what my meldowns feel like
"describe your meltdown"
Funny, but researching it has me going into a semi-meltdown phase. It's a very familiar state, I spend part of nearly every day there, and count days in row without it as success days.
My throat tightens and my teeth grit, without my noticing it. My face grimaces. I breathe in gasps. My head feels swollen, as does my face, and the constant wet of tears is really annoying. He isn't today, but the parrot often responds to me at these times with audio aggression. I suppose he's alarmed and defending himself against my agitated state.
When it goes full meltdown, the swelling in my head, rather like having a bad flu, overtakes all else, even my constant back ache (which rises with my stress too, till it can become a screaming mimi pain). I wouldn't call the way my head feels "pain" because it's a dull pressure that simply wipes out all cognition except fear. Since fear has long since ceased to tell me what to do, I stand there, mentally grasping at air, trying to figure out the correct thing to do from a choice of zero options. If the verbal engine was running, it's meanwhile shouting my emotions as diplomatically as possible while being rife with profanity. I have schooled myself to focus on truths that I need them to know, rather than missiles aimed to emotionally devastate them back. If they can hear it over the high voice and profanity, they'll learn a lot.
Then if that isn't enough to end the situation, the crying, freezing in place, yelling, maybe handling things around me carelessly and rough, I can reach that total blank where all I know is I want real pain in my head to drive out this weird pressure and I start banging my head with either my hands, objects in my hands, or into walls and doors. I try to find the right combination of head and impact zone to maximize nerve response and minimize damage in both head and object, but bang my head I will.
Drywall makes a nice hard bounce but people take it as fake drama if you do it in front of them. The sheer embarassment and shame of being in such an animal state, your lungs expelling through shut vocal cords in great loud rushes of screaming, the wet face all red and squinched, the crazy behaviour. This can exponentially increase both length and duration of a meltdown. The utter lack of kindness towards me after wards ensures I do not learn or receive the kind of comfort that directly produces oxytocin to combat the adrenaline that's causing all this damage in the first place.
I try to surround myself with oxytocin triggers but each pet is a living person with stress themselves, often far more than I could have imagined.
So eventually the breath settles, I hiccup my way down and wimper and curl up and self comfort as my cognition returns. Unless of course the emotional triggers continue, like when being emotionally abused or when I'm trying to accomplish something difficult that is just a bit too difficult to achieve.
Funny, but researching it has me going into a semi-meltdown phase. It's a very familiar state, I spend part of nearly every day there, and count days in row without it as success days.
My throat tightens and my teeth grit, without my noticing it. My face grimaces. I breathe in gasps. My head feels swollen, as does my face, and the constant wet of tears is really annoying. He isn't today, but the parrot often responds to me at these times with audio aggression. I suppose he's alarmed and defending himself against my agitated state.
When it goes full meltdown, the swelling in my head, rather like having a bad flu, overtakes all else, even my constant back ache (which rises with my stress too, till it can become a screaming mimi pain). I wouldn't call the way my head feels "pain" because it's a dull pressure that simply wipes out all cognition except fear. Since fear has long since ceased to tell me what to do, I stand there, mentally grasping at air, trying to figure out the correct thing to do from a choice of zero options. If the verbal engine was running, it's meanwhile shouting my emotions as diplomatically as possible while being rife with profanity. I have schooled myself to focus on truths that I need them to know, rather than missiles aimed to emotionally devastate them back. If they can hear it over the high voice and profanity, they'll learn a lot.
Then if that isn't enough to end the situation, the crying, freezing in place, yelling, maybe handling things around me carelessly and rough, I can reach that total blank where all I know is I want real pain in my head to drive out this weird pressure and I start banging my head with either my hands, objects in my hands, or into walls and doors. I try to find the right combination of head and impact zone to maximize nerve response and minimize damage in both head and object, but bang my head I will.
Drywall makes a nice hard bounce but people take it as fake drama if you do it in front of them. The sheer embarassment and shame of being in such an animal state, your lungs expelling through shut vocal cords in great loud rushes of screaming, the wet face all red and squinched, the crazy behaviour. This can exponentially increase both length and duration of a meltdown. The utter lack of kindness towards me after wards ensures I do not learn or receive the kind of comfort that directly produces oxytocin to combat the adrenaline that's causing all this damage in the first place.
I try to surround myself with oxytocin triggers but each pet is a living person with stress themselves, often far more than I could have imagined.
So eventually the breath settles, I hiccup my way down and wimper and curl up and self comfort as my cognition returns. Unless of course the emotional triggers continue, like when being emotionally abused or when I'm trying to accomplish something difficult that is just a bit too difficult to achieve.