Remembering the Onset of My Temper Outbursts

Posted on by Astrid

I have been a member of groups on the topic of disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD) for the past year or so. DMDD was introduced to the psychiatrist’s manual with DSM-5 in 2013. It is a condition in which a child or teen is irritable or angry most of the time and has severe temper outbursts on average at least three times a week for a period of at least twelve months. The diagnosis cannot be made in a child under six or a person over eighteen. This being the case, I’m not in these groups because I currently think I may have DMDD, but because I think I may’ve had it as a child.

According to my parents, I was just a little immature emotionally until the age of around seven. I switched schools, transferring from mainstream Kindergarten to a school for the visually impared, when I was nearly six in 1992. In 1993, I started to learn Braille. This is around the time my temper outbursts started. According to my parents, I wasn’t even regularly irritable up to that point. They describe me as a relaxed, cheerful child.

My own memories are hazy. Of course, I remember temper tantrums from before age seven, but what child doesn’t have those at times? Between the ages of seven and nine, my mood got worse and worse. I remember being suicidal at around the age of eight.

So was this DMDD? We will never know, as the diagnosis didn’t exist back in 1993. Was it, like my parents believe, a way of expressing my frustration with the fact that I was going blind? Was I being manipulative, also like my parents think? Trying to elicit care from my parents and professionals by acting out? Or was it a form of autistic burn-out? Had neurotypical developmental expectations overwhelmed my autistic brain?

Like I may’ve said, my parents don’t believe I’m autistic. They believe I have some traits, but not enough to impair my functioning or warrant a diagnosis. They say I’m just blind and of genius intelligence. And oh, the rest is just me trying to manipulate people for attention. They don’t seem to realize, then, that I, too, suffered from my irritability and anger outbursts.

My Big Burn-Out #TakeTheMaskOff

Posted on by Astrid

Trigger warning: suicide.

I so badly wanted to finish the #TakeTheMaskOff series on my other blog, but each time a topic comes up, I feel like I already covered that there. I probably did, but then again, I do want to share. After AutisticZebra posted the story of her big burn-out, I’m going to do the same. For those who know me in real life or through my other blog, this is probably old news, but well.

The year 2007 was an extremely eventful year. Three days in and I was given an ultimatum at the independence training home for the disabled I lived at at the time: another major meltdown and I’d be kicked out. The staff had already referred me to the local mental health agency for what they thought was autism, but they just wanted confirmation that they were doing the right thing. They had no intention of actually changing their support style, because they were allegedly already supporting me based on the assumption that I’m autistic.

On February 10, I had said major meltdown. I had had a fight with my parents over them participating in my autism diagnosis the night before and had been incredibly irritable all day. My least favoirte support worker was on shift, a pretty uncaring woman who kept dismissing my panicky response. So I had a meltdown. And several days later, after the staff had conferred, got told that I would be kicked out. The date for my eviction was set for June 1, which was fair enough given that they usually need to give two months’ notice.

Several weeks later, I was finally, at the age of 20, diagnosed with autism. I was relieved. I could start counseling with a very supportive community psychiatric nurse, who managed to convince the staff at the training home to give me more time to find new housing.

By July 3, I was given the keys to my new apartment in Nijmegen, the city where I’d start college. I moved out of the independence training home on August 1.

The three months that followed are a blur to me. I had almost daily meltdowns, in which I ran off or injured myself. The police were called repeatedly, but I “wasn’t crazy enough” to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

That is, until one day I was. On Friday, November 2, I had been wandering all day through my parents’ city, where the independence training home was located as well. In the late morning, I had been kicked off the train station for melting down there on my way to the train back to Nijmegen. I couldn’t count on my parents to support me, so desperately, I went to the training home. I wasn’t supported there by the staff either, so wandered through the city for the entirety of the afternoon and part of the evening. A training home former fellow client then offered me to sleep at her apartment for the night, so that we could find a solution in the morning. That wasn’t acceptable to the tstaff, so I was required to leave. I left the training home, took the first bus to the train station and phoned my support worker in Nijmegen to let her know I was going to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. I probably half realized that this was going to be picked up, but still tried to convince the fellow passengers on the bus not to clal the police. I remember a woman sitting next to me trying to comfort me, saying that help was on its way. At the station, I was picked up by the police, who took me to the police station and rang the crisis service in that city. This was when I finally got admitted to a mental hospital.

