After post (sorry...) *SI*

[Laura]

The incident was Wednesday night, just haven't had the opportunity to post until now.

• have you taken care of your physiacl wounds? if not, go do that now. we'll wait.
  
  Yeah done that.
• what had happened just before?
  
  Just before - well I arrived home from work and knew I hadn't long before I had to go out to church group... I'd been crying at work and on the Tube coming home and at home and I just knew I was going to SI.
• what were you thinking and feeling?
  
  I was so angry with myself and ashamed because I kept going over and over the situation that had upset me at work and I couldn't see any way of looking at it that gave me any right to feel so hurt by it and yet I still felt hurt, therefore I am bad.
• why did you end up hurting yourself then instead of some other time? was there an event that was teh final straw? what was it?
  
  An SI episode has been "on the cards" for weeks now. But it was giving a seminar and having several members of the audience attacking me that did it. Yes, I had made an error in the maths, but I'm not bright enough to fix it there and then, and if lots of people all shout at me at once then I just can't cope. I shouldn't cry in those situations but I can't help it. They don't think their behaviour was unreasonable and I suspect it wasn't. I'm just too pathetic to handle it.
• how did the situation get to the final straw stage? trace it back through the events thatled up to the last event. look for some point at which you could have made a different decisiona nd not arrived at the final straw.
  
  I don't think I could have stopped that happening. And all the other stresses that have been building up, well they are to do with having a new job and a new flatmate and all that, nothing I can do to avoid that either.
• were there outside factors like drugs, alsohol, being off your meds, lack of sleep, etc? can you address those in the future? how?
  
  Only outside factors are the stresses of being new here, which I can't prevent. No drugs, no alcohol, and I think I slept ok. And yes I take my meds.
• what other ways of coping did you try besides self-harm? how well did they work?
  
  In past weeks I've used quite a few to get this far. Even just before I SIed I read my list of strategies, but there didn't seem to be much I could do in the time available. And I didn't feel like I deserved to not SI anyway.
• in retrospect, are there coping methods that you now realize might have helped? what were they?
  
  Maybe I shouldn't have gone to the church group. Being alone at home bad idea, but maybe I should have gone to a web cafe and posted it all here. But when I'm tearful I don't want to be out in public.
  Maybe I shouldn't have had anything to SI with in the house. Well I did keep them inaccessible, and with a bit of paper so that I had to read my list of strategies and my reasons not to SI etc before doing it. I don't keep the "worst method" stuff in the house anymore, all I did on Wednesday was fairly minor.
• name at least two things you will do to help yourself remember those coping methods if you end up in this situation again.
  
  ??
• how do you feel about the situation that led to self-harm now? is it resolved? if not, what are some steps you might take toward resolution?
  
  No. I have to continue the seminar on Weds, and give another one on Tues too - with the same aggressive audience. I don't see a way to resolve it - they are behaving in ways that are seen as acceptable in the place where I work: it's just me that hates it.
  Maybe I should quit my job. But that will make me feel like a total failure, and I really don't want to let the SI have such far-reaching implications.
• are you likely to be in that emotional place again? how will you recognize it when you're in that situation?
  
  Obvious, I'll be crying when I don't want to.
• what will you try before you resort to self-harm if you're in that situation again? list three specific things you will commit to trying.
  
  It's very hard when I don't feel like I have the right not to SI. I'll try:
  Posting on BUS - hopefully I will have my computer next time?
  Avoiding being at home on my own - I could have stayed late at work and then gone straight to the church group perhaps. Thing is if I can't stop crying I am pretty desperate to get to be alone...
  Writing on myself in red pen. The other night it was I word I did, maybe I could have written the word instead of cutting it. I've managed that sometimes, though it does feel like copping out somehow.

[Luftballoons]

I'm not sure what kind of feedback you are wanting, but I'll post some thoughts/suggestions.

If your job is causing you to cry and be so stressed out that it is affecting your well-being, then I don't think it would make you a "failure" to quit. We all have different kinds of work environments that we respond to the best. I like working independently, given a list of things to do and then just doing them without bosses or coworkers bugging me. I also do pretty good with "busywork" jobs where the main requirement is just to stay awake.

