Trigger happy?

tools to help you assess your urges before you give in to them, and to help you understand and learn from slips after they happen. by posting here, you're saying that you are serious about exploring the feelings behind your self-harm in depth, whether you're ready to stop hurting yourself or not. to request posting access, click usergroups above and join before and after.

Moderator: treasure

Post Reply
User avatar
kurdt_kobain
forum moderator emeritus
forum moderator emeritus
Posts: 7964
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2003 11:22 pm
Gender: Vagina Positive
Location: Southeast US / Age: 22
Contact:

Trigger happy?

Post by kurdt_kobain » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:24 am

how will this situation or feeling change if i hurt myself?

The situation is imagined. Nothing is going on. No one is hating me at the moment or trying to hurt me. However, I feel like everyone is hating me and is going to hate me even more. I feel like maybe they're somehow knowing everything I feel about them and they're going to use this against me. I know this is not rational. I know this is imagined. But the insecurity and tenseness will go away if I hurt myself now.


what will hurting myself bring to the situation? what will it take away from the situation?

It will bring relief. It will make this stupid feeling go fucking away and I can pretend to be normal for a few more days. I don't know if it will take anything away. It seems like it will do nothing but help right now.


how do i want to feel about this in the long run? is hurting myself likely to get me closer to or farther from feeling that way?

I don't know how to make this feeling permently go away and I want to learn that. However it seems to be all over me and it won't leave me alone. I feel so insecure and so tense that my arms are burning and my wrists don't look right not cut. I don't know why. Every few months the area that I need to cut changes and there is no reason. For a while, though, it's been my wrists.
And somehow cutting them will relax me. Right now I'm disgusted by the whole-ness of my skin. It needs to be scratched with red, and broken and it needs to mirror how disgusting I am on the inside. In the long run...I'll just have another scar, and it won't really affect me. I honestly can't see the negative side of cutting right now except that it might hurt my parents and friends if they see.
I want to be so much farther away from feeling this, but maybe hurting myself just makes the feeling go away and then come back stronger?


if hurting myself seems like my best option right now, how long will the relief it brings last? what will i do then?


It will last a few days/hours. Depends. And when it goes away, I'll probably be back here answering these questions. I just can't find another way to deal. I can't. I have a fresh pack of razor blades sitting in my room. I want to go up and see how sharp they are. It's always FUN for me to test my blades on myself. Like self-injury is FUN for me. Relaxing myself by cutting is FUN. Isn't that sick? I honestly ENJOY it...


what is something i could do now instead of hurting myself? how will it change the situation i'm in? how long will that change last, and what will i do then?


I could go to sleep. I could read my book. I could listen to depressing music and close my eyes and pretend I'm bleeding to death. I could, um, go outside and sit on the swing and think about things. I like the air outside in the fall.
None of those will make the feeling go away as quicky as SI will...but it will eventually go away...and yeah. :-/ This feeling is going to come back, and I'm going to be back here. I don't know why I'm feeling this way.


how will i feel tomorrow if i hurt myself? how will i feel tomorrow if i do the other thing i came up with?


I will feel proud that I hurt myself. I know, odd? I will be glad that I hurt myself. I'll be happy that I have another cut and that I'm free from the feeling. If I do the other thing, I'll be dealing with this feeling again all tomorrow.


what do i really want to do right now? how can i best honor the self-protective instinct that has me wanting to self-injure right now?


I really do want to SI. I can honor it by...taking care of myself? By not hurting myself so that I won't be hurt...I can take care of myself and cuddle up under the blanket and hold my doll. Maybe...


*sigh*
trying to follow in the footsteps of the masters,
but it's a lot harder than it looks because even though
they had the same size feet as us, they weren't looking
down the whole time while they walked to make sure
they were doing it right.
[story people]

User avatar
RickTheTwinkie
knows the ropes
knows the ropes
Posts: 4861
Joined: Sat Mar 20, 2004 5:43 am
Gender: Maleness
Location: Warilla, NSW, Australia
Contact:

Post by RickTheTwinkie » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:58 am

Why exactly would you feel proud? Would you feel proud if you fought off the feelings another way?
rickthetwinkie

My Story

My Journal

User avatar
Tiarin
board admin emeritus
board admin emeritus
Posts: 5794
Joined: Thu Oct 09, 2003 10:34 pm

Re: Trigger happy?

Post by Tiarin » Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:50 am

kurdt_kobain wrote:The situation is imagined. Nothing is going on. No one is hating me at the moment or trying to hurt me. However, I feel like everyone is hating me and is going to hate me even more. I feel like maybe they're somehow knowing everything I feel about them and they're going to use this against me. I know this is not rational. I know this is imagined. But the insecurity and tenseness will go away if I hurt myself now.
that sounds really hard. i can well understand the fear that everyone hates you; that's a miserable place to be.

i'm wondering if you've ever noticed any pattern or trigger for these kinds of feelings. i'm not at all trying to jump to conclusions about what's going on with you, but just to give an example of a thought process i've noticed in my own life— lately i've observed that my general paranoia that everyone hates me often stems from a particular situation with one individual (for example, i think i did something stupid and now someone is mad at me). but for some reason it's hard for me to acknowledge that; it's a lot easier for me to generalize it into "everyone hates me."

so anyway, i know this isn't always the easiest thing to see, but i'm wondering if you have any sense of what provokes these fears.

i hope you're doing okay.

dragonfly
(formerly dragonfly)

"I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it." (Mary Oliver)

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests