meltdown

Yesterday I had my first ever identified meltdown and 24 hours later I am still not recovered. 

I woke up positive and decided to try to support my wife; I have been meaning to buy flowers and invite her out for walks for weeks now but because of memory limitations I have forgotten. I will not lament on how this could have been prevented if I'd ‘done better’, because the system limitations are the system limitations. But it would not have occurred if I did not have adhd.

Having spotted this episode what it was, it is plain to see that the rage at our racist neighbour and subsequent dangerous driving, and the waking up suicidal at the end of my parents’ trip, were both meltdowns too. They had a lower threshold because of valproate. But the system limitations remain even without the drugs.

I wanted to support her and show gratitude for everything she has done for me. But… I am still overwhelmed by emotional conversations so I suggested a walk in the park. Where I found the body. Our favourite park.

I took the kids bikes and my meteor and I knew I would need to walk to handle things even half-well so we walked while the kids rode. She spent 15 minutes talking and then reading a letter to me about all my failings. I listened as best I could and walked and stopped and walked and stopped because the kids started screaming. We retired to the place where I found the man hanging by his neck and I felt a little better. I needed the regularity of movement but there was none because of the constant interruptions.

The steel wool had built in my head, but the serenity of the place where this man ended his life, and the meaning, brought perspective and peace. I tried to talk and walk after that but the topic was so complex and emotionally draining, the kids were screaming and crying, and I was unable to do so calmly. So I proposed we walk by the river. I drive there, exercising incredible amounts of self control on the road and trying to centre myself so I could try again. I could feel myself vibrating apart while I was driving and I should have recognised my limits and gone home.

Things got worse by the river and I don’t really remember the conversation; just that I felt so incredibly overwhelmed and frustrated at my inability to talk and support her how I wanted to. I was being criticised for being angry and only talking about myself, but I was not angry and I was trying to explain why I was struggling with words and I was so incredibly frustrated because my system was overloaded.

This culminated in me ripping out a plant from the ground, while my wife said ‘that’s illegal boys daddy is bad’ and then my smashing my head into a log approximately 10 times before jumping down to the river and wading across to the other side just to escape things. 

My heart rate was 190 and I was lying on my back seeing the beauty of the world and it seemed to drop to 50 for 3 beats before spiking to 190 for 5 beats, rinse repeat.  After a while this stabilised and I asked if they had gone, they said they had, so I came back. And then the kids were sent running at me and the conversation was resumed and I just couldn’t handle it. I had to leave. I simply had to. I was getting very strong drives toward non-existence and it was getting dangerous.

I come home and sleep and walk and make knives and meditate and eat and make knives more… all trying to recover executive function. But the steel wool in my head is hurting all along and I cannot. The conversation is continued; I can’t remember if we spoke on the phone but there were definitely messages.

I try to explain what a meltdown is, but she tells me she knows, and keeps pushing. I think her information is incomplete and based on Japanese literature focused on children and their ‘tantrums’. This is the word they use here for adults too: tantrum.

I wonder if her counsellor has any idea about neurodivergence? Because I didn’t until a few months ago and I’m still learning by the day and my own mother who was a medical professional for 40 years doesn’t seem to either. They hear the words ‘autistic’ and ‘adhd’ and they just slap on whatever outdated understanding they retain from their schooldays.

I have slept 4 times since then and walked for 2 hours during the night and 1.5 hours this morning, trying to process things. I feel like I can talk about it a bit now, but I will not be able to talk to my wife for several days at least and even then I will need to keep it perfunctory. Sorry, Akane. This is the nature of the system. The nature of my brain.

I’ll start by saying that I am still only 6 weeks away from arpirazole, and 3 weeks away from it reaching sub-clinical plasma levels. I am 1 week away from valproate. Both of these drugs lowered my executive function in different ways, and the dopamine recovery curve for aripirazole in unusual cases like mind is estimated at 6 months. 6 months recovery after taking it for 8 weeks on a super low dose, and no warning. Bad doctor.

Anyway.

A meltdown is when your frontal brain ceases to function properly. It is not a tantrum and not in your control. It is not anger. It is not suicidality. But it can be rage and it can result in impulse-suicide.

What it is, is a complete cessation of your frontal brain’s ability to control your emotions and act as an observer. It is the loss of your ability to go ‘woah there Nelly’ and slow down the chariot. It is the loss of the ability to self regulate (dampen emotional response). It is the loss the of ability to talk. It is the loss of the ability to anything but act like a frightened animal.

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I’ll copy something here from ChatGPT since it is better than most of the outdated literature around:

During an Autistic (or Overload-related) Meltdown

Executive function systems become severely impaired because the brain is in survival/overload mode. Common breakdowns [this was all of them combined]:

- Inhibition collapse → inability to suppress emotional/behavioral outbursts (shouting, hitting, crying).

- Working memory failure → can’t hold instructions, can’t recall coping strategies, feels “blank.”

- Cognitive inflexibility → stuck in one response; can’t shift out of the escalating state.

- Planning/organization collapse → can’t sequence steps to regulate self (e.g., “go to quiet room, breathe, hydrate”).

- Self-monitoring drops → not aware of escalation until it peaks; may only realize impact afterward.

- Attention is hijacked → hyperfocus on the trigger, or total fragmentation of focus.

In simple terms:
 

During a meltdown, executive function goes offline. The prefrontal cortex disengages, and the limbic system (emotional/reactive circuits) dominates. That’s why it can feel like losing all capacity to regulate or plan until the storm passes.

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Think of it like a computer with multiple processing units. The CPU has gone offline, but the GPU is working overtime. Only the emotional brain is working. The ‘human brain’ which distinguishes us from a rat is offline.

You lose the ability to hold anything in your mind. You lose the ability to think. You lose the ability to spot the loss of ability. You lose the ability to empathise. You lose the ability to stop yourself from doing injurious and dangerous things. All you know is that it hurts and you hate everything and you want it to stop.

I stopped short of kicking a tree, knowing I could break my foot, but only at the last second and only because I have broken my fist against walls in the past. Getting blind drunk and punching a wall is also an autistic meltdown… but I never had the word or understanding so I turned it all into inadequacy and self-loathing.

Not this time.

This time I know the system limitations. 

It is not my fault.

If I am incapable of being the husband my wife needs, then morality 101 says I let her go and find someone who she can be happy with. I tried explaining this - that all I care about is her happiness - but she did not want empty words and platitudes; she wanted actions, which I had planned but forgotten. She thought I was outsourcing things, and said so multiple times, and that I was angry again… this wasn’t the case either; I instigated the walk-and-talk; but I was already melting down so was unable to communicate effectively.

So this isn’t her fault. She has gone to a counsellor and her feelings about the trauma of the situation and how one-sided it all must seem from her perspective are coming out. She is also the victim of this terrible guesswork-based medical industry. And I went there to try to help her, and to move things forward.

But I was incapable of it. And it made things worse.

I don’t know what to do. I cannot risk another meltdown like that so I have put up a wall. We are in business-mode, living separately. Thankfully my eldest child is with me from today and I have the structure to life that I have been looking forward to all this summer holiday, recovering alone in the new house. She wants me to get ‘out of my head’ and this will help me to do so.

But I need to understand my brain if I want to be able to be a good father, let alone husband. I need to understand it partly because my eldest child has much the same brain.

I am unable to use the medicines which many people take to manage their conditions. I tried, and they made me insane, and have made my executive function much, much worse. If I take them again I think I will die.

So I need to figure out ways to train the system. This is the main reason for the nibbana-protocol. I do believe I touched the unconditioned and wiped the system, neutralised the trauma, and gave myself a new life.

But it was a very lucky and… challenging thing. The sheer strength of will needed in order to do that, and then the amount of effort my brain had to make to rebuild itself is hard to fathom. I don’t think anyone can ever truly understand. And this rebuild process is ongoing.

I am still enormously burned out **on a neurological level** from the experience. My cortex is fried, my juices are sludgy. 

But the rules I figured out for my system are valid and they remain. Touching nibbana does not mean your brain changes on a fundamental level, merely that the wiring changes. I changed my OS, but not the system architecture.

The system:

• has short memory 

  • which means I need to talk

• has a broken clock

  • which means I need to walk

• can only process one thread at a time

  • which means I am overloaded by emotional conversations and need time to process

Maybe we can break conversations like this into chapters: she says something, I digest for a day, I reply, she digests for a day. Because I cannot handle it in realtime. The system just can’t run that type of process.

It’s like I’ve finished 100 ironman races and gone into recovery mode only to be asked to do 10 more.

I need more recovery and training for my brain before I will be able to handle a conversation like this or be a 'good husband’ again. I don’t know if I will ever be able to, if I’m honest, but I am still hopeful. The brain retains an incredible amount of plasticity, as my recent experience has shown, but it needs more time to recover.

For now, I am on my own again. It is necessary.

But at least I have my kid.

/jb202508251052