation.

This, No, this is and I give my full credit for this.

This analogy that I thought worked so well is like, you know, you're at home one night and you hear your security alarm go off, and you jump out of bed and you're like, of course I got to respond to this, my goodness, and you know, get to see you investigate and see what's going on.

And you see this person standing in your apartment or your house, and you have this blaring alarm going on in the background.

And the question is who do you get mad at?

Do you get mad at the burglar?

Do you get mad at the alarm?

And most logical people would say, I'm going to be mad at the burglar and call the police and respond in whatever every way I feel is appropriate to get this person out of my house and to get safe again.

And for a lot of autistic people that their meltdowns are the security line, it's the check engine light in your car.

It's a cup that's filled up with water and has overflowed.

Pick the analogy that works for you.

But it's showing us that our sensory system, our nervous system, our emotional capacity has been reached and breached and is gone overboard.

And so instead of yelling at the alarm, right starting to yell or get upset or acknowledge at least the violation of needs that let up to that overwhelm and that overload and that capacity breach.

Those are examples from Matt that I just think really make a lot of sense.

Yeah, and that then leads you to like, Okay, so this is an analogy, right, So what are the needs violations that a burglar represents?

Right?

That's what gets really unique is like we all have different houses with different valuables inside worth stealing to try to stretch this analogy farther, right, and like if we don't know what our needs are, if we don't know how to close the windows on the house, right, it's going to be that much easier for a problem to enter.

And that's again like understanding what is a melt down.

A melt down is a needs violation.

Okay, so what are your needs?

Right?

We all have different needs, but we all ultimately are going to be upset when our needs are violated.

That is pretty universal.

Yeah, No, and that's huge.

Like and the fact that we're stressing the needs piece is not by accident.

Especially I'm just going to bring in one other piece here and then we can kind of like expand it all.

But there's this misconception a lot of times that tantrums and meltdowns are the same thing, and they are not.

I'm going to say that really loud for the people in the back.

We cannot control a meltdown.

We can control a tantrum.

The reason for those two things, even though they might look similar on the surface, right being feeling out of control, throwing things, saying certain things, the reasons behind them are not the same.

Right, tantrums And again thank you to Matt for explaining this so well during workshops.

Right, tantrums are to get our desires met.

I really want to like get the situation to work into my favor, and I'm going to say what I need to say, do what I need to do to get what I want.

Right, it's intentional.

We know what we're doing.

For a tantrum, a meltdown, it's like a seizure.

You're not going to look at somebody having a seizure and say, would you stop that?

That's really inconvenient.

It's the same thing for a person having a meltdown.

Do not go up to a person having a meltdown and try to get them to talk, and do not start touching them, and do not please start to try to fix things and putting air quotes around that in the middle of a meltdown, right, their sensory system, nervous system is completely tapped out.

They need some time and space to regulate.

Right, as RADI you were saying, like, I don't have any aftercare like meltdown aftercare, right, So that is part of it, But just this idea that meltdowns are a warning that our needs have been violated, and it's trying to protect us so that our needs don't continue to get violated and then we eventually go into burnout, right, which can be a whole other conversation, But there's a part meltdowns are literally coming from a part of us that loves and values us so much that is trying to help us understand our needs and what has been violated.

So instead of saying, oh, I really need to stop having meltdowns, how can I go on this journey of understanding what my needs are?

How can I start to take these little tiny baby steps in acknowledging them.

Right, And I'm not suggesting that it's easy.

Most of us have been working on this for a few years now, of like understanding what our needs are and starting to speak them and own them.

And acknowledge them, and you advocate for ourselves.

But I don't know about you, but I still don't do it every time.

I literally just had a phone call a couple of days ago.

Somebody wants me to do something for them.

It's beyond my capacity, and my immediate thing was, how do I make this work?

How do I make it so that I can say yes, so that I don't inconvenience them, Never mind the fact that the original request is actually quite inconvenient to me and overwhelming to me.

But that doesn't matter, right, And I'm like, mak Cheryl, you're a freaking coach.

You've been doing this for a while now, what are you doing right?

But helping another person is not the same as helping ourselves.

That's why I'm so grateful for this conversation.

Yeah, thanks, Cheryl.

