The rumbling or rage stage of an autistic meltdown is one of the most challenging stages of the process. It is when the autistic person is at their worst. They will say things that they do not mean. They could be aggressive or physically destroy property, they could hurt people, or it could be the complete opposite. Regardless, I have experienced many of the things that most autistic individuals do during this stage. They were not the proudest moments of my life and as much as I remember them, I now wonder how I got through them unscathed or into the legal or justice system, but I honestly believe that it was God’s grace and divine intervention that helped me get through those challenges.

It has been when I was the most explosive towards anyone and anybody. The worst meltdowns happened during puberty. This is a common challenge for the autistic community where our strength and ability to reason is quite overpowering and unconceivable within the autistic person. There is just so much energy pent up between what is being felt and the hormones that it can be hard to be under control. I had some bad behaviors during this period of my life that made just getting through the day a feat. Junior High, although I only went two years, was extremely challenging that consisted of some of the worst of meltdowns and behaviors that were in no way socially appropriate. When that developed into very challenging behaviors that my parents could no longer manage me along with several psychiatric hospitalizations, my parents advocated for residential treatment to at a minimum adjust the psychotropic medications that I was on to the right cocktail and try to subdue the meltdowns to a bare minimum.

After nine months of residential treatment, there were meltdowns. In those early years, to keep me safe, I was placed in passive restraints that I did not enjoy or understand, my parents had to be taught these by the residential treatment facility as a safeguard in moments when help could be summoned. On top of this, I spent some time away at a camp that was substandard in many forms and it too involved continual passive restraints and many other things that were challenging and traumatic for me even to this day.

As I was discharged from the residential facility and got involved in the swimming team at my  senior high school as a statistician, The meltdowns became less. Additionally, I had toured the place that I would later go to vocational training an hour or so away from my home and one of the conditions that the state vocational rehabilitation counselor had placed for me to be considered for trial was that I had one year of no meltdowns. Therefore, the meltdowns became less physical to more verbally aggressive and were not outside of the confines of my parents or immediate family.

Eventually, being physically aggressive in a meltdown became out of style and the last time major meltdowns occurred was during the COVID-19 Lockdowns. Since then, I have been more adamant on working to stop a meltdown from evolving into the rumble stage by deploying coping mechanisms that are helpful. There have also been factors that have changed to eliminate the probability of being triggered by meltdowns along with working on what to do when those triggers appear. I have from time to time recalled and learned from those experiences and continue to work at not repeating them again.