Falling into Breakdown - What Was the Last Straw? AuDHD-er's Journey Towards Diagnosis

Falling into Breakdown. In this episode, I talk candidly about what caused my 'crash' into being mentally and physically incapacitated for 13+ weeks after months and years of extreme stress and worry. But what was the final straw? 

Includes: life review, dissociation (detachment from reality and time) and executive function malfunctioning!    

Trigger Warning - This one is a bit sad and dark, so if you're feeling wobbly, maybe give this episode a swerve!

The Actualising Woman 🌺 is an unfiltered diary of life after a mental breakdown and a late-diagnosis of ASD and ADHD (AuDHD) at age 57 🌼 As a therapist, empty nester, and entrepreneur, I share the raw reality of recovery: grief, regret, overwhelm and confusion, alongside professional insights, research, and coping tools🌸
This channel is about living unmasked 🌷 rebuilding identity 🌻 and finding strength after years of moving through the world undiagnosed. From mental health struggles to self-actualisation 🌸 (inspired by Carl Rogers and Natalie Rogers), I talk honestly about how I experience my own neurodivergence, and how I am motivated to create a life that finally fits ME🌸

If you’re navigating late-diagnosed ADHD, autism, or AuDHD 🌼, or rebuilding after a breakdown, you’ll find community, understanding and hope here 🌺. 

☕Girl needs COFFEE! Please donate ANY amount, so that I can do this full time?! Thank you! https://buymeacoffee.com/theactualisingwoman

Contact: clare@theactualisingwoman.co.uk for requests, stories for the show or questions.

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Clare Llewellyn-Bailey: Counselling psychotherapist, podcaster, empty-nester, and AuDHD-er!!

