Recovering From Autistic Burnout

Posted on by Astrid

Today, the prompt for Reena’s Exploration Challenge is one word: burnout. This word evokes so many thoughts, feelings and memories in me! After all, though I was never diagnosed as suffering with actual burnout, the reason is more that burnout isn’t a DSM-IV or DSM-5 diagnosis than my not having suffered it.

That is, I did indeed not suffer the classic shutdown-type burnout where people are too exhausted to function. Rather, my burnout was more of the meltdown type, where I got so irritable and dysregulated that I couldn’t function anymore.

In 2007, I suffered autistic burnout. This is an actual thing and is more and more recognized by autism professionals too. It involves an inability to function in daily life as a whole, not just work, due to the experience of being overloaded, being autistic in a neurotypical society.

I have shared my experience of landing in a mental crisis in 2007 many times before. I was at the time living independently (though with a lot of community support) and going to university. That all changed within a matter of days: on Tuesday, I was sitting an exam, while the following Saturday, I was a patient on the locked unit of a psychiatric hospital. First, while there, I had to stabilize. I had to get back into a normal sleep/wake rhythm and regain my will to live.

Once I was no longer nonfunctioning and suicidal, however, I had to get my life back on track. My social worker thought I could go into supported housing for autistic people. I, at first, thought so too. Until I saw all the criteria relating to independence, lack of challenging behavior, trainability, etc. That wasn’t going to work out.

To be quite fair, I never fully understood my actual level of functioning until sometime in 2020. I had wanted to prove myself for so long. I had worn so many masks that hid the real, messy truth of who I am. Consequently, I constantly overestimated myself and my abilities. So did the people around me. Until one day, in November of last year, I crashed again. I probably suffered another burnout. That was when my one-on-one support was started.

There still are voices in my head telling me I could, should in fact go back to my life of before my first burnout in 2007. Back to independent living and college. Otherwise, how can I claim recovery?

The thing is, people who experience work-related burnout, usually don’t go back to their exact jobs from before their burnout either, if to the same job at all. Why should I then go back to a life I hated from the get-go? I try to see recovery from burnout not in terms of recovering lost functioning, but in recovering lost pieces of myself.

The Most Important Milestone

Posted on by Astrid

This week’s prompt for Reena’s Exploration Challenge is “Milestones”.

I am a big calendar girl. As such, I always remember important dates. As a teen, I used to commemorate an important event in my life at least once a month. For example, September 24, 1999 was the day I realized I hated mainstream secondary school and I remembered it for several years afterwards. Similarly, on November 2, 2001, I was in crisis. Same on November 2, 2007 and I was sure the reason (or part of it) was the day (Friday) and date. I still to this day commemorate the day I landed in the psychiatric hospital, even though it’ll have been fourteen years this year.

I realize now that all of these are negative. Don’t I have positive anniversaries? Sure I do. September 19 is the day my husband and I first met (in 2007) and the day we got married (in 2011). On May 7, 2008, we started officially dating and on June 4, 2010, my husband proposed to me.

Then there is the day I was approved for long-term care funding, also June 4 but in 2019. Finally, the day I moved into the care facility, September 23. I only now realize that there were twenty years minus a day between the important event that defined my teens and the important event that I hope will define at least most of the rest of my life.

Okay, that makes me feel ashamed. After all, shouldn’t the most important milestone of my life be the day I met my husband or the day we got married? It probably should be, but right now, honestly, it isn’t. Sorry, hubby.

Carol and Jane

Posted on by Astrid

This week’s Reena’s Exploration Challenge is all about describing the interactions between (your) thinking brain and feeling brain as if they’re characters, perspectives or mindsets. In the theory of dissociative identity disorder, alters are divided into two categories: apparently normal parts (ANPs) and emotional parts (EPs). Some theorists refer to them as Daily Living and Trauma Fixated parts instead. Additionally, I have experience with dialectical behavior therapy, which has the concepts of rational and emotional mind and Wise Mind as the goal to integrate the two.

I don’t believe in the rigid ANP/EP divide and the alters I’m going to describe in the piece below, would most likely both be seen as EPs, even though they’re on opposite ends of a spectrum. You see, one of the main triggers for identity confusion for me is the inability to integrate my low functioning level with regards to my social and emotional development with my at least somewhat above-average verbal IQ. In this sense, Carol and Jane do represent thinking brain and feeling brain.

Yesterday I struggled. I got an official reminder from local taxes from when my husband and I still lived together in the tiny village. An official reminder means they’d previously sent out another type of reminder that doesn’t come with extra costs. This one did come with extra costs and the next step, if I don’t pay, would be a debt collector’s visit. I don’t know why the reminder was only sent to my My Government inbox and not to my husband’s and I didn’t understand the reminder. I texted my husband to ask him for help. By this time, Carol, the alter who is very emotionally immature and vulnerable, was already getting upset. Why don’t I just go under financial management and never bother with money again?