Looking back, this is a clear example of autistic burn-out. I was reminded of this once again by the Center for Consultation and Expertise consultant who came to visit me this morning. I was also told by that same consultant that my former psychologist’s twisting the truth to find a reason to kick me out of the hospital – by among other things taking away my autism diagnosis -, wasn’t about me. It was more likely about the budget cuts to inpatient mental health treatment.

Share Your World (August 13, 2018)

Posted on by Astrid

Oh wow, now that I’m taking off with this new’ish blogging adventure, I keep discovering new challenges to participate in. I had seen posts titled Share Your World on other blogs, but never took the time to actually read those posts, so I never found out about the challenge. I did read one today and wow, what an amazing challenge. The idea is that Cee, the challenge organizer, provides four questions which you then answer on your blog (or in the comments on her blog). This week, the questions are very inspiring. Here goes.

A class you wish you would have taken?
Too many to mention. When I was planning for college in high school, I was thinking of studying something in the humanities field, such as Dutch, English or history. I ultimately officially (as in, for yearbook purposes) settled on English, but never actually took an English college class. Several years later, I studied linguistics instead – for two months. I still wish I would’ve taken the language acquisition class I dropped out of after only a week.

I also wish I’d actually finished more psychology classes. I started on five or six of them at Open University, but only actually finished two.

And then there are the countless creative writing courses I’ve looked at on school sites but never took. Oh and I would reallly like to learn more about social work someday. Oh and alternative medicine. Oh and … you get the idea.

Are you scared of heights?
No. I remember crossing a hanging foot bridge with my husband one day several years ago, unaware that he was afraid of heights. I felt mostly scared because he was and I had to depend on him to keep me safe.

Are you a good cook? If so, do you consider yourself a chef?
No, not at all. I could probably cook a simple pasta if I really had to, but I haven’t actually cooked a meal in years.

What did you appreciate or what made you smile this past week? Feel free to use a quote, a photo, a story, or even a combination.
I try to appreciate something everyday. That being said, what comes to mind now is my husband bringing me a delicious bakery sausage roll all the way from a town about 70 miles away where he’d had to drive to in his truck. This happened on Thursday or Friday and I didn’t even include it in my gratitude list.

Monday’s Music Moves Me: Nursery Rhymes About Animals

Posted on by Astrid

Yesterday, I wanted to participate in Song Lyric Sunday and I had the most fabulous song (haha) for the theme of “drive/driving”. Then I couldn’t find the lyrics, so I gave up. I however also discovered Monday’s Music Moves Me, another music-themed blog hop. The theme for today is “songs with animals in the title”.

I have not previously participated in this linky, so I don’t know whether it’s focused on just pop songs. Others are including The Lion Sleeps Tonight, which was going to be in my head all day long, so I had to replace it with another one. I picked a children’s song. My mother-in-law sings this rhyme regularly.

From there, I decided to look up more children’s songs on this theme. I remembered from a time I listened to a lot of nursery rhymes that there was one about Alice the [whatever] has five humps. I googled it and here it is.

From there, I decided to make this entire post about nursery rhymes, so here’s another lovely song I found.

And for my last song, I’m going to cheat a little and share one of my all-time favorite nursery rhymes. It doesn’t have an animal in the title, but I guess it has a whole farm of them, LOL.

What children’s songs with animal themes do you love?