Transcript

Clare: 0:04

Hi there and welcome back. My name's Clare, and I wanted to talk today about the breakdown that I'm coming out of. There's been a marked change, I feel, in my brain in the last four or five days, I would say, and it's um it's an obvious difference as well. So I'm gonna kind of talk about it, but I also want to just warn everybody if you are feeling a bit wobbly yourself and may feel a bit triggered by this episode that you may want to kind of give this one a bit of a skip. The next episode will be about the coming out of the breakdown, but this is very much today about going into the breakdown and those initial few weeks, and I don't know where those weeks went, they're completely gone, and I want them back, please. Kinda. Um but so yes, so there could be basically I'm putting out a trigger warning, okay. And also just to clarify a little bit, I've spoken about my diagnosis that happened, but this is before that diagnosis. So the diagnosis for Aud came in the middle of August under the strangest circumstances, and we'll call that Pizza Day. Um, and if you listen to episode two, you'll know why. But this the breakdown came before the diagnosis, and it was, I believe, as a result of oh my goodness, I mean, take your pick, I don't know, trauma in my past as a child, trauma as an adult, actually, some experiences that I would never want to go through again. And I think that the breakdown was an accumulation of many, many, many, many things over many, many, many, many years. I've been in a pickle emotionally before, uh without a doubt, a couple of times. I definitely experienced some type of burnout earlier this year. A year of horrible experiences. This last twelve months has been horrendous, I have to say, and and and it's no surprise that there's been a breakdown. So this is before the main diagnosis with the psychiatrist. I would say it started early July. It'd been building, but I think I think I could probably almost pinpoint it in July. And I'd gone to the doctor, that's right, and I have spoken up until this point anyway. Gone to the doctor, had this um kind of meltdown in the doctor's office, and she sent me to the mental health nurse, and it was the following day, which was I think the 29th of July, that I came crashing down, both physically and mentally. So I'm gonna kind of start from that time and explain what happened, and and of course, I'm using this podcast really as a cathartic measure for myself, most definitely, but I also know, and especially I have realized recently due to the comments that have been coming through on TikTok, that there are many older females that are experiencing a breakdown at around the time of a diagnosis, or a breakdown that sparks off an investigation and therefore a diagnosis or an assessment at least into ASD or ADHD. And I think some commenters have mentioned that they've had breakdowns straight after that diagnosis as well, in that there is they're feeling a lot of confusion, a lot of grief, a lot of guilt, a lot of embarrassment, a lot of shame, lots of all of those kind of uh emotions that can rock your world and make you think, oh good grief, who the flip-flops am I now? I don't know how to function as I did before. And that has been creating a lot of turmoil for people. And I say women because my audience seems to be mainly female. So I'm going from that bit after going to see the mental health nurse, and I know that when I went to see her, and I went to see the doctor on the Friday before, that I had already been struggling for a few weeks. Yeah. Okay. So by the 29th of July, the I think that was the Tuesday, that's the day after I saw the mental health nurse, actually. I was worse after I saw her. Uh that's only because you know the the horses had bolted, you know, the gates were open. Um yeah. The next day was definitely flat on my back on the sofa, no energy. It just drained out of me. You know when you you know when you try and blow up a an inflatable mattress, you know, like if you've got guests to stay or something, and you blow it up, blow it up, and it's just absolutely perfect. By the time you've got the the plug in it, it's kind of deflated down to half its size. I was like that. I mean, I couldn't get the plug back in. It was just the energy just drained. I mean, within oh half an hour or something, it was really odd. I went into shutdown mentally and physically, and please understand I'm only trying to retrieve the memories from a time when I didn't have much memory. Um I don't know where those 13 weeks or so have gone. I just don't know. I remember bits of it, but not all of it. Yeah, and on that day, by that Tuesday, I I had already applied for an ASD assessment. I'd had a meeting with a couple of ladies a couple of years before, and they said we think it's ASD. I didn't do anything about it, but this summer I decided I would. So I'd been through this assessment which had kind of re I'd regurgitated all the feelings and all the thoughts and all the flashbacks and all the everything from doing that assessment, sadly, and I was warned of that. You know, I did know that it was very likely that it was going to stir things up again, and and I'm afraid that is exactly what it it did. And I didn't realise it had. I mean, where did that just come from? It was that I thought I was seeing things in the corner of my eye, you know, people outside looking in, um dunno, just little tiny things, things that you would probably just dismiss if you were in the right frame of mind. But there was a visual thing, and it there was a maybe one or two a day, and I thought, oh gosh, and then I would look and there's nothing there. So I mean make of that what you will, but that is apparently part of a symptom of a breakdown, as well as well as many others. I had had ideation particularly, and again I said that when I went into the doctors that uh that was rife and it wasn't what I wanted, but my brain had almost taken on a life of its own and was taking me to places I just didn't want to go. I wasn't in control of these things. I I had become part of somebody else's game almost. Um so I shut down. I shut down mentally, I shut down physically, and apparently this is how the body protects itself. When it's had enough, it absolutely shuts down, and that is exactly what it