I would really like to add one of the reasons we're so prune to melt downs as autistic people has to do with something called the predictive processing model, and that talks about what's actually going on in an autistic system.

And we are bottom up processors, whereas people who are not autistic are top down processors.

So imagine if you're not autistic, you see a newspaper and you can kind of prose the headlines and then make a choice about reading the articles.

When you're autistic, you see everything all at once.

You've got all the tiny words, all the fine print coming at you, and every situation is like that, every sense is like that.

So our systems are flooded with input.

So you can then imagine our cup gets full a lot faster than those who are not bottom up processors.

And so that is why we have the meltdowns that perhaps we're not seeing neurotypical people having, and perhaps why they're having trouble understanding what's going on because it's easy to just read that headlines.

I mean, you can just quickly read them and take a break.

But if you're faced with reading the whole newspaper all at once, that puts a lot of stress on the system.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think also too, like that distinction between needs and desires is like really confusing, thinking that your needs are just desires and that your melttowns are tantrums because you didn't really need your sunglasses or to get out of the sun, or to know what the plan was ahead of time, to know what the menu would be at the restaurant, Like whatever it is, right that gets treated like a desire, and then the meltdown gets treated like a tantrum.

And it's just it's part of the process that we've been working on, right, is learning what is a need and what is in fact not a desire.

Right, Like, there's so many things I've had to learn are not desires and it's not a tantrum for me to be unable to function without that need being met.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I can't I'm sure I'm not claiming I am like some sort of perfect angelic child, but like, I literally can't remember ever throwing a tantrum as a child, Like every instance, and I was an angry, throwing things, screaming and crying child all the time.

I cannot remember an instance of that that did not feel like a massive whirlwind of out of control, like I didn't ask for this, I didn't want this, I can't control it.

Like I'm sure I threw tantrums because I was a kid, like clearly, but when I look back at my childhood and I think of all the times that I had meltdowns, I'm like none of those ever felt like something I was doing for any reason.

It was something that was happening to me.

And it's been very challenging trying to, you know, articulate what's going on now as an adult.

What I'm like, was it all tantrums?

Was it all meltdowns?

Clearly I can't have been one hundred percent either, But like I can't even tell in hindsight, it's hard to tell in the present.

Yeah, but you know, again, if you can identify your needs, you can revert engineer why a meltdown happened, and maybe maybe reverse engineer why a tantrum happened.

Who knows, I'll find one someday, I'm sure.

Yeah, And I think that's it's a great question, you know, you know, if we're trying to look back at childhood, you know, like, oh, what was what were tantrum?

But what we're meltdowns?

But you might not remember your child's with that.

Well, and that's okay, you don't have to necessarily figure all of that out.

But now, because I mean, our audience is largely autistic adults and the people who love them, right, we're not suggesting that this is advice for your you know, five year old autistic child.

Absolutely not No.

They're going to look very different, and we fully acknowledge that, and we don't pretend anything different.

Right, We are all full grown adults who have years of experience kind of navigating the world and masking and unfortunately hiding and hiding our needs, you know, out of a need for survival.

And you know, part of the autism for us, as we've talked about, is like the rediscovery of self, right, the rediscovery of those authentic pieces of us that have had to kind of get put in the basement, so to speak, for a really long time.

So you know, if you're listening and you're like, I don't know what I need.

I don't know what I even want in this life, let alone what I need, right, please know that you are not alone.

All of us, at one time or another has had that experience of like going through years of like you both said, are we even allowed to have needs?

Are we allowed to have lots?

So it's like this is like learning a new language.

We're reintegrating parts of ourselves and we're getting to know parts of ourselves again that we maybe either knew very briefly or maybe never even knew all that.

Well, So I just say that to you know, give yourself grace if you can that this can be a process.

It doesn't have to be a light switch that got flipped like, oh today, I know my needs and I can fight for them and I can do it perfectly.

That's certainly not the reality for most.

And I really just wanted to comment quickly on what you said a radio about most of your meltdowns felt like something that was happening to you.

And I think that's a really interesting way to put it, because I remember, you know, being a child and a teenager and these I would have these meltdowns and it would feel like it would feel like something had taken control of my body and my mind.

It would feel like almost like something had invaded me for that moment and I had no control, and I would feel so guilty about that.