Mental Illness Labels

Posted on by Astrid

Yesterday, Sue over at My Loud Bipolar Whispers wrote a very interesting post on mental illness labels. It is definitely very inspiring to read how Sue overcomes the stigma and self-stigma of mental illness labels. I must admit I’m still caught up in mental illness labels at times. I started this blog in part to help myself overcome this limiting mindset where a diagnosis defines me. As such, I thought I’d do a similar post to Sue’s.

Over the past nearly twelve years that I’ve been in the mental health system, I have accumulated a bunch of mental illness labels. I am too lazy o list them all, but they included adjustment disorder, impulse control disorder NOS, dissociative identity disorder, PTSD, borderine and dependent personality disorder and depression. These labels define me in a sense, but in a sense, they do not. After all, some of these diagnoses were not just given to me but taken away again later. As such, I’m not supposed to dissociate anymore, as DID is no longer among my mental illness labels. Well, here we are, all 25 or so of us. I hear my former psychologist saying that I make up the DID because of having read up on it too much. Ironically, she was the one most eager to give me new and exciting mental health diagnoses.

Mental illness labels have a function in getting insurance to pay for treatment. In addition, they may guide what treatment and support you can access. Self-labeling (self-diagnosis) may have the added benefit that you can access support without the approval of a mental health professional. That’s how I access support geared towards people with DID.

However, mental illness labels should not be limiting my experience of who I am. I am more than my mental illnesses. Here is a list of labels I’d like to be known for.


  • Wife

  • Daughter

  • Sister

  • Friend

  • Writer

  • Blogger

  • Creative

  • Introvert

  • Compassionate

  • Intelligent

  • Honest

  • Former psychology major

  • Disability rights activist

  • Mental health advocate

  • Survivor

What labels do you define yourself by?

My Relationship with Food

Posted on by Astrid

Today, I’m paging through the eBook Journal Writing Prompts for Child Abuse Survivors. It is definitely worth it. One of the prompts, in the third chapter, which deals with shame, is about your relationship with food. I am going to write about that today.

I am fat. There I said it. I am no longer obese, fortunately, but I still need to lose over 20lbs to be at a healthy BMI. Besides, my body fat is concentrated primarily on my stomach, which means it’s all the more dangerous for my long-term physical health.

I have a long history of disordered eating. When I was around 14, I “wanted” to develop an eating disorder. No, I didn’t read pro-anorexia sites, though I probably would have had I had access to the Internet back then. I didn’t really want to have anorexia, but I wanted badly to overcome the painful relationship with food I had by this time, and my way of doing so was to develop an even more harmful attitude towards it.

The origin of this even more harmful attitude was probably shame. My parents would regularly yell at me for eating too much and I badly wanted to break this habit, but I didn’t knowhow.

I didn’t stop overeating, but I started obsessing over how it’d make me fat. I started keeping food logs and commenting on how much I’d eaten, but it didn’t help me actually stop overeating.

I remember at one time calculating my BMI, which was a little above 20 at the time. I thought that should soothe my mind and it did in a way. I wasn’t fat, after all. Looking back, I now realize said BMI calculator was geared towards adults and a BMI over 20 is in fact overweight for a teen.

I never developed a full-blown eating disorder, even though a part of me engaged in a lot of disordered eating patterns, including purging, up till fairly recently. In fact, this part of me – she’s called Agnes – was the one reasoning last Wednesday that diarrhea is a good thing because it helps me lose weight.

I’ve had a fairly normal relationship with food over the past year or so. At least in terms of behaviors. I no longer purge, rarely overeat and do exercise regularly. However, like I said above, my thought patterns are still pretty disordered.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (August 11, 2018)

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I did the #WeekendCoffeeShare for a while on my other blog, but stopped eventually. Now that I’m getting this blog up and running, I think I’ll participate again. I’m currently having a cup of organic green tea with my mother-in-law, but if you’d like coffee, that’s fine with me too.

