Great article, I've only recently realised (in the last few years) that my occasional meltdowns are caused by certain triggers. I completely agree that I am responsible for controlling my reactions to triggers, I put in a lot of ongoing work to do this. However, I find it frustrating that when I control my reactions, no-one knows that anything occurred (because it's happening in my mind and body), but when I don't control my reactions and melt down, that is obviously noted by observers (and suffered by them too unfortunately).

So controlling reactions to triggers often feels like a losing game where my success is not noticed and only failure is apparent. In other words, I might have controlled three meltdowns today, but a fourth meltdown happened and I could not control it, and so my family or coworkers see me as some unpredredicatable scary person, when in fact I controlled myself more than I didn't, they just did not know about the times when I controlled my reactions.