Comments on: Overload thresholds really are pretty relative to the person.

By: andreashettle

andreashettle — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 23:23:58 +0000

In re-reading this post today (after following a link from somewhere else), it occurs to me that there is a certain rough parallel here to one of your posts on asthma: a certain level of functioning (whether lung capacity or neurological functioning) may be perfectly normal for one person but dangerously unsafe for another. Which is why it can be risky to assume that the "warning signals" or symptoms for some kind of crash (whether asthmatic crisis or a shutdown/meltdown etc) are necessarily going to be universal for everyone prone to similar types of crash downs.

By: Bridge Load Limit « Andrea’s Buzzing About:

Bridge Load Limit « Andrea’s Buzzing About: — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:02:19 +0000

[…] wrote a pithy blogpost on 6th May, 2006, making the excellent point that what constitutes a sensory overload threshold for […]

By: n.

n. — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 09:48:15 +0000

This is so interesting. I don’t know what else to say but “another lightbulb”, as usual…
I think it’s not stating the obvious, but rather stating the “should-be-obvious”, the “why didn’t I think of that?!” sort of thing.

By: andrea

andrea — Sun, 07 May 2006 11:38:48 +0000

Wow, this is an excellent post! It really does make a difference for where the “normal” baseline is for an individual. My hubby is finally beginning to understand that my pain threshold is way higher than his, but my social chit-chat threshold is way lower, et cetera ad nauseum. Mostly ad nauseum.

andrea

By: ballastexistenz

ballastexistenz — Sun, 07 May 2006 08:08:07 +0000

Yeah. When I said that, I didn’t mean anything like shut up and quit whining. I did mean, though, that it’s a fairly standard (as in, standard for an autistic, not necessarily standard for me or any particular autistic) kind of shutdown, and not necessarily (as the poster before me, not you, said) a seizure, and definitely not requiring (as you came up with) a psychological explanation such as a flashback to a certain time period in someone’s life. Since people seemed to be trying to figure out exactly what had gone on, and it sounded more like shutdown than anything particularly exotic. I wasn’t even writing in reply to the first post, but the later conversation between people trying to figure out what could cause that.

By: Pyraxis

Pyraxis — Sun, 07 May 2006 03:17:54 +0000

I remember, last summer, posting a very long and emotional account on WrongPlanet about one of my first in-person experiences with autistic overload, and you replied to it with "Sounds like fairly ordinary shutdown to me". I misinterpreted it exactly as you described, as one of those vacuous statements whose hidden meaning is "Shut up, quit whining and pretending like your thoughts are a big deal". I remember sitting there and trying to feel grateful for being knocked down. Society's conditioning can be too pervasive.

By: Kristina Chew

Kristina Chew — Sat, 06 May 2006 19:49:28 +0000

This post and the previous one exactly cohere with Charlie’s Saturday—-overloads of anxiety and gastrointestinal distress, over and over.

It was good to read this one especially.