did. It shut down physically, it shut down um actually it shut down any anxious thoughts, it shut down most thoughts in actuality. It was a really lovely holiday in my head. It was a head holiday, it was great in that way. Yeah, I remember saying my head is just full of air at the moment. I have an empty bra I have no brain, I have no anxiety, I have no thoughts, and I don't know. When my daughter visited and she would say, Would you like X, Y, and Z, I would go I I don't know. There was nothing I could cling hold of in my brain to help me make a decision. There was just nothing. Nothing was in there. I don't know. It was just I don't know, almost don't bother me with it. I I don't I don't know, you make the decision. It was really quite strange, really strange, because I have lived for at that point th 57 37 in your dreams, Claire. I'd lived 57 years up until that point anxious uh without even knowing it actually. I've been since been diagnosed with GAD as well, so that would make sense, but I'd been living with worry, anxiety, stress, trauma, uh, financial stress, emotional stress, all of it. It had all just disappeared. I have a bit of an analogy that I only thought of. I'm really good at analogies these days because I've been trying to explain it. Me and my daughter just when we chat, which is every single day, we talk about I mean she's been a marvellous support. She will let me spew all my stuff, you know, and then she'll come up. She says, Oh mum, it's like uh it's like this, this, and this, isn't it? You know when you do XYZ and da da da and um yeah, she's really good at them. So there's lots of them, and I'm gonna spew them all out today because I don't I don't want this part of the breakdown story to be all of the time through every single episode. So I'm gonna just just dump it all out on in this one. And the analogy that is the most recent one is it was like I was in a boat on my own in the middle of the sea. All I could do was lie there and look at the sky. I didn't have any sails on the boat, no outboard motor on the boat, no oars, no flares, nothing. Just me in a boat, and I was floating around hoping that I would hit land at some point, but no way of guiding myself there at all. It was very much something that I had to sit and wait and go through. And I knew that at the time. I remember saying to my daughter, right at the very beginning, in the first week or two, this is going to be big. I said, This is going to be big and of course tears and snot everywhere. She was just bringing me tea just constantly. Yeah, this is gonna be big. I know this is big, but I do know that there is gonna be a great time afterwards. I know that there's going to be something wonderful afterwards, and I'm going to look back on this beer and think, good grief, that was life-changing. I knew it had an end, but I just didn't know when that would come. I knew I my brain would come back, and I will have learned so much from whatever is happening to me right now. It was really insightful actually, because really I could have just thought, oh goodness me, this is it now for for good. You know, I'm I'm gonna end up in a uh being sectioned or something, you know, and and this is it from for me from now on. But it wasn't that I was aware while I was stuck there, physically, mentally, stuck in nowhere land, I knew that it was a significant event that I was experiencing. It was highly profound, and I knew that the emotions that I was I was feeling at that time, the crying, my gut would tense up. I mean, I had a uh achy tummy for a long time, I mean, from the muscles. You know, when I would cry, I was crying from my soul, squeezing out this emotion out of my body. I was trying to expel it, get it out, and I had to just let it happen. And the crying would start from my navel, I'm just touching my tummy now, and it would come all the way up through my chest, through my neck and out through my head, and I would cry so hard, so much that I wouldn't be able to breathe. I would be stuck in this clenched up face, waiting for myself to be able to take a breath. It was so intense, so intense, but I knew it was doing me good. It was like I was crying again for the first time, like I'd never cried a tear before and I'd kept it all in, and now I decided on this day or this week or this month, it was now time to let it all out, you know, let it all go. Let my body expel the toxins, you know, the demons, the the grief, the sadness, the despair, it all had to come out. It's like I'd never cried before about them, and they all decided to just all gather together. Just go, hey, let's get her. Let's get her now while she's weak. Oh man, it's a good job, I can laugh about it, isn't it? There was something that was really strange about the whole uh shutdown, the whole let's say the first eight, ten weeks. Um which was that there was a bit in the middle there when I remembered I had a brother and I remembered I had parents. I've said before, I'm estranged from my parents, I don't talk to them for many reasons, we won't go there. I've had the counselling, you know, uh it's it's fine, it's fine. It's all it's all does decades anyway. So but I had this moment where I thought, oh god, yeah, I remember him. My brother. Uh oh yes, I remember. That's right. That happens, that's right. And it was like I had been on a different planet for about 200 years. I remember saying that to my daughter. There was a weirdness about time, and the only way I can describe it, and I know that this might be really out there for a lot of you, I get it completely. I've watched videos about NDE, the near-death experience, just to explore that because I know that many people have experienced that or are claiming that they've experienced it, and I wanted to look into it, so I I did, because I'm kind of I'm kind of open-minded in that way, and if I'm in the right mood, that's one of the videos I would put on. And I remember people on these videos talking about life review, so they've gone to the um air quotes, the other side, or wherever they go, and there's a moment there where they have to look at their back on their life and learn the lessons, or they're shown how it was for the person that they had said something to or done something nasty to, or whatever like that. And also you're shown the good bits