I have spent over a decade consciously trying to figure out why my mood suddenly plummets in these emotional crashes that keep.
This weekend when talking about my latest crash with my wife, S, we started zooming in on sensory processing as a candidate. Where I saw myself as an insufferable selfish brat who'd throw a tantrum when I didn't get what I wanted (no mustard on our salmon in this case), she thought it was a pretty obvious case of my being vastly overloaded by the Christmas market crowd around us and then triggered to a meltdown by this one thing going astray.
...
So, sensory overload?
I know it can be a problem for me - going to the Las Vegas strip was awful.
I also remembered reading a fair bit from the autism community about meltdown vs tantrums.
Now that the idea of thinking of myself in these terms has shown up, it starts resonating. Not only that, but it is concrete, it is actionable, and it hints at a possibility of removing the self-shaming inherent in thinking of my crashes as tantrums (and therefore egotistical etc etc).
So today I've actually managed several times to
1. Identify emotional instability
2. REMOVE MYSELF before I crash
3. Not crash.
Sure, I still feel emotional and exhausted and on edge. But I HAVE NOT crashed out.
...
Maybe there is something to this.
Maybe I can actually derive strategies and stability improvements from this.
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