Posted by Dinah on January 16, 2003, at 9:37:20
Ok, I am probably doing something stupid here. But I found it deeply distasteful to be the subject of post(s) debating whether I was an attention seeking faker or merely too crazy to post on this mental health forum. So I'm going to be honest.
I come from a family of parents who genuinely hate each other. I took on the role (and my parents allowed me to take on the role) of peacemaker. Which meant that I had to hide my fear, distress, and sometimes anger to mediate between them. Moreover, I had to be a good little girl so as not to cause more conflict in the household.
When my life fell apart at age 11, in large part by being designated the target in middle school, but other things too, I was angry as hell. I wanted the adults in my life to protect me and I acted out, way out, to try to express the depths of my pain. That got me nowhere I wanted to be. So I learned to divide off the part of me that was scared and enraged, and learned to behave in a very rational manner, effectively functioning on two very different levels.
My husband is a great wonderful guy, but not particularly emotionally sensitive. I learned that it was best to be very rational around him too. And once I had my son it was important to me to be a good, patient, not angry mom.
In fact you might notice on this forum that the angrier I get, the more intellectualized my posts get.
The result is a pressure cooker. As stress adds on, pressure builds. As pressure builds, urges, obsessions, images wrap themselves around my mind. There are two effective ways to deal with them. One is to talk about them, laugh at them if I can, and thus reduce the pressure. The other is to act on them. That's really the best way, but darn it, good little me promised my therapist not to do that, and good little me tries to keep her promises. Fortunately he recognizes the effort and forgives my occasional lapses.
Of course, it would be best to learn better coping skills so that the pressure doesn't build. I'm trying to do that, but it's not easy. Medications, for me, are not terribly effective. They seem to work by separating me from my emotions more, which reduces the frequency of my obsessions, but places the pressure higher. I actually self harmed more on SSRI's, and I could see that Risperdal was having a similar effect.
Do I really want to kill myself sometimes? Sure, that's pretty common isn't it? Do I really want to hurt myself sometimes? Sure, it's hard not to want to do something that makes you feel better so quickly. Do I act on my impulses? I don't kill myself because it would hurt my son. I try not to self injure because I promised.
Self injury is not "crazy" and self injurers do not have to be locked away, or even medicated out of their humanity.
For further information on self injury, I recommend the following site:
http://www.palace.net/~llama/psych/
poster:Dinah
thread:35310
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030111/msgs/35310.html