they've always said. You have this kind of recap on your life in the important moments, and then you learn the lessons from that, your soul learns from it. And this was like what I imagine in a way, in a very small way, that would be like I was remembering my original family, let's say, mum, dad, brother, as though I was looking at them from a completely different point of view. Like somebody had said, Oh, you know, when you were when you were around in the you know, 1600s, you were in a family, and you remember your name was Susan when you were a maid, and da da da, and I'll go, yeah, I remember that. I remember that life. And it was like that. I remember being his sister, but it was past tense, although it's now, it's current. I think this is the dissociation and I believe from the research I've done, is the hippocampus, the part that is responsible for memories and emotions, absolutely malfunctions. The distance of time isn't as it was before. It's all, excuse the language, fecked up. And it was. And also that detachment from a bodily form, it was it was that I was in my soul, in a spirit, looking down on everything that had happened before, and I was grieving everything that had ever happened before. I remember feeling very sad about the life I'd had before. It was like I was at my own funeral. I was really sad about what Claire had had to go through. Yeah. Really detached, isn't it? It's particularly detached when you think, actually, I'm not in my body being sad for my I'm not wallowing in self-pity right now. I am watching myself be sad for that girl, that woman. I'm outside of my body looking sidewards at the woman who's lying on the sofa so sad. Yeah. And I'm grieving her, very much feeling like she's gone and she's going. Not that I'm dying, but that I can see that that woman, that Claire, who I now call V1, version one, is dying, is going. Give me a minute. Very spiritual, profound experience, all of it. I know it might sound really dramatic, but it was traumatic, actually. Yeah, let's have it. I'm gonna say what it is. Say what you see. And I guess around that time I had this other analogy and I was doing a lot of puzzles at some point towards the end of the breakdown, more recently, you know, in the last six, eight weeks, I suppose. But I remember the analogy of me doing a jigsaw puzzle, and the picture on the box is of a cottage, and the pieces that I've got in front of me are of a ship. And I have no idea how to put that jigsaw puzzle together and make it look like a cottage. I've I can't put it back together again. There is no way I can pull my socks up or get a grip or think of some nice happy memories and you know you'll feel better. So all of this today really is is to talk about the sinking down and what it was like when I was at the bottom of it all. I wasn't wrong, it is something that was profound and life-changing, definitely. And I'm gonna talk more about that on the next episode. But I just wanted to explain how my hard drive was wiped, and now I seem to have a new operating system, I have a new battery. I mean, huh, how many analogies or metaphors can you find for this? Oh, I could find thousands. I don't know if you've heard of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, I expect you have, and it's the triangle, and right at the very bottom of the triangle, let me get it up because I still to some extent my brain can't hold a thought. Um so let me just have a quick look. It is. Yeah, hierarchy of needs. So at the very bottom, I mean Google it if you don't, it's interesting. The very bottom of the triangle is the very basic needs that uh a human needs to survive. So we're really on survival at the bottom there. But in my case, I wouldn't bother with the word reproduction right now, because that's on the very bottom rung of the ladder of the hierarchy of needs. But all I was thinking about and all I needed during that initial time, and in fact, you know, for a good six, eight, ten weeks or so, was the very basic things water, sleep, food, air, shelter, and clothing. For me, it was I had to prioritize just those. But I didn't even think about everything else. Everything was suspended. It was a very odd place to be. Yeah. So that's the bit I wanted to talk about, the bit where I'm sliding down into breakdown. The next episode is gonna be a little more uplifting, and I'm gonna talk about how it felt to come back, to come back online, if you like, to for my brain and my fight-flight response to calm down and the hippocampus to mend. I haven't really delved into the science of it all so much, the neuroscience, about a breakdown. I don't feel the need to do that actually, which is quite strange for me as an ex-teacher. But I think I've deliberately well, I'm on V2 now, aren't I? I'm on version 2, so if I don't want to, I'm not gonna but enough to say that I do know that it is to do with the hippocampus, to do with adrenaline, cortisol, and when you have too much of that in your body, you're in trouble. You you know, you need to do something, and it'll come out as a physical symptom when you have all that, all those hormones raging around your body that are toxic actually for your body. The cortisol adrenaline is only supposed to be there for a short time, for example, to help you run away and give you the energy to run away from a lion or a you know the number 37 bus that's looming on you. There's supposed to be short bursts of these hormones in order to keep you alive, but when you've been running those toxins through your body for decades, there's going to always be a time when it goes, sod it, no, not doing, not playing anymore. I can't do this. So that's what happened. Okay, so next episode, let's look at the brighter side of life. Okay, alright, thanks for listening, and I hope that I haven't triggered you all. Um I hope that that wasn't too too much. I mean, that's probably the deepest I'm gonna go on that on the breakdown experience, but I just feel that I wanted to put that out there. So, okay, I will speak to you in the next one. You take care and have a great day. Remember to please follow the show. Enough from me. I'm gonna let you go and get on with your day, and I'm going to go and get a cup of tea because I've done well. Episode number three, yay! Patting myself on the back here, guys. Bye.