How to have autistic meltdowns without hating yourself

How self-compassion, radical honesty AND OTHER SECRET STUFF can help you ride the emotional wave of your autistic/ADHD meltdowns. Hang ten 🤙

Austin 3:16 says surf’s up!

— Tw: abuse, suicide —

Hi, I’m mentally ill. 

Hi mentally ill, I’m Dad. 

I have a complicated relationship with my father. His biggest fear was being around people like me. My biggest fear was being around people like him. I come to find out, there’s a lot more people like him in the world, which is why I’m considered the weird one. 

He used to do this quirky thing, whenever I got in trouble, where he’d come home from work and dress me down while getting undressed. It wasn’t sexual, but I feel like showing me his dick was part of it. 

It was a dominance ritual, probably passed down by generations of Irishmen, all traumatized directly or indirectly by the potato famine, British occupation, or their own cuisine. 

His goal was never to figure out why I was struggling in school or engaging in impulsive, dissociative behaviors. His goal was to dominate me.

As a devout Catholic and corporate lawyer, he can only see the world through the lens of law and order. There’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to do things. Good and evil. Winners and losers. He’s completely brain rotted by vertical morality.

He wanted his first-born son to follow in his bootlicking footsteps. When I resisted, he took it as a personal affront. 

That’s what I remember most about it— how personally he took my “failure.” I put failure in quotation marks because I was only a failure according to the lofty expectations inside his head. As an adult, I realize he put so much pressure on me because he’s probably autistic himself. He’s consumed by pretty severe OCD and chronic dysregulation. He tells himself a very black and white story and can’t deviate from it whatsoever. 

Me, reacting the way a traumatized person would react when they’re being traumatized, went against the image (that only existed in his mind) of him being a loving, emotionally engaged parent. His ego couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance, so he took out his dysregulation on me. As a kid, I just couldn’t understand why this grown man wouldn’t stop screaming at me. 

As an adult, I understand the pattern more clearly. What does the government do when there’s a rebellion? It squashes it, civil rights be damned. It exercises very little restraint and tries to make an example out of people, just like my dad tried to make an example out of me. It was always about power and control. 

This became especially clear after I quit the football team in high school. That’s when his disdain for me really turned up to 11. He had visions of me playing collegiality, a reality that looked promising after I hauled in seven touchdowns my freshman year. I even served as an emergency backup on varsity for a couple games. The problem was, I had no one in my life to help me process what I was going through internally— you know, the whole undiagnosed autism thing that continuously got swept under the rug to protect his ego?

I went to the same school, with the same 25-ish kids, from kindergarten through eighth grade. High school, especially with the added time commitment of football practice and workouts, was a transition my nervous system just couldn’t handle. I hit burnout my sophomore year, completely shut down and quit the team. 

My dad was disgusted with me. I couldn’t look him in the eyes for months, something he’d mock me for. 

“Look me in the eye when I’m talking to you, boy!“ 

He was the warden and I was the prisoner. He’d barge into my room, trying to catch me relaxing. He’d slam on the bathroom door if I took too long of a shower. He’d pick a fight with me if I wasn’t ready to jump up and help him with yard work at a moment’s notice. He’d come home and interrogate me every night: 

“Did you help your mom with the dishes? Did you clean the bathroom like I asked? Did you study for your test on Friday? Did you take out the garbage? Did you take out the recyclables? Did you finish that job application? Are you applying for colleges?”

Fun fact: Autistic people often struggle with eye contact, transitions and demands. 

There was no escape from this man. He was a relentless taskmaster, motivated by spite. All that said, I think what annoyed me most about him is that he’d quote Larry the Cable Guy unironically. 

“IF I HAVE TO TELL YOU ONE MORE TIME, YOU’RE GROUNDED! IT’S TIME TO GET ‘ER DONE!”

God, he’s so lame. 

One time, he called me a faggot on the back porch. 

That word hit me like a Mario star. I got this sudden burst of adrenaline. I reared back my fist and aimed for his head. 

“GROUND ME FOR THIS, MOTHERFUCKER!” 

