Is this a "melt down" ? Is this normal?

Hi, 

So ive been very run down lately , questioning my life, whT im doing, im not coping well with certain aspects but its been just bubbiling under the servjce where i can feel im depressed but in functioning. 

Today however i was sent over the edge , plans that had been madr where cancelled and i couldnt xope with the unexpected change, let down and financial implication.

This sebt me into an emotional pit / panic. I then began to rage and started punching my head and digging flesh out of my arm.woth my nails.

This is a more extreme freak out for me that has happrned before but i never put it down to possibly a melt down/ autism thing as ive only jyst been diagnosed.

Is this possuble or am i just unstable? Does anypne else have these more violent episodes and how can i cause myself less harm? 

On a weird note the head punching and flesh pinching calms me down 

  • "Have a nice day!". Well at least they were polite!Grin

    Sometimes things like that happen and you do think to yourself about what you could have done. I've had situations where someones got me in a bad position at a bad time. Worst you can do is dwell on it, but it seems you aren't. I've carried things like that around for years before. It was a waste of time and energy. I realised one day that all of the ****holes I was thinking of probably weren't thinking about me.

  • Actually a colleague of mine did get pulled over and got a b*m search but afterwards they just breezed him off with the proverbial 'have a nice day.'  I am beginning to wonder now if Igot that right......

    I did not stand up to that woman as much as I should have done. It was a pretty dark time, got pretty traumatised by what happened really. I'd had a nightmare a few months before about being arrested and not knowing why. It was only a dream, it is not real on waking up. 

  • Airports are the worst places to have to try and hold it all in. I ******* hate the places. All of the noise, movement, information and those bloody flourescent lights. Pretty much anyone on the spectrum must have a mare of a time in them, I know I do.

    The last time I went through an airport I had to get pretty intoxicated. It didn't help when my friend refused to go through the scanner after a few polite requests (he's watched too many YouTube videos about conspiracy nonsense), I was getting more and more nervous. He held up the queue for about 5 minutes. In the end the he asked the girl if they could do it another way. I'd had enough I was trying to hold all the pressure in or as Martian Tom said "red-lining" (I like that one, it sums it up nicely!), I ended up saying "Yeah they can, see those rooms over there? They can take you in there, make you strip and look inside your ***". He ended up walking straight through, all the other lads were laughing and the girl said "Thank you, sir" and was laughing herself. I was so nervous though. Going through an airport is bad enough anyway. I can laugh at it now but at the time it made my nerves bad for a few days. The whole experience.

    Sorry to hear about your experience with that lady, she sounds like a piece of ***. Some people can't take things on the chin sometimes and her way of dealing with it is childish to say the least. Maybe she was just a piece of *** anyway. I get the impression you didn't stand for it though!

  • I used to be medicated as  child with a tranquilliser for what was described as tantrums. This could be hours of screaming and trashing things in my bedroom. I thought I was so over it until realisi in my 30's I had got trapped into a situation I could not get out of - the dole - and some of the interviews were becoming more like interrogations. I got out of that by doing a TESOL course and leaving theFire UK. But on my second and final move from the UK In jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, with Immigration, which if anything proved to be worse. The country I was in joined the EU and I never imagined the scenarios taking place right now. Nerve wise, none of that helped and even now, certain stressors can be difficult. Things like the metro breaking down and being stranded on overcrowded buses in the cold and hungry, with no break before next lesson, having six-hour or more delays at the airport with no information on when it will be resolved.....I am not proud of these lapses.

    Best of all, when I got into real trouble with the Kafkaesque mazes of what I had hoped was yesteryear, one lovely individual I encountered in whom I had foolishly confided, undertook a nice little one-to-one troll campaign with me over email, suggesting I was not fit to have a residence permit. She was the child of immigrants herself and her family had been systematically humiliated.....how nice for her to find a sweet way to discharge all that poison. I keep forgetting what a vicious social darwinist world it is really. She would have sent me to the left of the queue to be sure.

  • It sounds like the type of situation that might send me over the edge too. I try to detect and deal with the stress a little better before I lose control, rather than thinking I can contain it all inside - that way the flip isn't so dramatic. I'm not really sure what 'meltdown' means. There's a thread here where the consensus is mostly that 'overload' is a better term.

    So, yes as Cloudy Mountain says, you might find something less harmful than punching your head that calms you down. All I want to say is that I hope you can find some kinds of  help with the current situations to make them less stressful. Not all the answers are inside.

  • I know it must concern you but it does sound like something along those lines. I've overloaded before and done worse. I had a particularly intense situation a few years ago and stuck a fork into my forehead several times. I also got into an argument with someone on a particularly stressful and overloady day and shoved a fork deep into my arm. Both times it wasn't even a thing I thought about doing, it was totally out of the blue, purely reflex. It was purely coincidental that it was a fork, lol. I was eating both times, so that was why. It was the first thing I could grab. I've also punched myself in the face so many times I can't remember. I feel the pressure building up and before I know it I've got a cut over my eye or a split lip.

    Also with the flesh pinching thing I tend to dig my nails into my hand if I'm getting to the point where I start to feel the overload getting too much.

    I know your concern, I don't consider myself a self harmer by a long stretch. I think the pain distracts me from having a complete panic attack. It sort of draws my mind back into my body. There are solutions however. These are called "destructive stims" and there are ways around them. If you can try and identify stims that have the same effect but aren't destructive. I didn't even know about stimming until I was diagnosed. I squeeze the top of my head until I feel better, it doesn't harm me but slowly stops the pressure. I squeeze my cauliflower ear too. I sniff vinegar ( *** that sounds weird). I also get an ice pack and hold it onto my head or in my hands until I get a dull pain, but only if I really need to feel something painful. It's not ideal but it works. You might find some stims that don't involve pain at all though. You just need to identify stims that work for you.

    I felt a bit embarrassed telling you all of that myself but we can't start smashing ourselves to pieces! You aren't unstable, don't worry! You just haven't found out strategies to not reach that point and if you do how to relieve the pressure. You might find a totally nice stim. All the best!