Why Do Autistics Melt Down-One Young Man’s Experience

Perhaps it was funny, really.

But I don’t feel it was right now.

It was just another meltdown.

Meltdown? The method Autistics employ to communicate their displeasure. It looks like a tantrum but it’s much more complex.

Doesn’t everyone take a rolling pin to their Sam’s Mobile Shop or similar toy, and, yelling at the top of their voice, wallop the shit out of it? 

It’s our ‘normal’ of course. Even though he’s twenty-seven.

I’m reminded of that other normal day when our offspring were kids. I was carrying a load of washing to the laundry. I put the washing down to answer the door and Lin hopped into the basket for a sit. The woman at the door could see into the house.

A freshly bathed child was sitting atop the dirty clothes basket, and the other little poppet was counting fleas jumping about in the transparent cylinder of the vacuum cleaner. I wondered at the time what the woman thought. 

Back to the present and I was trying to concentrate on what the visiting computer techie was saying. Heaven knows I’d have trouble remembering his advice simply because it was computer-related – and right then, our Lin had to take his temper out on his beloved vehicle. I haven’t been game enough to see if he really hit it. I like to think he hit the bedclothes instead. 

I was so angry with him. These beautiful toys cost money and he LOVED the blessed thing. What was he thinking? I asked him if he was two or twenty-seven and I told him not to talk to me. I told him I was just too cross.

I can’t recall what script he was using when he was walloping. 

There are dozens in his woolly head. They go around and around and pop out just at the exact time they’re required.

• ‘Don’t you run away from me again, young lady,’
• ‘Get down from there, d’you hear?’
• ‘That’s it, don’t sit in the bus, go to your room, now,’
• ‘Silly old Gordon fell in a ditch, fell in a ditch.’

You’ve probably forgotten all those sentences, probably haven’t seen Monster’s Inc, Recess, Bridge to Terabithia or that specific episode of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends for years; probably couldn’t have told me where you’d heard the words, in fact.

But I can’t get away from them. Ever. We can reason through a stressful situation, but autistics have difficulty doing that. They stim because it is comforting, like talking an issue over with a friend is beneficial to us. I can usually cope well with the stimming. 

But not today. I think I’m a bit stressed. A shit day today, really. 

The next morning…

“It was the red one,” he said.

The red one. The Royal Mail Van. Oh, my goodness, it wasn’t Sam’s Mobile Shop he hit. I thought at the time it was extraordinary that he would damage Sam’s Mobile Shop. But no, it was Postman Pat’s van.

 
“Don’t hit the red one anymore,” he said. “Don’t hit, like Muriel did.”

Alarm bells in my head. 

Muriel, I remember her. She was a cartoon character; always horrible to her husband, Eustace. And she hit Courage, Eustace’s dog, with a rolling pin because he wouldn’t sleep in the attic. (Good grief, cartoons can be traumatising.) 

That’s what I mean about scripts playing endlessly in his head. He was clearly cross about something, yesterday, so he took Muriel’s script and acted it out because it was, to him, the appropriate way to handle his stress.

He sleeps poorly, does our Lin. He slept several hours after his meltdown. For the first time ever in his twenty-seven years, I didn’t wake him for dinner. He awoke by himself, much later, got up and apologised.

“You’re sorry you got angry”, he said and immediately followed it with “Thank you for your apology.”
For the uninitiated, this dialogue exemplifies the Semantic Pragmatic Disorder. When he’s stressed the SPD comes to the fore and the wrong pronoun comes out. Non autistics would be saying ‘I’m sorry I got angry’.

This language also shows he is genuinely sorry. He wouldn’t tell me he was sorry if he wasn’t. And anticipating my response by saying ‘thank you for your apology’ means he’s hoping I will have calmed down and will in fact respond with those words. If I have calmed down, I’m likely to accept his apology and things will be on an even keel again.

Today is another day.