"freezing" in autistic meltdowns?

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Hi!
All my life, I've been "freezing" i.e. stopping to talk and move, staring at a wall, not being able to think, on the verge of sobbing, and feeling extremely overwhelmed by everything.
Could it be due to an autistic meltdown? I've never otherwise experienced them, but they seem extremely common in autistic people, so I find myself wondering if this could be an explanation. Do you guys have something similar?

It happened to me last night. You're not alone. Props to you for recognizing what it is and knowing how to get through it.

Yeah I have shut downs, I think one of the things that trigger it is failure.

Any big bewildering situation that can burn out our Aspie brains for the moment will do it. Mine was worrying about being guilty for something relatively ridiculous. Fortunately a fellow ND friend was there and we ended up talking about it.

Failure is a frequent thing. (And thank you for bringing it up; I never suspected there were people out there who were affected that way by it!) I don't like to look at casual screwups as failures. If it's a sin, then it's a failure. But if it's a mistake then it was just something to learn from. At least that's how I rate it.

Hang in there, people.

Yes. Always for me in public situations like jobs or grocery / any other shopping alone. Sometimes I overcome it for months. Sometimes I sit in my car and can’t go in even if I think I look good for the day to go get a haircut / grocery shopping just because I want to avoid hi and thank you’s out in public because it stresses me out if I’ve had a lot of meltdowns privately during that time period but I’m always overly polite in public too though if can be social that day.

Jobs are a bit different for freezing but essentially same thing but it’s the same people so it can seem a lot scarier!

At times of high stress my brain tends to slowly power down with me losing more an more of my abilities. When it's really bad, such as before a panic attack caused by sensory overload, I can't even decide to leave the room and so just stand or sit there staring at a wall and breathing funny.

When any organism perceives overwhelming mortal danger with little or no chance for escape, the biological response is a global one of paralysis and shutdown. Ethologists call this innate response tonic immobility.

For an individual this state of tonic immobility is very scary one to experience. The individual literally lose control over their actions. Highly traumatized and chronically neglected or abused individuals are dominated by the immobilization/shutdown system. Chronically traumatized individuals tend to be plagued with dissociative symptoms, including frequent spaciness, unreality, depersonalization, a general disengagement from life and various somatic symptoms and health complaints.

Being physically, mentally, and emotionally immobilized by overwhelming stress permits a traumatized individual to not to feel the harrowing enormity of what’s about to happen to them, which in their hyperarousal state might threaten their very sanity. In such instances some of the chemicals (i.e., endorphins) secreted functions as an analgesic, so the pain of any injury (to their body or psyche) is experienced with far less intensity.

Humans experience this frozen state as helpless terror and panic. It is a state of utter hopelessness. Tonic immobility is the last-ditch of defense cascade, occurs in traumatized humans. Immobility correlates with tachycardia and low heart rate variability. Cardiac deceleration response is hypothesized to be part of a freezing-like defensive response that includes reduced body sway and heart rate deceleration. Tonic immobility is an innate behavioral response characterized by temporary, profound physical inactivity, analgesia, and relative unresponsiveness to external stimulation that occurs in response to inescapable threats. It is a form of disassociation similar to self-hypnosis.

When a person is in a traumatized state, they physically lose their ability to talk. One of the things that Bessel van der Kolk showed when he first started to do trauma research with functional MRIs is that when people are in the trauma state, they actually shut down the frontal parts of their brain and particularly the area on the left cortex called Broca's area, which is responsible for speech. When the person is in the traumatic state, those brain regions are literally shut down; they're taken offline. Some Aspies report that during a meltdown, they have difficulty processing speech. It is like hearing white noise. Others indicate they lose their ability to think in words. [When the brain collapses down into the core brain, it is becoming a preverbal brain like that of an infant that hasn’t learned to speak.] Rather their brains revert back to thinking in terms of pictures and video clips and when they try and communicate, their words come out as gibberish. Others indicate they lose their ability to process all sensory inputs. Sometimes during a panic attack, the whole body goes limp and the person will collapse on the floor.

p.s. const4nce since this is your first post, welcome to Wrong Planet!