I had a similar realization regarding all the wellness culture protocols I was doing… they made me “less volatile”, especially fasting and meditation (and yes I dove into CBT too, though not with a trained therapist), but at no point did I ever ask myself if volatility was really a problem I needed to fix instead of a signal I needed to pay attention to. I wish I hadn’t needed to burn out before recognizing this but, better late than never I guess 🌺
Tragically, our society teaches us to ignore signals, not to pay attention to them. They are inconvenient, uncomfortable, and often indicate there is hard work to be done.
So now there is an entire industry focused on helping us ignore the signals.
Chris’s essay also had me making a lot of connections. I went through the same type of thing with CBT-oriented therapy after my collapse burnout over 15 years ago. I was still years away autism even being a glimmer of a thought.
"I got calm. I didn't get better." That landed like a stone.
The first thing that comes up is a simple interpretation that gains depth when you consider what it's doing. If you are calm, you are perceived as better. If you're better, you are fixed. If you are fixed, you no longer need help. And the cycle repeats. The therapies log another data point for someone they "helped." And the therapies keep getting offered to people they harm.
I haven't tried CBT, but I know what you're describing. The treatments I was offered included talk therapy, biofeedback, SSRIs, SNRIs, SARIs, and eventually, when the chronic stress became physical, muscle relaxants, nerve blockers, and opioids. These were all aimed at the downstream effects of being autistic without knowing it, not the source.
The source was the mismatch between my neurology and nearly every environment and relationship I inhabited. The pattern recognition that sees more than the room can hold. The translation labor. The constant remapping. The carrying of contradictions nobody else seemed to notice. The inability to put into words what I was actually experiencing. The world that provided no validation for any of it. The load that accumulates silently under the surface.
When I tried to describe what I was experiencing to professionals, I usually described it as rage held under the surface, which was the closest I could come to naming the load. Inevitably, the conversation almost always turned back to me. Are you safe? Are others safe? Which reframes suffering as threat and hands the problem back to you as a failure of emotional control.
But it was never emotional. It was the weight. Decades of accumulated load carried in a heavy pack I'd been trained to pretend wasn't there. The rage was what happens when a body carries that long enough. (And no, I never busted up a grocery store with a baseball bat, or anything like that. The "rage" stayed inside me.)
And it only began to come into focus with an accurate name after the whole system collapsed. After the bottom dropped completely out.
Where's the justice in that? There isn't any. What there is, maybe, is the makings of a map. My hope is that the next person doesn't have to wait for the collapse to get the accurate name.
This fits neatly into a piece I've been writing called "The File", which is one I haven't felt confident releasing yet. But the universe keeps offering me seeds of encouragement. This is one of them.
Thank you for writing this. And for the seed you grew from mine.
I want to respond to everything you just wrote here, but the storm in my head is blowing thoughts past me faster than I can grasp them.
The thing about rage, though, that resonates with something else I’ve been thinking about. It comes out of the moment with my therapist “Half of the trauma I’m carrying wouldn’t exist if it had just been okay for me to lose my shit once in a while.”
So I'm going to speculate, and you tell me how far off the mark I am:
I think I understand the feeling you were describing - and when the problem is placed in you, then rage is viewed as an anger management issue. But in "rage held under the surface" the important word is held. And not as restraint, but as pressure. You were describing a felt sense of a violent pressure. And even though it was within, the violence wasn't something you enacted, it was violence being done to you. That is the weight - the accumulation. And it seems like every intervention you were given was intended to strengthen the restraint.
I can't share the memory this surfaces for me here, not yet. But that same pressure almost ended me at an early age, a person who would never have hurt me, who held the pressure for much too long, and the pressure blew with no warning, no chance for them to get to a safe place and melt down. They were driving. My mom and I discussed it later, what happens when you hold pressure in too long. We know this - it is physics. And yet...
Anger management isn't the solution. Internalizing the problem isn't a solution.
There is no justice in being misread by the entire healthcare community.
There is justice in creating maps and helping the next person.
I'm glad what I wrote resonated, and I'm looking forward to reading "The File" when you are ready to share.
"The important word is held. And not as restraint, but as pressure."
Yes. Exactly that.
Every intervention aimed at strengthening the restraint — the mindfulness, the emotional regulation techniques, the implicit and explicit message that controlling your response was the goal — was adding pressure to a container already at capacity.
