The meltdown ends, but for autism moms, the aftermath lingers. In this episode of The Autism Mom Coach, the first of a two-part series, Lisa names what she calls the meltdown hangover: the emotional, mental, and physical fallout that can outlast the meltdown itself by hours, days, or even weeks. Drawing on her own experience with homework meltdowns and her son’s perfectionism, she walks through the telltale signs (exhaustion, shame and guilt, rumination, anxiety, and grief) and explains why, unlike a regular hangover, this one runs on your own thoughts and can stretch on as long as you let it. The goal this week is simple awareness, the necessary first step before next week’s strategies for recovery.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- What a “meltdown hangover” is and its five common signs (exhaustion, shame and guilt, rumination, anxiety, and grief), drawn from Lisa’s own life and her coaching clients.
- Why meltdown hangovers can last far longer than a regular hangover, since the symptoms are largely your own thoughts, and how staying stuck in them can keep you chronically depleted between meltdowns.
- A set of reflective questions to help you identify your personal hangover symptoms, from your energy and emotions right afterward to how kind or scolding your inner voice is.
Resources mentioned:
- Free Training: Reduce Meltdowns by 50% This Week
- Schedule a consultation with Lisa
- The Autism Mom Coach
Related episodes:
- The Meltdown Hangover, Part Two (Ep #205)
- The #1 Meltdown Mistake Autism Parents Make (And How to Stop) (Ep #200)
- The Autism Behavior Barometer: A Better Way to Understand Meltdowns (Ep #130)
Listen Here
Transcript
You are listening to episode 204 of The Autism Mom Coach, The Meltdown Hangover: Why Autism Moms Feel So Burnt Out After a Meltdown. Hi, I’m Lisa Candara, mother to an 18-year-old son with autism and founder of the Autism Mom Coach. Through years of trial and error, I have created tools that have helped me stop escalating meltdowns, make impossible decisions, and advocate more effectively for my son for the long game.
I’ve now coached over 100 moms through these same struggles. In this podcast, I share everything I’ve learned and what I am still learning with you. Let’s get started. Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. I am so glad you’re here and I hope you are doing well. But let’s face it, you might not be doing well.
You might be right in it right now because that’s just how autism parenting goes. It comes in waves. And right now, with it being the beginning of summer, routines changing, less structure, more stress, you might be feeling it right now. You might be experiencing more meltdowns from your kid, more stress and anxiety getting through your day-to-day life.
If that is where you are, this episode is perfect for you. In fact, this is exactly why the next two weeks of episodes are going to be replays of episodes I’ve already published because in this minute, I am in it. I need time to manage, to triage, to advocate, to scream into a pillow. So for the next couple of weeks, I am going to be taking a step back, but I don’t want to leave you hanging, which is why I am going to be republishing two of my most popular episodes, and they are all about the meltdown hangover.
What happens for us as the autism parent once the meltdown is over? Now, one thing to note about these two episodes is I published them long before I created my free training, How to Reduce Autism Meltdowns in a Week If you wanna dive deeper into the tools and concepts that I teach in these next two episodes, grab my new training, How to Reduce Autism Meltdowns in Less Than a Week, in the show notes.
All right, everyone, enjoy this week’s episode and wish me luck. Okay, on to today’s topic and the topic for next week. This is actually going to be a two-parter about meltdown hangovers. In this week’s episode, I’m going to talk to you about what a meltdown hangover is, and in next week’s episode, I am going to give you very specific steps of the things that you can do after a meltdown to reduce the intensity and the duration.
Okay, first, what is a meltdown hangover? Well, I’m guessing for all of you, you pretty much know what it is. I’m sure you’ve experienced it. I define it as the emotional, mental, and physical aftermath of a meltdown experienced by autism moms. Here are some of the signs and symptoms, and of course, I am taking this from my own personal experience with meltdown hangovers, as well as from the clients that I coach on these same topics.
First, exhaustion. Feeling completely drained and depleted, not only from managing the actual meltdown, but from all of the energy that you expended dreading it or resisting it in the first place Two, shame and guilt. This sounds like a lot of shoulding yourself. Shame and guilt is a huge one for me, especially after meltdowns concerning homework.
My son is very much a perfectionist, so he always wanted to make sure he was getting his homework right, so there was tons of anxiety for him just surrounding the entire process. And even though I was there beside him to help him and guide him in any way, he would still get really angry with me, and he would definitely believe that I had no idea what I was talking about.
This was especially so for math, because math is taught right now in a way that looks foreign to me, and for sure not the way that I was taught math. So even when I was trying to help him through math problems, he would not believe my answers because I wasn’t doing it the same way that his teacher told him.
This got so bad that I was actually getting a calculator out to show him by multiplying and dividing things on the calculator to prove to him that the answer was actually correct, even though I had done it another way. Anyway, this led to huge amounts of frustration from me and from him. For my part, I was coming home from a day at work, trying to get dinner on the table, homework finished, do the bedtime routine, the whole thing, and maybe, just maybe, relax a second.