He caught my fist and pinned me to the ground. A primal scream bellowed from the deepest part of my soul. I wanted the neighbors to hear. I wanted them to know how much pain I was in, because no one in my house seemed to give a shit. 

That punch not landing was my 9/11. 

He’s lucky there wasn’t a gun in the house. I would’ve made the Menendez brothers look like the Jonas Brothers. 

I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there!

Week after week, he’d scream me into a meltdown, then ground me for it, mistaking my nervous system reaction for disobedience and lack of respect. Of course, we didn’t call them meltdowns at the time. 

Hissy fits. Temper tantrums. The language was always demeaning. He’d never take responsibility for his side of things. 

A few years ago, I wrote him a letter, apologizing for how I acted in high school, hoping it would lead to a deeper conversation. He told me, “I liked your letter,” gave me half-a-hug and we’ve never spoken about it since.

Ah, the Irish… 

I still have nightmares about his lectures. I wasn’t allowed to leave the room unless I apologized CONVINCINGLY ENOUGH and agreed to WORK HARDER. Any time I tried to explain myself, it was shot down as “excuses.” I was forced to deny my inner experience and accept his worldview— that any problem I had was simply a result of my laziness and moral inadequacy. 

It got to a point where I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I was punching holes in the wall, stealing money and alcohol, sneaking out my bedroom window, picking up half-smoked cigarettes at the park and smoking them inside a Port-A-Potty. I went full Bart Simpson. 

I’d come home, get caught and then barricade myself in my room, threatening to kill myself if my parents called the cops. I even started cursing. 

As the meltdowns got worse and more frequent, it culminated with him trying to kick me out of the house at 18. My mom jumped in and stopped it, traumatized from her experience of her mom doing the same to her. 

The meltdowns didn’t stop, even when I was away at college. They became less frequent, as I no longer had the Grim Reaper stomping around upstairs, but I was still caught in the cycle. Every couple weeks, I’d have some embarrassing episode.

I was drinking and chain-smoking every night like a retired bartender. I’d melt down online, writing long, cringey Facebook rants directed at my family, ex-girlfriends or the college’s administration. Some nights, I’d drink a bag of wine and wake up in jail or in some random backyard. I even skipped a few classes. 

I needed understanding. I needed guidance. I needed help. Instead, I got a criminal record, academic probation and a reputation as a loose cannon who you probably don’t want at your party. 

As an adult, I’ve noticed my meltdowns are heavily tied to the quality of my relationships and financial security. When my basic needs are being met and I have friends— my mental health is relatively stable (fucking imagine that!). When my future isn’t as certain and I start self-isolating— I tend to fly off the handle more, losing myself in doom spirals, fixating on worst possible scenarios and having flashbacks to the traumatic feelings of my childhood. 

At first, I blamed it on the alcohol. I got sober for a year and a half. The meltdowns got worse. 

Next, I blamed it on myself. There must be something wrong with me, right? I must be bipolar! I must be having manic episodes! The doctor prescribed me 500 mg of Depakote and within four days I was so suicidal I ended up in the mental hospital for a week. The meltdowns got worse. 

Next, I blamed it on my job. Taking 10,000 steps a day, pallet-jacking thousands of pounds of shrubbery across a smoldering Home Depot parking lot can’t be good for my mental health, right? I quit and got an office job. The meltdowns got worse.

At 29, my life was in complete shambles. I had no money, chronic pain and crushing debt. I could barely muster the strength to get out of bed in the morning, let alone apply for jobs. I didn’t see a path forward that didn’t result in me having more meltdowns. I was tired of traumatizing my wife. I was tired of being a burden. Death was beginning to sound more appealing, like falling back into a comfortable beanbag chair.

Oh, how I yearn to R-E-L-A-X.

Every night when I closed my eyes, I’d see vivid fantasies of my own death. I felt the pressure of the blade as it penetrated my wrists and throat, the yank of the hangman’s knot as the stool toppled over, the smell of carbon monoxide as I took one final swig of beer, washing down sleeping pills in the front seat of my running car. 

