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___).::t is for therapy::.__ _ ___
************************************************************************* ‘All treatment approaches strive for a common goal: a more effective functioning in a world that is experienced as less mystifying, less harmful, and more pleasurable. The process usually involved developing insight into the unproductiveness of current behaviour. This is the easy part. More difficult is the process of reworking old reflexes and developing new ways of dealing with life’s stresses.’
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While I feared stopping my self-harm I think that I secretly hoped that someone would help me. But only I could save myself and a future without self-harm and eating disorders and escape routes scared me so much. Perhaps it would have been easier if I took each day as new, not thinking about whether I would or wouldn’t stop in the future. Only I think that I would have kept doing it. The confusion in my head that I could want two such mutually exclusive things so passionately and at the same time scared me and confused me, so I would cut more! I’d just want to pour the contents of my head out, make them see how much pain I was in, how my mind was black and shrivelling. I wanted them to know how much pain I was in and what they could do to help me. Because the people who treated me would never know how suicidal I could feel after one little comment from them. Sometimes I would see that I needed help, normally in the midst of a crisis. I’d be told by someone that I couldn’t carry on like this, that I needed to get something done about it now. I’d initially tell them I was fine thank you, but it would later sink in that maybe I didn’t want to live like this. So I’d have a firm resolve to do something, to get help. But normally by the time I got it the crisis would be over, I would be numb again. Sometimes I would even be able to say that I wanted help, sometimes I would start to say it and then bump into a kind of mental block. So whenever I would say half a sentence and then pretend to forget what I was about to say, that was me not being brave enough to ask for something that I shouldn’t have. I got told a lot that I was resistant, which never failed to surprise me. After all, I was convinced that they were laughing at me for being so open, for telling them all my private feelings that I should really be ashamed of. I was angry with myself for being so truthful, for giving them an entrance into my mind. And then they told me that I was resistant, that I glossed over things and only spoke of my life on a very factual feeling, not letting them know how I actually felt. But that was what I was trying to tell them, I didn’t feel a thing. Beneath all my hard exterior, jokes about my pain and playing games with people, there was a lonely, needy and scared little girl. It just always felt too much, too greedy of me to admit to needing people’s help. Denying that there was anything the matter, hiding the hard truth: that I desperately wanted someone to talk to and someone to love me, that was okay because I wasn’t being demanding. That’s what made me resist, a fear of facing my feelings and a fear of asking for too much, and often a fear of the voice, if it happened to be with me at the time. I could talk about everything on a very superficial level so that what I spoke about became a script, not connected to the insecurity and the pain and the fear deep inside of me. Most of the time I was cut off from all feeling at all, either emotionally numb or emotionally dead. I never really felt much more than a dull ache. It was rarely really resistance against therapy, I did withhold stuff, often about my family life, that I didn’t feel ready to tell them, but I imagine that I must have told them quite a bit, of what I knew at least. I couldn’t face thinking about that little child, the child crying out for love and attention, for long enough to connect with it and really listen and understand the hurt there. So that came out in my warped ways of trying to get attention without an ability to ask for it, or even to properly accept it. I was always scared at the beginning of therapy, knew that I would end up getting attached and begin the terrible cycle again, before ending up desolated and alone. That was always a major point in the list of disadvantages before entering therapy. I didn’t want to get close but never seemed to be able to stop myself. I think that, at times, having therapy made me worse, having to deal with the very issues that I so wanted to avoid. I often wondered if I should just quit therapy forever, perhaps the issues I was having to face would disappear and caused me no harm if I wasn’t forced to notice them. Still, I think that having a therapist of some sort often kept me from going over the edge. But then, it did leave me balancing and faltering a lot so maybe it would have been better to have just fallen, got it over with. And when I felt rejected by a therapist I had grown dependent on, they would essentially be giving me a massive push, or treading on the fingers of that small child inside me, which were desperately hanging on for dear life. And, if I am forced to admit to it, I also cut more while in therapy to get attention and also to feel as if my problems were bad enough to deserve their attention. I think that the best treatments for me were probably the treatments where we didn’t discuss symptoms, when was the last time I cut and so on. Still, that sort of