I'm like, well, don't be ridiculous, Cheryl.

Everybody has control, right, you know, like you have.

I literally grew up in a high control religious environment, so the idea that you know, we wouldn't have control would be silly, Like, no, we must have full control of our bodies and minds and our words, which isn't possible or logical, but I would feel so much guilt afterwards that I had said the wrong thing, or that I had hurt somebody's feelings.

And that word you used, Patrice's shame.

It's really big for a lot of us, a lot of autistic adults who, whether they knew that they were, you know, autistic as a child or not, just all these years of feeling like an inconvenience, feeling like a burden, feeling different, feeling that we're out of control of our own bodies and minds are like all of that combines into a lot of guilt and shame, or it can, at least, so just to acknowledge that, like this is not just oh, I had a melt down today, going to give myself a nap and move on.

Like it's tied up into a lot of our self worth, the way we look at ourselves and treat ourselves and value ourselves because we have those narratives a lot of us of being too much and too sensitive.

And I know I'm repeating myself, but it's just so important that the number of times that I heard that as a child, it became part of identity, and it became part of the way I understood the world.

So I'd have a meltdown and I'd be like, Oh, that was so bad, that was so bad.

You're like, why did you have a meltdown?

Why couldn't you just fill in the blank?

Right?

Why couldn't you just dig a deep breath, Why couldn't you just calm down?

Why couldn't you just find a quiet place?

Right?

Almost like we're looking at our childhood through the eyes and the brains of an adult.

We didn't have those tools at the time, right.

Some of us still don't, and that's okay, But just the emotional aspect of meltdowns, I think it's really important to acknowledge, right, this is not just a behavior.

This is intrinsic to how a lot of us feel about ourselves and to how we've been treated by the people around us.

Yeah, and along the topic of knowing what our needs are, starting to think about what our needs are, you know, that can be even scary to do, even that, because for a lot of us, having our needs wasn't allowed for exactly the reason Cheryl you just described.

You know, maybe our caregarvers didn't understand what was going on for us.

Maybe they didn't have the capacity to cope with what they were seeing that they didn't understand what was going on.

And so what a child will do in that circumstance is to decide not to have any needs anymore.

I'll be safe if I don't have any needs.

That was definitely what happened to me.

I'll be competent, I'll be exceptional at everything.

Therefore, I won't need anyone, and I'll just rely on myself.

And so to reach adulthood and to reach a time of no longer being able to continue on that way, you know, that's what burnout kind of does to a lot of us.

We can no longer continue kind of this white knuckling of our lives and confronting, oh, I actually do have needs can be really scary, and so I just really want to underscore how that can be treacherous terrain that's advisable to move towards with a coach, with a therapist.

You don't have to do this alone, because it is really deep work.

If it were so simple, it's just naming needs and getting them met, then we would have done that already.

Yep.

If it was that simple, we would have thought our way out of it.

By now, Yes, No, I think that's that's so important though, I mean, thank you for Patrice for saying that, because you know, it's not like, oh, here's a checklist, Oh this one, this one, and this one, these are mine.

I need to work on these like that might be one little tiny step, but you know, having somebody you trust that you can do this work with is really important because it may bring up a lot of stuff.

The years of not being able to acknowledge ourselves and our needs, right, that can bring up a lot of stuff.

And you know, we have these protective coping mechanisms that will come to the rescue, right like, oh, it's okay.

You know you don't really need that.

It's okay.

You know they didn't they didn't mean to, you know, violate a boundary like it's no, it's no big deal, Like let's just move on, right.

So whatever it is for you, those things can come up and they can be strong when you're trying to do this work.

So I love the idea of not feeling like you have to do it all alone.

And the other thing, maybe I don't know if it's possible if we can link to that test.

Yeah, I can put the VIA test in the show notes.

Yeah, because you know, you both mentioned it, and for some reason I always called it VIA, but we'll go with ya.

I don't care.

It's VIA.

Yeah, it's it's an acronym.

We can do whatever.

Yeah, Yeah, it's fine, it's fine everyone, you know, everyone's brings to work differently.

But just to quickly explain to people, you know what we're talking about here.

This was a test that was originally designed, you know, for for a company to figure out, you know, the strengths of its employees, so that you could put them in the correct departments.