I imagined killing myself in a grand spectacle, swan diving off the Hoan Bridge or strapping some kind of bomb to my chest and walking into a deserving corporation’s headquarters dual-wielding AR-15s. I felt the darkness closing in on me. I imagined myself swiveling back and forth in a turret, blasting away the descending zombie hoard. 

After about six months of this nightly routine, I came to a chilling, albeit shortsighted conclusion: 

I am unsafe. I will always be unsafe. Violence is the only solution. 

All of a sudden, I was no longer the narrator of Fight Club— I had become Tyler Durden. 

Violence is the last resort of an animal backed into a corner, of a person whose nervous system is so fried— their reality becomes irreparably warped. 

All of a sudden, a snide jab from my boss felt like one of the zombies crawled up my back and took a bite out of my neck. In that situation— you don’t think, you just flail, like a fish in a pelican’s beak. 

Fun fact: Being “in trouble,” having my experiences invalidated and being trapped in rooms are all big meltdown triggers for me as an adult. But no, you’re right, I need to stop blaming everything on my father and just get over it already! 

I’m doing better now. I want to murder my dad less. My meltdowns are a lot tamer than they used to be— more infrequent, too. But I didn’t see any improvement whatsoever until I completely reframed the way I looked at meltdowns and their role in the story of my life. 

What is a meltdown? 

Whether you call them meltdowns, manic episodes, trauma responses, or just-plain wild-cattin’— some people with autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, cPTSD and PTSD really struggle with these heightened states of nervous system activation— so it’s useful for us to try to understand them. 

It’s especially useful if you’re the one having the meltdowns. 

Purely from my own lived experience, I would define meltdowns as times when I felt so overwhelmed, I no longer possessed the decision-making capacity to not react out of pure anger and frustration. In laymen’s terms: I saw red, freaked out and completely lost my shit. 

I like to use this helpful graphic from Sony Jane Wise, the lived-experience educator:

Please don’t sue me for using this, I just genuinely found it helpful. 😰 Buy their book.

We’ve all seen children have meltdowns. This is because their frontal lobe, the part of the brain that’s responsible for impulse control and decision making, is underdeveloped. At 30, I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, two conditions that (YOU GUESSED IT) are associated with having an abnormal or underdeveloped frontal lobe. 

Holy shit, Scoob, we cracked the case! Lift up Tyler Durden’s mask— turns out it’s been a traumatized disabled guy this entire time! 

After my diagnosis, I immediately had two thoughts: 

1. What a weight of my shoulders. I’m so glad I don’t have to keep beating myself up

2. I need to learn about autism to see if it has any answers on how to stop having these damn meltdowns before I start hoarding Nitroglycerin

I hate being an asshole. It’s part of the reason I self-isolate when I’m feeling dysregulated— I don’t like spreading my shit around to other people. It’s why I used to drink. It’s why I’m currently stoned at 11:13 a.m. (in my defense, I’m writing this on Nov. 6, 2024). 

I hate being the guy who blows up every two days. That’s what my dad used to do. I can’t just turn around and do the same thing to my family. The buck stops with me, bitch. 

---

5 ways to reduce the severity and frequency of autistic/ADHD meltdowns

The following are five strategies, or ways of thinking about meltdowns, that have helped me personally. Take what works for you and leave the rest. Add your own neurodivergent meltdown tips and tricks in the comments, so this page can be a good resource for future travelers. 

1. Practice self-compassion 

I’m gonna keep bringing up Kristin Neff’s “Self-Compassion” whether you like it or not, because I genuinely believe this singular concept, if taught to children, would fundamentally change our country for the better.

[Boomer enters]

NAH FUCK THAT SHIT, TRUMP 2024! WE DID IT, BABY! WE’RE NOT JUST A BUNCH OF EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE PEOPLE HAVING A DIFFERENT KIND OF MELTDOWN… 🙄 WHY WUD YOU SAY THAT ABOUT US !! ? 😱 🇺🇲

If I see a mushroom cloud, I’m walking into it. Anyways…

Part of the reason those of us who suffer from meltdowns have a tendency to sweep shit under the rug is because we live in a reputation-based society. Our safety is dependent on our ability to project a certain image of ourselves to the world. I think we have it all wrong. 

