Attunement Freeze Overwhelm Shutdown

Definition

Sensory and emotional overload shutdown — in autistic or highly sensitive nervous systems, accumulating input crosses a threshold and the system withdraws: feeling still floods while attention cannot land and intake closes. Unlike Vulnerability-Lock's biosocial trait dysregulation or Trigger-Blank's trauma reactivation, there is no trauma or personality pathology here — only a low-acuity overwhelm that lifts once stimulation drops. Shares the overwhelm-shutdown phenotype with its cognitive-load siblings (Acuity Freeze, FM; Curiosity Freeze, OM), which reduce input directly (centering=direct); here the overload is emotional flooding in a sensitive/autistic system, so down-regulation needs co-regulation by another — hence centering=support_required.

Glossary source /cascades/Attunement Freeze/variants/@label=attunement-freeze-overwhelm-shutdown/reason

Orthography

case

capitalized-always

evidence

ordinary

Usage

do not use for

The parent cascade, a reusable global diagnosis, or a variant attached to a different cascade.

register

{
  "docs": "allowed",
  "marketing": "allowed",
  "product": "required",
  "public": "required"
}

use when

Naming a reviewed presentation that is a child of exactly one parent cascade.

Relationships and lifecycle

Parents

• cascade.attunement-freeze