Right, And for us autistic people who have who have worked with Matt in some of Math's workshops, we use it completely differently.

And there are a bunch of questions.

You answer them to the best of your ability as it is right now, and there's going to be a question at the end the little box that you took off saying I am autistic, because it will help them tabulate the results correctly.

And when you get your results, you're going to see all of these so called strengths and it has really nothing to do with strengths if we're being honest.

If you look at the top three to five of your list.

Think of them in terms of values, think about them in terms of what gives me the most bang for my book, most return on my investment.

When I spend time and energy, you know, cultivating these categories.

You know, I feel alive, I feel amazing, I feel like I'm flowing, I feel like I'm enjoy and when we ignore those top of our lists.

So for me, it's things like appreciation of beauty and excellence, love and learning fairness.

Right, when I put my effort and attention on those areas and the activities that represent those areas, right, I'm feeling really good, I'm feeling like my return on investment is high.

But when I ignore it, when I leave that out and I don't have time for it or I don't make time for it, I do feel depleted.

I do feel like I'm kind of swimming through quicksand or whatever.

Yeah, So I just think it would be a really cool tool for a lot of people if they understood not just their needs from the perspective of emotions and you know, physiology, but also what do you need in terms of meaning?

What do you need in terms of your values?

Right?

What do you need to where do you need to be putting your attention and energy so that you can really feel like more autonomy and more in flow.

I don't know.

This could be a piece of some people's.

Puzzle that could be an entire episode.

Honestly, just talking about that, we should spin that off into a whole other topic.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's really important to know both what gives you that flow and also the most efficient way to get in the way of your flow, right, Like, it's important to know like no, that that is going to go to the top of the queue for giving me issues if this gets violated, and.

Looking at the bottom of your list, which I think is really awesome to look at some people as well, because the bottom of my list have things like you know, zest, zest for life and you know, perseverance and self regulation.

And it doesn't mean that I'm bad at those things.

It doesn't mean they're weaknesses.

It just means that I'm not going to get the same level of, like you said, flow, It's going to be harder.

It's going to feel like I am like putting my shoulder down trying to push my way through.

But the reason I mentioned this, and again all credit for this goes to Matt for opening my eyes to this like understanding of values is we put so much energy and the bottom of our list, which for me can lead to meltdowns, right, trying to prove myself, trying to make something work, trying to make something happen.

Right, it's making me feel like I'm not really like I don't know, I'm not sure the right word.

I'm not in flow.

So like, for example, I am going to be meeting with somebody tomorrow who is a marketing expert.

I've got to like a little consult with her and to see if she can help me with that aspect of my business.

Right, I am not a marketer, right, Same with my website.

I paid a person to build my website, and you know I could, I could try to market all myself, but maybe I could get my needs met better if somebody who is really good at that and that does fall on the top of their list rather than me forcing through the bottom of mine.

Fingers crossed.

Yeah, good luck with that, because uh yeah, getting someone else's flow to step in where you have no flow is just a delightful synergy of the human experience.

Yeah, and I wanted to add the non violent communication people.

They put out a beautiful pdf of what are universal human needs and also feelings, and I find that sometimes that's a useful guide.

Perhaps we can also link to that for those who might like to explore.

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

So do we have time to hit one more little topic, one more tiny little topic, or do we need to wrap up and get out of here?

We probably have a little time for one.

More Okay, Well, I just wanted to because this has all been rather heavy and a lot to process.

I was wondering if we could just think of some little hints and tips and tricks for meltdown aftercare, not stopping them, not prematurely ending them, but like once the tide has retreated, once the tea kettle has boiled dry, what do you do?

Because I clearly have not put a lot of thought into that.

So perhaps our audience shares that lack of information with me, and we could talk about a couple of ideas before we close out today.

I love this question.

Yeah.

For me, I need space.

I need space, and we died blanket headphones with some really calming music and imask maybe a walk in the forest.

Yeah, reducing demands, you know, the same way as we need to heal from burnout.

Kind of a meltdown as kind of like a mini burnout recovery.

So I treat it with gentleness, pressure, and slowness.

So not going right back into the task that triggered the melt down.

Okay, okay, that seems.

Walk away, a radio walk away.