If we were having coffee, I’d ask you how you’re doing. I hope you’re all doing as well as possible. I hope the weather is good where you are. It is here. For me, that means not soaring hot anymore but not chilly either.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I started new day activities last Monday. My first week as a whole was as good as my first day. I have been doing a variety of different activities, both indoors and outdoors.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I’m still enjoying this blogging adventure. It is a challenge to blog everyday, but so far I’m meeting that challenge head on.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I am considering exploring a low-FODMAP diet for irritalbe bowel syndrome. I discussed this with my mother-in-law, who is trying this too. It is pretty compliicated, particularly the elimination phase, but it may be worth trying. I was provisionally diagnosed with IBS in 2013 after a colonoscopy, bloodwork and a stool sample all came back normal, even though I’m not a classic case. I’m already pretty sure artificial sweeteners trigger my IBS. I consume those in relatively large quantities, as I tend to believe they’re an excuse to consume sweetness without gaining weight. Thankfully, with low-FODMAP, you don’t need to stop eating products that may be triggering altogether. IBS, after all, is painful and annoying, but it is not dangerous.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I’m enjoying the day at my in-laws. My husband is visiting his grandma, who had a stroke a few weeks back. Unfortunately, due to her cognitive decline, she probably won’t recognize me, so I am not going with him. I’m so happy that I can stay at his parents’, because I don’t like being alone all evening. My father-in-law made a delicious pizza for dinner.

So what have you all been up to lately?

Weekly Gratitude List (August 10, 2018) #TToT

Posted on by Astrid

It’s Friday again. This week has flown by! It was really a mixed bag in terms of how I’ve felt. Here are the things I’ve been grateful for this past week.

1. Starting at new day activities. My first week definitely was a good one. I am truly loving it there.

2. The weather. It was hot on Monday and Tuesday but as of Wednesday it’s been pretty nice. Not cold but cool enough that I could finally move again and not break out in a sweat from merely existing.

3. Going on the elliptical. It was quite a challenge, since I hadn’t exercised in weeks, but it was a fun challenge. I love being able to let my thoughts go as I exercise.

4. Eating at my in-laws on Wednesday. My husband had to suddenly stay at work late, so he asked whether I could eat with his parents. They cooked endive with mashed potatoes, which is not my favorite meal to say the least, but it wasn’t too terrble either. Congrats to me for eating all that was on my plate.

5. A lie-in on Thursday. I had kept my alarm set at 6:45, but turned it off and rolled over. My support coordinator wouldn’t be here till 3PM and, though I have in the past been in bed till that late, I trusted myself to wake before then. And I did.

6. Those blueberries I mentioned yesterday. Boy, do I love them. They also doubly made up for the endive on Wednesday, as I had them for dessert then too. At home, I rarely eat dessert, but my in-laws do.

7. Making a cheesecake with my support coordinator. I didn’t share this yesterday, as I hadn’t tried it then yet, but it was delicious! My husband also really liked it.

8. Going to the marketplace. At my new day activities, the people visit the local marketplace each Friday. We all bring money, throw it together and buy some extra treat for lunchtime. Today though, I didn’t put mo money in with the others’, as I’d forgotten my lunch so wante dto buy me some more food than just a treat. The bread stand wasn’t there, but I did buy strawberries. Later, a staff went to the supermarket to buy some bread for me.

9. Journaling prompt eBooks. I bought two new ones on Wednesday. Yes, I’m probably obsessed with collecting them, given how many journaling prompt books and files and apps I have. One of the new ones I bought is the complete Lisa Shea journaling collection (eleven books for one reduced price). I had been ahing at many of the individual books, but €1,- each still means I’d spend over €10 on just some journaling prompts and some were more expensive. What then if they disappoint me? Well, the full collection was €6,45, which seemed reasonable. So far, I’m loving the books. The other was Journal Writing Prompts for Child Abuse Survivors, which cost only €0,99. I like that one too. As a side note, it’s interesting how I spend far less money on eBooks now that I use Kindle. Back when I used Kobo, I didn’t bet an eye at €5,- for a few simple journaling prompts (like one of Mari L. McCarthy’s 24-day challenge books). It’s good that I am more careful now, in that it’s technically my husband’s money I’m using (even though I pay him back straight away), as I use his credit card.