My husband was a little annoyed that I shoved this task onto his plate. For this reason, Jane, who wants to be the intelligent, successful, self-reliant one, said: “Okay, I’ll solve it.” Carol was still prominently present in my mind and she has difficulty thinking clearly. In the end, I paid off the tax debt, but put the wrong identification number in the Comments field. This means the tax agency won’t be able to identify me as the debtor, so it may mean I lost the money. It was €160.

From there on, Carol took full control of my mind. I cried my eyes out and really wished I could crawl under the covers, get a guardian, be supported in the care facility and never worry about difficult decisions again. I didn’t even feel like seeing my husband, as Carol feels too inadequate for marriage.

Ultimately, the situation got sorted (hopefully). My husband sent out an E-mail to the tax agency asking them to either process my payment with the wrong number or return it to me so I can submit it again. Still, this whole situation has us (as in, me with all my parts) truly triggered. It’s a sad reality that each time, I am confronted with the disconnect between my good intellectual functioning and my poor emotional functioning.

Losing Myself and Finding Myself (Reena’s Exploration Challenge #96)

Posted on by Astrid

I remember when and where I lost myself. My old self, that is. It was November 2, 2007 at 8:01PM when I stepped onto the bus at Balustrade bus stop in Apeldoorn. I had decided this was it.

I phoned my old support coordinator at the training home. I’d just been told to leave the home’s premises, because according to the on duty staff, I was making them take unwarranted responsibility for me. I had come there in distress and a housemate had offered for me to spend the night with her, so that we had time to find me a new place to stay in the morning.

I wasn’t homeless. That is, I had a roof over my head. In the Netherlands, the word that translates to “homeless” also refers to people who are wasting away in their residence. And I was.

At 8:01PM November 2, I phoned my old support coordinator to tell her I was going to kill myself. I was on the bus and the bus driver and fellow passengers heard me. They called the police and, after a long wait at the police station, I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital in the middle of the night.

At that point, my old self went away. I lost the self that went to college, had plans for working and lived independently.

I’m still not 100% sure who will replace her. When and where I’ll find myself. My new self, that is. I know my old self is gone. Even though I live semi-independently now, I do not have anything close to a “normal” life, whatever that may be. But that’s okay. I know I will ultimately find a new eqwuilibrium, when I’m in a living facility that suits me.

In September of 2006, I wrote a post in my online diary about the two different images I had of myself. One was “white”. This image represented a “normal” life. Living independently, going to university, finding a job, marrying, getting children and whatnot. The other image, the “black” one, represented my need for support. It wasn’t that I needed 24-hour care, but that I needed more than just the once-a-week visit from a support worker to read me my mail that’s normal for people who are just blind.

By April of 2007, I knew the “black” image was coming true, but I was seeing the colors in it. I eventually did live independently and go to college, but I would get sixteen hours of home support a week.

And then that image too died, on November 2. It was hard. I grieved. But I didn’t give up. Gradually, I started to see how colorful a life I can have if I accept care.

The care facilities I’m looking at moving into, couldn’t be closer to the “black” image of myself. They are 24-hour intensive support facilities. Yet I don’t see that life as bad. I see it was exactly as colorful and rich as, or even more so than the “normal” life I envisioned for myself.

I am joining in with Reena’s Exploration Challenge #96.

She Walked Through Fire

Posted on by Astrid

She walked through fire but was not burned by it. Her body did not show a sign of the path she’d been traveling through the burning forest or her life. She did not feel pain. She had all feeling neatly folded away in the dirty laundry drawer in her mind. Over the years, walking through a little too many fires, she’d grown accustomed to not showing their effects. She was not burned – at least, not visibly so.

A few months ago, I read up on somatoform dissociation. It is where there’s a disconnect between your body and your mind and it shows itself physically, as opposed to psychologically. Psychological dissociation is a distortion in memory, sense of self or identity. Somatoform dissociation manifests itself in distortions to your physical experience. For example, you may not feel sensation in a particular body part for a while (not explained by the body part just having “fallen asleep”). Or you may have a strong aversion to a food or smell you normally like. You may even react differently to medications depending on your state of mind.

While it is unlikely that someone would not have physical burns from walking through an actual fire, the psychological equivalent describes perfectly what it is like to dissociate. In dissociation, you lock away the feelings or memories associated with a trauma into the unconscious. You walk through a psychological fire (experience a trauma) but don’t get burned – at least, not visibly so.

I once read in a women’s magazine about a person with dissociative identity disorder (DID). This woman’s doctor explained that everyone has a breaking point in life and this may be why people with DID may be able to hold it together for years after their early childhood trauma, but fall apart eventually. In other words, they lock away the pain and burns from walking through fire until a minor injury – hurting their index finger – tears open the horrible burn wounds. In my own case, I was fifteen when I first realized I dissociate, but 23 when I experienced this breaking point. I think the breaking point happened after I was attacked by a fellow patient on the resocialization unit of the psychiatric hospital. I wasn’t diagnosed with DID till more than a year later and that diagnosis has since been taken away, but the psychological burn wounds never disappeared.

This post is part of Reena’s Exploration Challenge #48.