So there was a lot of yelling, a lot of screaming from both of us about the homework, and it would eventually end up in him running into his room, slamming the door, and me feeling frustrated, upset, and sad, and then also just being so mad at myself for getting as angry as I did, because after all, honestly, I didn’t care whether he did his homework or not.
To me, staying in school all day and performing in school was enough, and so the homework was just an extra layer. But he was so insistent that he’d do it and do it perfectly, and I was so frustrated with myself for getting so upset every single time. Third, rumination. This is replaying the meltdown over and over in your brain.
“What could I have done differently? Why did I react this way? Were other people staring at us? I wonder what they think.” All of that. Rumination is a big one for me, and I see this for my clients, too, with any meltdown that happens outside of the home or in front of other people. There is a lot of rumination over what other people saw, what they were thinking, and how they might have been perceiving you or your child.
Four, anxiety. Well, this just makes sense, right? You’ve been in a chronic stress, fight-flight response with your child, and so of course, afterwards, you’re going to feel some anxiety. However, like I’ve said before, anxiety doesn’t happen by itself. Anxiety is something that we have the ability to either tamp down or amp up, and when we are spinning in shame and guilt and rumination, all of those thoughts are actually increasing our stress levels and our anxiety.
So not surprisingly, we’re going to feel anxious, especially if we’re thinking about the next meltdown and dreading tomorrow night’s homework assignment or getting up for school the next day or whatever it is where you’re anticipating that another meltdown might occur. And then finally, grief and sadness.
I know for me, after my son’s meltdowns, I felt a lot of grief for him because I could see how basically tortured he is by his own brain and his own OCD and needing things to be perfect or needing things to be a certain way. I would feel really sad and helpless, and that would stay with me for a while.
It didn’t disappear as soon as the meltdown was over. So on that note, let’s talk about timeframes. So when we’re talking about hangovers the way many of us think of them related to booze, we’re talking about meltdowns that might last a couple of hours or maybe even an entire day. But when it comes to meltdown hangovers, those can last a lot longer because we’re not just dealing with the physical symptoms like you are in an actual hangover that you can remedy pretty quickly by drinking water and eating.
In a meltdown hangover, many of those symptoms are our thoughts themselves, and because they are our own thoughts, we can keep them going for as long as we choose to. So that means meltdown hangovers can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks. It really depends on the intensity of the meltdown itself, the duration of the meltdown itself, what your various triggers are.
Maybe this happened out in public. Maybe this happened around certain people. Maybe your child did something specifically that was really traumatic or upsetting to you. All of these factors can influence how long the meltdown hangover lasts. And then for some of us, the hangover is chronic because we are not recovering between meltdowns, and so we are perpetually in this state of the meltdown hangover, the overhang of shame, anxiety, the rumination, the sadness, and the exhaustion All right, with all that said, for this week, I want you to become familiar with what your meltdown hangover symptoms are because once you become familiar with them and know what they are, that’s the first step in making changes, which is exactly what we’re going to talk about next week.
Okay, here are some questions you can ask yourself to identify your meltdown hangover symptoms. First, what do you do as soon as the meltdown is over? What are your energy levels? Are you shaking? Are you thirsty? What are your primary emotions? Are you ruminating about what happened? If so, for how long?
What are your thoughts about yourself after a meltdown hangover? What are your thoughts about your child? Are you feeling guilty? If so, why are you feeling guilty? Are you blaming yourself? If so, what exactly are you blaming yourself for? Do you pour yourself a drink? Do you get out the chips and ice cream?
How do you talk to yourself? Is the voice inside of yourself being kind and reassuring and compassionate, or is it scolding you? All right. That is it for this week’s episode of the podcast. Now remember, if you want to join my open coaching call on September 19th, go to the show notes now, and you can register.
And also, in the past month, I’ve put out a lot of new resources. I’m going to leave a link to all of them in the show notes. Those are my behavior barometer that you can use to rate and assess your child’s meltdowns and also decide ahead of time how you want to respond to the meltdowns. There is my five steps to stop escalating your child’s behaviors, and this is a resource that you can use so that when your child is melting down, you are not actually escalating them and prolonging the meltdown.
You can get these resources in the show notes. All right, I will talk to you next week. Have a great week. Thanks for listening to The Autism Mom Coach. If you are ready to apply the principles you are learning in these episodes to your life, it is time to schedule a consultation call with me. Podcasts are great, but the ahas are fleeting.
Real change comes from application and implementation, and this is exactly what we do in my one-on-one coaching program. To schedule your consultation, go to my website, theautismmomcoach.com, and take the first step to taking better care of yourself so that you can show up as the parent you want to be for your child with autism.