I think, instead of seeing ourselves as mini-corporations, brands to be leveraged into capital, we should see people for what they are— sensory beings who are just as capable of good as we are of evil, just as susceptible to violence as the people we deem “bad,” and just as capable of blossoming into the people we think of as “good.” 

The goal, then, especially if you’re someone who struggles with meltdowns, should be to stop wasting all this energy worrying about how people perceive you, and instead channel it into taking care of your sensory needs so you can show up in a more regulated state for yourself and the people around you. 

When your house floods, you don’t plug your bathtub and flood your house EVEN MORE as PUNISHMENT for it being such a WEAK HOUSE. So why do we do flood ourselves with even more negative emotions after having a meltdown? The more logical thing to do would be to grab a fucking towel. 

There are three parts to self-compassion, that differentiate it from the self-esteem movement, which had some… obvious flaws. 

• Self-kindness: Showing up for yourself in times of discomfort and pain. For me, this meant not increasing my suffering by beating myself up after meltdowns. 

• Common humanity: Finding solace in community. A lot of people struggle with these issues and engaging with them puts our suffering into the proper context. 

• Mindfulness: When grounded, we’re able to be more mindful of how our reactions affect the people around us. Mindfulness involves both noticing and owning our painful emotions and drawing boundaries when we feel ourself being pushed past the point of no return. 

We’re essentially the project manager of our own emotions. There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of egos involved, and you need to validate all parts of yourself (even the ugly parts) to keep the machine running smoothly. 

You need to make peace with the darkest elements of your soul, otherwise their frustration (from being ignored) will keep building up and billowing over. You need to walk into the enchanted forest, knock on the ogre’s door and hand him a plate of onion rings with ear wax dipping sauce. 

I’m trying to be more like a plant. I need to water myself. I need to spend time in the sun. I need to get really high and beat off once a week— this is how I keep my nervous system regulated. I take baths now. I listen to bedroom pop. I go to the library. 

Come to think of it, my dad never could keep a plant alive. Classic over-waterer. 

2. Embrace radical honesty 

I write honestly about my mental health— not because I’m some keyboard warrior begging for good boy points on the internet— but because I’ve been to hell, I’ve shaken hands with the devil and nihilism fucking sucks. I’m running from that. 

For a long time, I didn’t have the language or desire to explain what was happening to me. I blocked my meltdowns from my memory, like I’d seen my father do a million times before. The difference is— I’m talking about it now. He’s not. 

A lot of readers are gonna accuse me of being “too vulnerable” or “trauma dumping”— I do this for a reason. I want to normalize radical honesty. My writing is a test. 

If you can listen to me, the Trish Paytas of Autism™, cry on the kitchen floor about my daddy issues, without cringing into the next dimension, congratulations— now you understand how hard this is going to be. 

If sane people like us want to survive the Christian-Nationalist hellscape we’re being dragged into, we need to relearn how to communicate. 

Communication isn’t all about yapping. Arguably the most important aspect of radical honesty— the part that everyone seems to forget— is developing the ability to sit in discomfort and validate other people’s experiences. 

Holding space for people is difficult. It can be taxing on our nervous systems. Sometimes we have visceral reactions to other peoples’ truths, but it’s important to make them feel heard, without rushing to judgment, giving advice, or changing the subject. 

When you’re judgmental, even if you’re technically “right,” you build walls between yourself and other people. They get defensive. You get defensive. You’re fixin’ to spend an afternoon hurling ad hominem insults at each other like two boomers on Facebook. That helps nobody.

If you want people to be more empathetic towards you and your meltdowns, you’ll need to practice being more empathetic to other people first. From there, you’ll start to develop the capacity and confidence to be radically honest about your own trauma, which will help heal the parts of you that cause you to have meltdowns in the first place. 

3. Learn how to ride the wave 🌊 🏄 

We have to understand our meltdowns before we can take steps towards mitigating them. Once you understand the pattern, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. I like to imagine my meltdowns like a wave. 

These pictures are cropped poorly. I’m aware of that. OCD gang is gonna have to cut me some slack.

