I’ve sort of had several distinct kinds of things happen:

meltdowns – I feel extremely upset and start behaving in a compulsive, unpleasant sort of way as a result

dissociation – I get extremely scared and freeze up, and then find that I can’t move, my vision gets strange and I feel numb emotionally

overload – I have too much noise, mental effort, disturbing sensations, etc and start feeling extremely tired, freezing up, and not processing or reacting to things

Actually, overload and dissociation feel similar, but the way to deal with it is totally different. Dissociation and meltdowns look and feel different from each other but are solved the exact same way. Overload is solved by just ‘stopping whatever is going on and taking a break’ while the other two are solved by my parents convincing me that they haven’t stopped loving me.

I also was told my sensory sensitivity to sudden loud sounds, was a phobia, and I need to get over that phobia. Unbelivable, but I guess in Special Ed it was “Make your problems go away, so it’s easier for NTs to be around you.” right?

Oh I also was told not to shutdown, I don’t want to go into what I did instead because it might be triggering to some people. I mean it was super bad, but still. So great job schools, telling a person to exchange a rather harmless way of coping, with one that’s harmful.

This on top of the Phoebe Prince story, I’m starting to wonder why people would send their children to public school at all unless they had to. It’s becoming more of a unsupervised warehouse of children, then a place of learning.

Just as the shutdown was not an episode of dissociation, an episode of overload is not an episode of anxiety. However, I have massive anxiety about going into overload, because it usually entails physical pain for me, and once I’m in overload, I have massive anxiety about how long the pain will last. So I live with a lot of fear about overload, and I’m still trying to figure out how to work with that.

Rather, what tends to happen is, no matter how happy/fun-having I am, eventually everything will start to seem all sped-up and my visual field will start to resolve itself into specific objects less and less. I do not consider this a horrible thing, but it was definitely annoying growing up to have this going on and not know what it was and have everyone tell me repeatedly that I needed to “work on my social phobias” and whatnot.

As I’ve blogged about, I spent lots of years on hefty doses of benzos (and then neuroleptics as well) for “anxiety” that wasn’t anxiety at all. Not that I haven’t developed some of the real deal too, mind.

Distinguishing between what’s really anxiety/PTSD and what is neurological is important, and there just isn’t the common knowledge which would help people.

I’m starting to be able to sort out what is overload and what is really anxiety–and to work on decoupling the two. Overload does not always have to be further anxiety-producing. In some cases, it looks like another of those self-fulfilling prophecies, when people keep going on about your “anxiety”.

There is anxiety associated with the seizure, but usually not too much. The worst of it is behind me, after all. But in that aftermath, speech is just too much work for my brain to cope with.

The whole explanation is a good analogy.

Pretty much everything we do puts stress on us in some way. Walking puts stress on our feet, legs, and joints. Typing puts stress on our fingers, wrists, arms, and so on.

I’ll stop now, but I hope I made some sense?

The funny thing is that my first “panic attack” was not like most of my later panic attacks, many of which probably WERE legitimate panic attacks resulting from a state of extreme fear combined with overload. What actually happened that first time was that I lost the ability to speak coherently, I had trouble understanding people’s words, and I kept stimming. I wasn’t really nervous at all as much as I was in a state of mental disarray, there was too much going on for me. I had gone to a restaurant with a relatively large amount of people and gotten a new dish, which was actually pretty good, but I was kind of disconcerted too. I was brought to the hospital, and my father suggested that someone must have slipped something in my drink, although nothing came up on my blood test. Now when I have these kinds of problems, I do have extreme anxiety, but I think for me this is based around the fear that I won’t be able to act the way people want, and they will do harmful things to me as a result. As I’m starting to learn more, I don’t think this is actually social anxiety either. This isn’t a “What will people think of me” thing as much as it’s a “Don’t hurt me” thing. And yeah, that’s scary, it’s scary not being able to stand up for myself and not knowing how other people will act. I’m having a thing now were certain abilities (like speech) seem to be dropping off as I start to take on more than I can handle, although I eventually regain them once things are more under control. This is kind of scary although I read that it’s much harder to institutionalize a non-homeless adult than an adolescent, especially in the states that will give you a court hearing before doing that for more than a day or two.

One time we had to go to the bank to cancel two of my accounts. The bank interior was of a certain kind which is very sensory unfriendly to me. I wasn’t stressed though. It wasn’t until we had to go talk to some guy that I noticed I had gone some way into shutdown, because I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. It was good my partner was there, or I’d have ended up with gods know what, and walked under a bus on the way home (because my body also seems to operate on its own according to basic scripts as far as I can tell, when shutdown progresses to a certain point. They do not seem to be the best scripts ever :S. I am safer on a bicycle).

I also don’t always shut down due to overload, there are various reactions to what I suspect are slightly different types of situations. Some of them lead to outbursts, others to me not shutting down but having no resources left to do anything but things that come very very easy to me, while yet others lead to shutdown (which does indeed feel like a shutting down of functions or systems or something, I know which ones tend to go first for me, and if the situation is more intense then more stuff seems to get shut down to deal with it. It’s always the understanding of words that goes first, though I can then still usually do speech patterns, which is not good actually because I have landed in trouble before by throwing out answers I think would fit, and using ‘yes’ as the default answer to a certain pattern because I found it ends the situation fastest.)

Outbursts happen when what happens doesn’t fit the model of it that was in my head, this also goes for when objects are not where my head says they should be. It has to be fairly intense though, or a last drop kind of thing.

Problem: having a model of how I think things will go, helps me get through situations and such more easily, with less overload and lower chances of shutdown. However, when they don’t match up, things are even worse than when I didn’t make a model/expectations at all (I can be sure that after that, I won’t be able to function at all the rest of the day), and the outbursts are very unpleasant for me and for others around me. When I don’t make a model/expectations, I can be sure I won’t bother anyone else, but I can be fairly sure I will experience much more overload and chances of shutdown are much higher (though functioning will be more evenly divided over time this way), which may not be as burdensome on others, but are just as unpleasant for me as an outburst.

So I’ve figured out when outbursts happen, but I’m not sure what makes the difference between overload-with-shutdown and overload-without-shutdown for me.