therapy left me in much more danger of doing something particularly dangerous with no-one to discuss it with before or afterwards. And I preferred therapy which just involved me having someone to talk to, someone to tell the things that my friends wouldn’t want to know. It all became much more serious when they asked more of me, goals and things. Or to delve into childhood, the mere thought of which would upset me at the loss of innocence. Besides which, I’d be terrified that I might accidentally get ‘better’ along the way, and then I wouldn’t be special at all, I couldn’t have attention and I couldn’t have a crisis every other second. I have tried out some of the practical suggestions put to me for reducing my self-harm, to see if any are effective for me. Clearly what helps one will not necessarily help another, but there you are, take it or leave it. The first set of ideas are physical ideas, often ways in which to hurt yourself with a minimal amount of damage. This includes things like wearing an elastic band around your wrist and snapping it against your wrist instead of cutting or anything more dangerous. Other suggestions are holding ice in your hand and using a toothbrush instead of a razor blade. These ideas can work a little, although I found that they don’t relieve all that much tension, perhaps due to not bleeding. Sometimes they would make me angry because they couldn’t hurt as much as I wanted to hurt myself. The ice cubes were particularly useful when my body went physically numb. The main problem I would have with them are that they are barely removed, if they are in fact removed, from self-harm. They cause less damage and so make a good alternative. But the point of them is that they hurt you, and the idea of alternative coping strategies is to avoid hurting yourself. And those ice cubes sting quite a bit after a while! Still, as a last resort it could be a good idea to try these things out, it depends whether you see the potential danger or instead the actual act of inflicting pain on oneself as the worst thing about self-harm. There is at least no doubt that the potential danger of these things causing major damage must be fairly low. Secondly, there are the ideas still closely connected to self-harm but which don’t involve hurting your body, which can only be a good thing. One idea is to break the object with which you self-harm, showing power over it. I broke a razor blade into four pieces. Bad idea: for weeks, months, I got quite strong compulsions to eat the pieces. Who was in control there, I hear you ask! Other than that, there are things like drawing the cuts on your body with a marker pen. Again, for me, too much temptation to cut over the marks. Perhaps the most useful idea would be to draw round your arm, or the place you want to cut (if possible) and draw onto it the marks you want to make. Even better: after doing that write down words around it, words you associate with the cuts. Might give more insight into why you cut. I didn’t get very far. The biggest problem I had with these ideas was that they were so very closely related to self-harm. And while it is in my mind I will want to hurt myself. So carrying on thinking about self-harming in a way unlikely to be helpful in the long-term seems ineffective, keeping my mind on it only added to the compulsive desires. The third set of ideas are still physical but are better in that they don’t involve hurting your body. This includes things like scribbling on paper, punching pillows etc. I never found any of this to be much use at all, and I’m still not sure whether expressing aggression in this way releases it or makes it more ingrained for the future, leading to more desires to hurt yourself or other people. Then there are the distractions when you feel like self-harming. They presumably work on the premise that the longer you wait between feeling a desire to cut and actually cutting, the more likely it is that the desire will fade. In addition to this, the distraction you pick may be helpful. Besides, distraction is something that ‘normal’ people do, whereas ‘normal’ people are much less likely to do something like drawing on their arms! Probably the best distractions are things which engage the brain, such as doing a puzzle. Even if any of these things are useful, few will detract from the pain, neither does self-harm. To get over the hurt no amount of self-harm or starvation will heal you, unless, unless, of course, we’re talking death, because, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne:
‘We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.’
But, other than that, self-harm can never be seen as a long-term solution. Perhaps even worse, it is a self-defeating spiral, the more you do it the worse you will begin to feel in, same as it is with eating disorders. Other things, like ringing a friend or watching a good film, holding out until the urgency to hurt yourself fades, they are probably much better ways of coping with the moment than are any of these ways more related to self-harm, for they introduce more of a sense of normality, and developing closer links with friends must be good too. All the suggestions listed above are more physical, I find them particularly hard because while I remain thinking about self-harm nothing will satisfy me until I have done the real thing. So, for me, the only way is total distraction, doing things that anyone might use as general coping strategies, rather than self-harmers as a way of not self-harming. But whatever keeps you safe in the moment. |