But it needs to have done.

No, no, no, yeah no, I love those Patris.

Those are I'm definitely filing those away for myself.

For me, definitely some parallels like nature going for a walk by myself, the trails near my house very very regulating.

A dark room I panic with way to blankets, so I can't do those, but just a dark room, I mask and you know, silence, absolute silence, so I don't have the stimulation coming in through my eyes.

I have like earphones as well, so no, basically sensory deprivation a little bit because I've been in sensory overwhelmed, so kind of get the pendulum just swing backwards a little bit.

Chocolate chocolate helps for me that are living through chemistry, that calming piece for me.

And then like humor, the Funny Show or video clips on you know, social media.

There's anything just funny or like cute animals, you know, anything that doesn't require a huge amount of brain power, or like a comfort show that you've seen so many times you could practically quote it that doesn't require any brain effort at all.

I've noticed that, you know.

I'll be you know, talking to somebody like, oh, do you want to watch blank?

And I'm like, I've never seen that before.

No, thank you.

Like, if I've been in a meltdown mode, I know that I can't take in new stimulation and new information, right, so like kind of just knowing that those kinds of things put me into meltdown.

So like what is the opposite, Well, some lightness, some humor, some space, some removing sensory stimulation.

Sometimes a bath right with things that smell really nice and like the salts in there in the or a diffuser.

It'll help me sometimes.

Yeah, thanks, Cheryl.

You know I want to add one more thing, you know, because the radio what you said makes a really good point.

Sometimes you have to go right back to the thing that cause you to melt down, if you're at work or something.

So what I'll do is, you know, I have water next to me, and even just having a drink of water can sometimes in the moment kind of bring some soothing.

I might hold on to some objects that has some meaning for me, that just to remind myself of where home is.

And there's a trick I learned once that when we're stressed, we're like animals in the wild, like boring in with our eyes on what's causing the danger.

So if we look into our peripheral vision, that sends a signal to your body it's okay, you can calm down here.

And I find that in the moment, if I can't just leave, these things do provide some relief.

I will then have to make an appointment later though, to be under my blanket and having more more extensive recovery.

Well, that's a really good point, Patrice and a radio, both of you like as much as the perfect world would be nice to have.

Well, these are my ten key steps to recovering from a meltdown.

Like sometimes we're on an airplane, sometimes we're at work, sometimes we're you know, at the grocery store.

So yeah, having some other tricks that can be more in the moment that can be really helpful.

I've heard for some people that humming can be really helpful.

Yes, that helps a lot too.

Yeah, And for me when I was teaching and I just it was just like I was teaching grade five at the time, and it was like sensory hell, and I would like, if I could get somebody to cover, I would go for two minutes just to the washroom, shut the door, and I'd just be like like take ten breaths, you know what I mean, and that I would go back like I couldn't leave my kids for too long.

But like being able to just take a breath breathing.

I know it's crazy, but like breathing intentional breathing can sometimes really help after a meltdown as well, not necessarily meditation, because meditation can sometimes leave you with a lot of expectations on oh my mind's not quiet enough for me.

I'm just talking about like actually taking a full inhale and exhil Yeah.

Well, thank you both for those tips.

I will definitely be thinking about that moving forward, because, yeah, I was really disappointed with myself the other day when I realized I had no aftercare strategies at all, like that, that's a prummer.

So hopefully that helped some of our audience as well.

Thank you both for this lovely and interesting discussion about meltdowns, which covered both our specific experiences of meltdowns as well as some broader themes that unify the autistic meltdown experience across individuals.

We hope that you and the audience learned something about yourself or the autistic people in your life that will help you navigate the next meltdown, because if there is one thing that is sure about the future, it is that more meltdown triggers will present themselves.

As a reminder, we are all peer support coaches within the Autistic peer support coaching collective, offering a variety of free and paid intentionally autistic spaces.

You can learn more and follow us at our website Autistic coaches dot com.

You can support us by sharing the podcast with your friends, peers, and anyone who lives with, works with, or loves an autistic person.

Thank you for listening to us talking about Autistic Stuff for Autistic People.

Until next time, find an autistic friend and discuss meltdown recovery tips with them.

See you later.

Autistic Stuff for Autistic People is a production of Fox and Draven Media.

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