At the top of the crest, we have euphoria, blind optimism, Dancing in the Moonlight by King Harvest. In my 20s, I’m doing stand up comedy for a crowd of three people and getting black out drunk in the basement of a bowling alley. In my 30s, I’m doing edibles, writing articles and listening to bedroom pop that sounds like Play Station 2 loading screen music.

PUMP THIS SHIT INTO MY VEINS!

In my 40s, I’m hoping to find a stable career.

Then comes the crash. I can feel myself dropping and I’m grasping for air. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I start to feel overstimulated and under-stimulated at the same time. Substance use increases, but instead of helping me calm down like it normally does, it just accelerates my downward momentum. From the outside, it looks like the drugs and alcohol are causing these meltdowns, when in reality, they’re my feeble attempt at preventing them. I’m trying to create a soft landing so I don’t put any more holes in the wall. I’m trying to comfort the dragon through the storm. Sometimes I get a little burned.  

Down here at the bottom of the wave, you have the meltdown, which can last anywhere from a couple hours to a couple of days, depending on the consequences of my actions and how much I beat myself up about it afterwords. 

When the depression gets boring, I start to climb my way out, these days by deleting TikTok, writing about the experience and doing something special, like going to a drive-in and getting chicken fingers and a root beer float with my wife. 

By engaging in my special interests and utilizing (mostly) healthy coping mechanisms, I can generate enough positive momentum to get me headed back towards equilibrium. 

The problem is, I don’t stop there. I fly into orbit. I have a couple good days and become unconscious of my sensory needs again. I start pushing myself beyond my capacity— and the cycle continues. 

Now that we understand the anatomy of our meltdown wave, the question becomes: 

When do I notice myself having a meltdown? 

Before it’s happening? As it’s happening? After it happens? Not at all? 

The sooner you realize you’re having a meltdown, the more time you have to plan accordingly. Let’s start where most people start:

Not noticing the meltdown at all

(See my father) 

Noticing after the meltdown

I’m in my visual aid era. ✨

When I was in college, I wouldn’t notice I was having a meltdown until I woke up in the drunk tank next to a toothless tweaker in a shirt with a picture of a wolf on it.

Now, as much as I love Chester and wish him the best— this is not an ideal pattern to have play out repeatedly in my life, can we agree on that? I needed to start noticing my meltdowns much earlier, or I was gonna end up just like him, homeless and very fashionable. 

Noticing during the meltdown 

After my hip injury, I started having meltdowns at work. I’d be whipping plants around, ranting to myself, punching the steering wheel and screaming at the top of my lungs. One time I gave a customer the finger— I was truly unhinged there for a hot second. Working in retail will do that to a motherfucker. 

Because I didn’t want to bring that energy home to my wife, I’d usually pick up a six-pack of IPAs on the way home and spend the rest of the night disassociating on the couch by myself. 

No mugshot this time, but because I didn’t notice until during the meltdown, I didn’t have the executive functioning capacity to choose a healthier coping mechanism. 

Noticing on the ramp-up to the meltdown

S/o to my wife for helping me with these.

I was supposed to go to a Halloween party last weekend. We didn’t know the people who owned the house, and when I saw myself in costume in the mirror, I was hit with a debilitating fear of being perceived.

“I’m kinda having a meltdown right now,” I said, as I paced around the room. I used the qualifier “kinda,” because I didn’t want to admit it to myself. We were going to see my wife’s friend and I didn’t want to ruin her night out. 

Meltdowns feel horrendous and embarrassing. They take a huge emotional toll on the people around us. It fucks up the rest of your day, for sure.

How can I expect to hold down a job or show up consistently for friends when I can’t even handle looking like a Dollar Tree Stone Cold Steve Austin for two hours? 

I wanted to die.

Despite my several assurances that I’d be fine so long as we picked up a six-pack of Natural Light on the way, my wife decided, in her infinite wisdom, that it wasn’t a good idea for us to go to the party. 

“Why didn’t we have this discussion four days ago?” I asked, frustrated with myself. “Why do I keep agreeing to shit without thinking about it first?” 

I’m still too late.