And underneath all of it was a moral judgment: that feeling the pressure itself was the problem. That if you were carrying load, pain, rage that accumulated in you that nobody could see and nobody validated, the correct response was to get better at holding it. Quietly. Calmly. Without disrupting the room.
That's not treatment. That's training. And it's an endless cycle, because the load doesn't stop accumulating just because you've gotten better at hiding it.
I see it going backward and forward. Backward into my own family. The sudden, confusing meltdowns that were inevitable because the pressure was invisible, because nobody had the language, because we were never taught to name the load, to ask for relief, or honor those requests when others made them.
The physics always won eventually. It would have taken an entirely different cultural norm to interrupt that. The norm didn't exist then, but I have hope that it might be shifting.
And forward, which is where the hope lives. I'm trying to be the generation that has the language and passes it on. That tells my kids: you don't have to do everything, even when, and maybe especially when, you want to. You can take time to reset. When you feel this "thing" building inside, that's information, not failure. That's your system telling you it needs something. Honor it.
The cycle breaks when someone finally names the load out loud and teaches the next person they don't have to carry it alone.
"There is justice in creating maps and helping the next person." Yes. I deeply believe this is true.
The File is getting closer. Your writing is part of what's making it possible.
I relate to all of this and feel like I am always trying to figure it out - I’m now working with brain-spotting and a female AuDHD therapist because I got so tired of translating!
Wow, I can so thoroughly identify with every word you're written here, Amberhawk. For decades, mothering a very complicated boy with several physical and mental and sensory handicaps wore me to a complete frazzle. And, then, being trained by mental health professionals to "rise above" the endless signals for which none of my responses provided him with sustained help just sent me further and further into depression and self-loathing which I then had to keep masking. I haven't read Chris' post but I'm deeply grateful to read your honest report. And sad for your suffering ... and for mine ... and for your mother... and for my son.
This! Mindfulness can be an awesome tool - BUT CBT and many people teach it to be used outside of its intended context and cause more harm than good as a result. You are not alone in these experiences and I really feel for you going through all of this. Mindfulness and meditation needs to come with safety warnings - but rarely does as it really is not suitable for everyone and needs to take account of many mental health conditions, neurodiversity and trauma backgrounds plus present situations before being considered as a suitable tool to be used.
I had a similar realization regarding all the wellness culture protocols I was doing… they made me “less volatile”, especially fasting and meditation (and yes I dove into CBT too, though not with a trained therapist), but at no point did I ever ask myself if volatility was really a problem I needed to fix instead of a signal I needed to pay attention to. I wish I hadn’t needed to burn out before recognizing this but, better late than never I guess 🌺
Tragically, our society teaches us to ignore signals, not to pay attention to them. They are inconvenient, uncomfortable, and often indicate there is hard work to be done.
So now there is an entire industry focused on helping us ignore the signals.
Chris’s essay also had me making a lot of connections. I went through the same type of thing with CBT-oriented therapy after my collapse burnout over 15 years ago. I was still years away autism even being a glimmer of a thought.
Sounds like our timelines were similar. Understanding the root cause makes such a huge difference.
"I got calm. I didn't get better." That landed like a stone.
The first thing that comes up is a simple interpretation that gains depth when you consider what it's doing. If you are calm, you are perceived as better. If you're better, you are fixed. If you are fixed, you no longer need help. And the cycle repeats. The therapies log another data point for someone they "helped." And the therapies keep getting offered to people they harm.
I haven't tried CBT, but I know what you're describing. The treatments I was offered included talk therapy, biofeedback, SSRIs, SNRIs, SARIs, and eventually, when the chronic stress became physical, muscle relaxants, nerve blockers, and opioids. These were all aimed at the downstream effects of being autistic without knowing it, not the source.
The source was the mismatch between my neurology and nearly every environment and relationship I inhabited. The pattern recognition that sees more than the room can hold. The translation labor. The constant remapping. The carrying of contradictions nobody else seemed to notice. The inability to put into words what I was actually experiencing. The world that provided no validation for any of it. The load that accumulates silently under the surface.
When I tried to describe what I was experiencing to professionals, I usually described it as rage held under the surface, which was the closest I could come to naming the load. Inevitably, the conversation almost always turned back to me. Are you safe? Are others safe? Which reframes suffering as threat and hands the problem back to you as a failure of emotional control.
But it was never emotional. It was the weight. Decades of accumulated load carried in a heavy pack I'd been trained to pretend wasn't there. The rage was what happens when a body carries that long enough. (And no, I never busted up a grocery store with a baseball bat, or anything like that. The "rage" stayed inside me.)
