Understanding Neurodiversity: Emotional Dysregulation
Sometimes it’s easier to crawl under the bed and hide
I hid a lot in my childhood. Under the bed, inside the cupboard, behind that weird statue in our living room.
Everywhere and anywhere I could enter. I crawled my way into tiny spaces, balled up, and waited; but it wasn’t because I liked the game of hide-and-seek.
There are a lot of reasons why I hid, but hide & seek wasn’t one of them. I did it because I felt like I had done something terrible.
Someone reading this must think, “Kids hide all the time when they feel they’re about to be punished for something. It’s what makes them kids,” and I guess you’re right. I’ve never been in charge of kids long enough to draw such a conclusion.
But when I hid most times, it wasn’t to avoid punishment. It was because I was feeling intense emotions that I just couldn’t regulate.
And yeah, sometimes that meant guilt from doing something bad or fear from being misunderstood.
The difference between me and every other kid I knew then was that they calmed down after punishment.
For me, the emotions were still the same. The guilt was still there, and it was still large. My heart was still racing, and my breathing was still heavy long after the punishment was over, or maybe the punishment had never happened.
It didn’t matter to me; the immense emotions were always there. The urge to hide somewhere and rock back and forth was always there.
It also never mattered how “little” the offense seemed to be. Sometimes it wasn’t even an offense. I once hid from my mom for three hours because I couldn't find the cover for my tennis racket.
Contrary to what some assume, this wasn’t a response to trauma, abuse, or neglect.
I say this because of how easy it is for people to look for who to blame, and while any of those three things mentioned can cause a child to act like that, it’s not the reason I and every other autistic person like me have issues with emotional regulation.
Parents and guardians of autistics often blame themselves for their kids’ reactions. My mom, for the longest time, was worried because my reactions were either intense or nonexistent.
I’m starting to realize she must have blamed herself for how I behaved as a child, but it was never anyone’s fault.
I recently learned that what happened to me all those times were autistic meltdowns and shutdowns caused mostly by my inability to regulate my emotions like a neurotypical.
In my teenage years, my meltdowns took a different form. I wasn’t hiding and rocking under the bed anymore. Now I was banging my head whenever I felt any intense, stressful emotions.
At first, I told everyone I had an itchy head, but it wasn’t easy to hide from people. I refrained from being honest about my meltdowns because I was afraid people would perceive me as mentally ill and in need of restraint.
Struggling with emotional dysregulation isn’t only about having intense emotional reactions, meltdowns, and shutdowns. It also means sometimes having no emotional reaction.
A lot of people think autistics don’t feel emotions, but that’s very far from the truth. If anything, many autistics feel things too intensely, but we have trouble identifying these emotions.
What some consider a lack of emotions or empathy in autistics is usually:
- Alexithymia (difficulty recognizing, expressing, or describing one’s emotions).
- Difficulty recognizing and identifying non-verbal cues.
- Difficulty identifying other’s emotions.
My emotions feel like someone’s slowly increasing to someone was slowly increasing the temperature inside me. I don’t notice it until everywhere is hot and burning.
This makes it difficult to be aware when I’ve reached my emotional peak (that’s what I call the point in which my emotions get intense to the point of having physiological manifestations).
And I mean this literally.
When I’m happy or slightly excited, it often increases to the point where I get a headache or am extremely exhausted.
When I’m anxious, I get stomach cramps, diarrhea, or nausea (in “extreme cases”); and when I’m sad or disappointed, that’s when I shut down.
The fact that I and many other autistic women feel emotions so strongly is why it’s so easy for many autistic women to be misdiagnosed with BPD or Bipolar disorder.
Of course, having what most people feel to be intense emotional displays can paint you to be many things. One of them being dangerous or manipulative.
But it’s important to understand that having meltdowns isn’t a means to hurt or manipulate anyone.
They’re often a release of the intense emotions that the autistic has a problem regulating, and it’s not something you can discipline or scold away in a child.
That autistic who’s always having a meltdown hates it more than you do. They probably wish they could control it & not have such intense emotional reactions.
Look at emotional dysregulation like this:
If there’s a switch most humans are born with that helps them know when to display emotions and when it’s time to stop, having emotional dysregulation means you weren’t born with that switch.