I haven’t perfected this system yet, but I’m beginning to notice my meltdowns sooner, which is a huge accomplishment considering where I was just six months ago. I don’t know this for a fact, but according to my therapist, the more you reach down and touch the water, the less frequent your meltdowns become. In other words, your wave gets longer and more spread out, going from the chronically dysregulated wave on the right to the more chill-to-have-at-parties wave on the left:

Damn that’s a cool ass wave.

4. Lean into your support system

A neurodivergent-affirming therapist can help facilitate this process for you, supporting you through the inevitable ups-and-downs that come with being on the spectrum. 

In therapy, the traumas that trigger our meltdowns can become topics of expansion. As you bump into the same pain points over and over again, you and your therapist will develop a deeper understanding of their anatomy. All of a sudden, it’s not this scary thing that you can barely talk about. It’s something you’ve been discussing candidly for years. You develop a shorthand, which allows you to jump ahead in the story, gobbling up and processing trauma like a self-integrated Hungry, Hungry Hippo™.

You become more of an expert on yourself. It’s easier to notice the subconscious patterns that play out within you when you have someone else to use as a mirror. I would argue, it’s kind of essential, if not through therapy, then by some other means— a trusted friend, parent, or stripper— you need relationships to keep you grounded so you don’t turn into the Unabomber, babe. A man in a world with no mirrors doesn’t know what he looks like.

If you can’t afford therapy because you can’t afford health insurance in this godforsaken Sarlacc pit of a country, engaging in neurodivergent content on social media can provide some much-needed relief in a pinch.

At some point in the near future, I will take the time to put together a giant list of cool neurodivergent content creators I’ve come across over the years. In the meantime, here are a few positive affirmations you can tell yourself while having a meltdown, stolen from courtesy of the Lived Experience Educator’s Instagram page:

5. Use meltdowns as information

Something in me clicked when my therapist said: 

“The goal may not be to never have a meltdown again. Meltdowns are a part of the autistic experience and they’re great information. Your body is trying to express a need.” 

— My therapist, who probably doesn’t want to be associated with this website lmao

When our check engine light comes on, we don’t yeet our car into the lake. We grab the owner’s manual and pop open the hood. 

Fostering that kind of curiosity about yourself is hard, especially when every couple days, you turn into a binge-drinking monster man who comes home ranting about the government. It’s easy to conveniently sweep some of that shit under the rug, the way my dad’s antics were often explained away with, “That’s just how he is,” or “You know your father.” 

Maybe instead of worrying so much about preserving our reputations, we get curious about our outbursts, sans judgment, and start taking tangible steps away from hurting the people we love. 

When you have a meltdown, your body is trying to tell you something:

“Pssst! We need to get the fuck away from this guy!”

“Pssst! We’re fucking exhausted and we need a break!”

“Pssst! This job is a fucking pointless waste of our life!”

Neurotypicals have this little mouse that whispers in their ear, telling them important things like when it’s time to eat and go to bed. We neurodivergents have the same thing, only our mouse is the size of Master Splinter and he hits us in the back of the head with a boat oar.

Master Splinter doesn’t fuck around. You ignore his teachings at your own peril.

In my 20s, I had a lot of alcohol-related meltdowns. Not coincidentally, I did a lot of that drinking in extremely overstimulating environments.

At 31, I’ve done enough noticing to notice, pretty unequivocally, that being in loud, bright, socially taxing places is devastating for my nervous system. 

It’s pretty easy for your drinking, and thus your emotions, to get out of control when your sensory diet consists of uncomfortable stools, urinal cake fumes and pin ball machine noises. Once I noticed that feeling enough times, I stopped associating bars with relaxation and stated going to the library more often instead. 

That’s the thing about noticing, it doesn’t change the patterns overnight. You notice, you notice, you notice, and then when the pattern becomes so obvious that you can’t possibly ignore it any longer— that’s when you start to change.

We can’t force people to understand us. But we can seek to understand ourselves, our patterns and our needs to better show up for those people. 

By practicing self-compassion, being radically honest, riding the wave, leaning into our support system and using meltdowns as information, we can build a life that works for us. We can take back our autonomy and live in better harmony with our bodies and the world.

We can have meltdowns without hating ourselves. 

And all of our dads can suck a dick.