And it only began to come into focus with an accurate name after the whole system collapsed. After the bottom dropped completely out.
Where's the justice in that? There isn't any. What there is, maybe, is the makings of a map. My hope is that the next person doesn't have to wait for the collapse to get the accurate name.
This fits neatly into a piece I've been writing called "The File", which is one I haven't felt confident releasing yet. But the universe keeps offering me seeds of encouragement. This is one of them.
Thank you for writing this. And for the seed you grew from mine.
I want to respond to everything you just wrote here, but the storm in my head is blowing thoughts past me faster than I can grasp them.
The thing about rage, though, that resonates with something else I’ve been thinking about. It comes out of the moment with my therapist “Half of the trauma I’m carrying wouldn’t exist if it had just been okay for me to lose my shit once in a while.”
So I'm going to speculate, and you tell me how far off the mark I am:
I think I understand the feeling you were describing - and when the problem is placed in you, then rage is viewed as an anger management issue. But in "rage held under the surface" the important word is held. And not as restraint, but as pressure. You were describing a felt sense of a violent pressure. And even though it was within, the violence wasn't something you enacted, it was violence being done to you. That is the weight - the accumulation. And it seems like every intervention you were given was intended to strengthen the restraint.
I can't share the memory this surfaces for me here, not yet. But that same pressure almost ended me at an early age, a person who would never have hurt me, who held the pressure for much too long, and the pressure blew with no warning, no chance for them to get to a safe place and melt down. They were driving. My mom and I discussed it later, what happens when you hold pressure in too long. We know this - it is physics. And yet...
Anger management isn't the solution. Internalizing the problem isn't a solution.
There is no justice in being misread by the entire healthcare community.
There is justice in creating maps and helping the next person.
I'm glad what I wrote resonated, and I'm looking forward to reading "The File" when you are ready to share.
"The important word is held. And not as restraint, but as pressure."
Yes. Exactly that.
Every intervention aimed at strengthening the restraint — the mindfulness, the emotional regulation techniques, the implicit and explicit message that controlling your response was the goal — was adding pressure to a container already at capacity.
And underneath all of it was a moral judgment: that feeling the pressure itself was the problem. That if you were carrying load, pain, rage that accumulated in you that nobody could see and nobody validated, the correct response was to get better at holding it. Quietly. Calmly. Without disrupting the room.
That's not treatment. That's training. And it's an endless cycle, because the load doesn't stop accumulating just because you've gotten better at hiding it.
I see it going backward and forward. Backward into my own family. The sudden, confusing meltdowns that were inevitable because the pressure was invisible, because nobody had the language, because we were never taught to name the load, to ask for relief, or honor those requests when others made them.
The physics always won eventually. It would have taken an entirely different cultural norm to interrupt that. The norm didn't exist then, but I have hope that it might be shifting.
And forward, which is where the hope lives. I'm trying to be the generation that has the language and passes it on. That tells my kids: you don't have to do everything, even when, and maybe especially when, you want to. You can take time to reset. When you feel this "thing" building inside, that's information, not failure. That's your system telling you it needs something. Honor it.
The cycle breaks when someone finally names the load out loud and teaches the next person they don't have to carry it alone.
"There is justice in creating maps and helping the next person." Yes. I deeply believe this is true.
The File is getting closer. Your writing is part of what's making it possible.
I relate to all of this and feel like I am always trying to figure it out - I’m now working with brain-spotting and a female AuDHD therapist because I got so tired of translating!
Wow, I can so thoroughly identify with every word you're written here, Amberhawk. For decades, mothering a very complicated boy with several physical and mental and sensory handicaps wore me to a complete frazzle. And, then, being trained by mental health professionals to "rise above" the endless signals for which none of my responses provided him with sustained help just sent me further and further into depression and self-loathing which I then had to keep masking. I haven't read Chris' post but I'm deeply grateful to read your honest report. And sad for your suffering ... and for mine ... and for your mother... and for my son.
This! Mindfulness can be an awesome tool - BUT CBT and many people teach it to be used outside of its intended context and cause more harm than good as a result. You are not alone in these experiences and I really feel for you going through all of this. Mindfulness and meditation needs to come with safety warnings - but rarely does as it really is not suitable for everyone and needs to take account of many mental health conditions, neurodiversity and trauma backgrounds plus present situations before being considered as a suitable tool to be used.