10. Lying in the cocoon swing at day activities. A cocoon swing is like a small tent that hangs off a tree and you can then lie in it and swing it. I love it. It’s truly pure relaxation!

Linking up with Ten Things of Thankful again.

Angry

Posted on by Astrid

Hiya everyone,
My name is Kelly. I am 10-years-old. I am so angry now. I wanna call my mother and shout at her and all that, but the grown-up people say I can’t. I am angry because my parents say I’m angry too easily when in fact it’s them who do stuff like tough love.

I mean my mother says “So you wanna go residential at Bartiméus?”. That’s the school for the blind we go to. So if I’m not being good she’s gonna send me away. She also throws out my toys cause she says I’m defiant because I have too many toys.

Oh and Mrs. B our low vision teacher doesn’t want me to do low vision anymore. Well I don’t care what people think.

I was typing up this memory thingy but then my Internet crashed and I lost the piece I’d written. I will try to share again.

One day a social worker comes by my house to talk to my parents. I dunno who wants it my parents or the social worker. My mother says the social worker had said I’m angry too easily and I need play therapy. I go there during biology class, which is the only interesting class in school. so it sucks. I gotta play with this grown-up man I don’t even know. I wanna flood the water tray and throw out the purple dolls in the dollhouse because ya know, dolls can’t be purple. I don’t know why but my parents take me out of this therpay after four sessions. So why the fuck did they put me into it? I mean I’m not supposed to magically snap out of my anger by four sessions of stupid play therapy am I?

I’m confused now. Yes I’m angry. My parents say I wanna make them miserable. I have stopped caring. They’re gonna put me in residential if I don’t stop playing with my toys anyway and yet I’m suppose to play with this grown-up during biology class. I’m so angry. I don’t know why, cannot write it in English or maybe not even in Dutch either. I’m just pissed off.

Quote of the Day (August 9, 2018): Gratitude Unlocks the Fullness of Life

Posted on by Astrid

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” – Melody Beattie

I once read that gratitude is happiness coupled by wonder. It means that we recognize that what we have is not a given. I mean, being able to read a quote on the Internet puts me in the minority worldwide. Even with my disability benefits, which amount to only 75% of minimum wage, I am rich compared to other people in the world. Isn’t that humbling?

Today, I had a rather boring day. Still, there is a lot to be grateful for today if I really look hard. The fact that I slept well and had a lie-in as I didn’t go to day activities. Barry, our cat, meowing me awake in the morning, letting me know he’s still here. He is a true delight. The blueberries I put in my yoghurt with crunchy muesli this morning. My being able to be grateful for that definitely did turn breakfast into a feast.

As I started my day, I was grateful for the two comments I had gotten on my blog while asleep. I also appreciated the tons of E-mails in my inbox. They reminded me of the good friendships I’ve formed particularly on one E-mail list.

I went to have some exercise on the elliptical. Though I was scared by a thunderstorm pretty soon, I still managed twelve minutes of exercise and am going to try for another 30 or so later in the evening. I am grateful for my mobility. I am also trying to be a little grateful for the rain, as nature and the farmers really need it.

My support coordinator arrived at 3PM. We had a cup of coffee and then started making a cheesecake. Gratitude turend that activity into excitement. It was the first time either of us had made a cheesecake.

Later, when my support coordinator had left, I looked up some journaling prompts in some eBooks I had bought yesterday. One of them gave me the reminder that I am blessed. Ordinary things such as the boring day I had today, do not happen to everyone. Besides, they can be turned into extraordinary things with the help of an attitude of gratitude.