My friend Kris Krüg gave it a name almost twenty years ago. I was CEO of Raincity Studios back then, the web agency I'd co-founded in Vancouver, and when a problem landed on my desk I didn't so much handle it as go off. On whoever happened to be closest. Kris called it a robplosion. Everybody laughed, me included, because it was a good word, and because laughing was easier than talking about what it actually was.
Now it's the name of this website. I know.
So why do people like me explode over small things? Here's the plain version, the one I'd have wanted at thirty. The small thing is almost never the real thing. It's the last drop in a glass that was already full. Stress, noise, too many people, bad sleep, and under all of it a fear that something is about to go wrong and it'll be my fault. The glass fills up quietly all day. Then somebody asks a simple question at the wrong moment and it goes everywhere.
That's the short answer. The longer one is messier.
What a robplosion actually looked like
It was rarely the big disasters. Give me a real crisis and I'd go calm, almost cold, and fix it. It was the small stuff that got me. A deadline moved without anybody telling me. A meeting running long. Somebody saying "quick question" while I was deep in something else.
My voice would go up. The words came out faster than I could check them. For a few minutes I wasn't really steering, I was more like a passenger watching myself be a jerk. Then it was done, and the other person was standing there, and I was left with the part nobody saw.
The shame. It came after, every single time, and it stuck around a lot longer than the anger did.
That's what people miss about guys who blow up. Most of us aren't enjoying it. We're furious, then we're disgusted with ourselves, and then (this is the dangerous bit) we're so ashamed that we avoid the person we yelled at. Which makes everything worse.
Why the small things do it
The NHS page on anger says that when you're already dealing with a lot of problems or stress, anger gets harder to control. Obvious, right? It didn't feel obvious from the inside. From the inside it felt like the world was full of idiots.
For me a few things were filling that glass, and I didn't know the names of most of them.
Autism. I only found out I had ASD in 2022, at 50, during a breakdown in the COVID years. Fifty years of not knowing why I was "weird". When I look back at the robplosions with that word in my hand, a lot of them make more sense. The National Autistic Society describes a meltdown as an intense response to an overwhelming situation, where a person temporarily loses control of their behaviour. That is uncomfortably close to some afternoons in that office. Open-plan room, phones going, people everywhere, and me acting like I was fine with all of it.
Anxiety. A lot of my anger was fear in a louder coat. When I sense something falling apart I don't look scared, I look furious. Getting angry felt like doing something. Being scared felt like nothing.
Shame. If you already think you're a fraud, every small mistake, yours or anybody's, feels like proof it's all about to come out. So you get there first. Loudly.
Substances, for some of those years. They didn't help anything. I haven't touched cocaine or heroin in sixteen years now, and that gets its own posts.
I want to be straight about one thing. Autism explains some of it. It excuses none of it. The people I yelled at didn't care what was going on in my nervous system, and they were right not to.
Meltdown, bad temper, or something with a medical name?
I've asked myself this one a lot. There's a real difference between an autistic meltdown and a tantrum, and I went into it in Meltdown or tantrum? The adult version. There's also a diagnosis called intermittent explosive disorder, which Mayo Clinic describes as sudden outbursts way out of proportion to the situation. I read that description once and went quiet for a while.
I don't have that diagnosis. Mine are Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), BPD and ADHD, all from 2022. I'm saying so because I don't want anyone using my story as a checklist. If your outbursts are frequent, or people are scared of them, a doctor or psychologist can actually work out what's going on. I dig into it more in Intermittent explosive disorder, explained by someone who explodes.
What helps me now
No magic. It's mostly boring.
I watch the glass instead of the drop. The National Autistic Society talks about a "rumble stage", the signs of distress that show up before a meltdown. Mine are a hot face, a tight chest, short answers, and a sudden urge to fix everything at once. When I catch those, the day is already too full, and my job is to empty some of it before somebody asks me a simple question.
I leave the room, and I say that's what I'm doing. "I need ten minutes, I'm not leaving the conversation." The second half matters. Walking out without it just looks like another explosion with a door at the end.
I cut down what fills the glass. Noise is a big one. So is being "on" with people for hours with no break. Living out here in La Petite-Nation, lakes and walking the dog in the forest and a lot of quiet, helps more than I like to admit.
And lifelong therapy. Somebody helping me read the instruction manual I never got.
If you want something to read on a bad night, this one is gentle. A bit like having somebody calm sit next to you while you're still shaking.
Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
Thich Nhat Hanh
My take. Gentle and practical. Reads like someone calm sitting next to you while you're still shaking.
Good to know. Spiritual framing, not clinical.
The practical side is in How I'm learning to control the outbursts, and the after part is in Repairing after a blow-up.
Where the line is
This part matters more than anything else on the page.
If the people you live with are scared of you, that's abuse, whatever is behind it. Yelling that makes someone afraid, threats, smashing things, anything physical. Autism doesn't change that. Neither does anxiety or a rough childhood. And keeping you calm isn't their job. It's yours.
Sandra, my partner, has lived with the last fifteen years of this. It was never her job to manage me, even in the years when I acted like it was.
If you're on the receiving end and you're afraid, in Québec you can call SOS violence conjugale at 1 800 363-9010, any hour, free and confidential. If you're the one exploding and you can see it getting worse, call 811 or book your doctor. This week, not after the next one.
The word, now
I still robplode. Less often, and smaller. Sometimes I catch it early. The word started as a joke at my expense, then for a long time it was something to hide behind. These days it's mostly a reminder of the work. I put it on the website because it's honest, and because Kris came up with it almost twenty years ago and nobody has found a better one.