Example: I had a SARS screening job at the local ER a couple summers ago, and during the week on the midnight shift (I was on midnights very often) VERY few people came in and the nurses were in a seperate area from me......so my main responsibility was to spend 8 hours just trying to keep myself awake so I could screen that handful of people and count some sheets of paper that took all of 5 minutes. While some people, like my boyfriend (a very outdoors/hands-on kind of guy), would go batshiat insane doing that, I dealt fairly well. I enjoyed my job and all of the reading and thinking and game-boy-ing and busywork involved with it. And when I was on busy hours, I enjoyed it too because it was just me doing it.....no stupid coworkers working with me and a mostly-absent boss.

But long story short, you might not feel good or BE good at a job where the environment is agressive; you might do better at a job like the one I had. And I would do very poorly at a job that required lots of group work.

There is NO shame in quitting a job that isn't suited for you. I've done it and didn't feel bad about doing it. If you are a "failure" and happy or "successful" and crying on the job, doesn't that mean that it's the labels that are mixed up?

So far as the red pen goes......

***very minor trigs: trying to talk about "gross" things like blood non-graphically***
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I dunno how to say this without being all gross, but for me part of the urge to SI is to have something "3D", something that I can touch and "interact" with, maybe with drops of stuff I can smear or something. If you find the red pen isn't doing it for you, how about paint? Something, uh, goopy like darker red fingerpaint? I think there would be children's fingerpaint that would be washable and non-toxic. You could interact with it moreso than the red pen, smear it or write words with it or whatever, and it wouldn't look as fake as pen does because it being a 3D/liquid material it has some depth and movement?
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Anyway, hope something in all that helps you.

[littlethings]

Hey Laura,

First of all, I wanted to catch that little "sorry" in the heading and just remind you that you don’t have to be sorry for self-injuring or sorry for posting, which ever the case may be.

It sounds like that situation was very emotionally threatening in a lot of ways
- Failure: you made an error. This is not a dramatic failure, but when combined with the stress and pressure of giving a seminar it leads to shame….
- shame: At having ‘messed up’ in front of so many people.
- invalidation: you’re telling yourself that you reacted badly to their reasonable behavior.

And on top of that you have the huge stresses of a new job and new living situation.

So in my opinion, you had every reason and every right to be upset and to cry. It doesn't matter whether the audience reacted reasonably or not. If you look at what was going on that situation would upset anyone. Some people just cry more than others. You were invalidated and threatened.

I don’t know if it will help at all, but you’re a logical sort of person. And that is the closest I can come to logic in an emotional situation.

The only difference between what you did, and what I think just about anyone else would have done is the self-injury. I think it’s pretty amazing that you’ve come so far. Think about your track record for a minute. When you talked about using coping strategies over the last few weeks, all I could think about was the urges you were coping with then. The ones you fought off. Let’s not look at self-injury as a progression for a minute. On a case-by-case basis, you kicked ass.

And I think you will continue to do so. Good luck with your seminar, and take care of yourself.

JoAnna

[Tiarin]

I was so angry with myself and ashamed because I kept going over and over the situation that had upset me at work and I couldn't see any way of looking at it that gave me any right to feel so hurt by it and yet I still felt hurt, therefore I am bad.

i know i'm just kind of echoing luftballoons and joanna here, but i have to confess that it actually surprised me a bit to realize that you didn't see such a situation as something "bad" enough to justify your reaction. (maybe only because that kind of situation could cause me to have a complete meltdown. ) am i hearing right that you're in an environment where people are expected to "be tough" and simply deal with that sort of thing? i would think that would be terribly stressful, not only to cope with the people shouting at you, but also with the expectation that you are supposed to shrug it off. like a burden on top of a burden.

my friends constantly have to give me the speech of, the way you feel is legitimate and real regardless of whether you think it's "justified" by the situation. because your feelings are still there and affecting you, regardless of whether you think you're "allowed" to have them. (so i'll be a hypocrite and pass the lecture along. )

i don't know if this is relevant to you, but something i've thought a lot about recently is that i am what might be called "oversensitive." i do seem to take things hard, react strongly, etc. and i think i've spent a lot of my life getting mad at myself over that, telling myself that i needed to learn to be "stronger." but really, it hasn't helped. from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, it's been a dead end. i'm thinking that it might be more useful to look at how to deal with being sensitive and getting hurt when it does happen, rather than hoping that i can erase that aspect of my personality through an act of radical willpower.

sorry . . . i'm kind of going on and on here. you definitely have my sympathies about all of this, though. as i said, that situation sounds pretty awful to me. it doesn't surprise me at all that you felt hurt by it.

It's very hard when I don't feel like I have the right not to SI.

i relate a lot to that. when i'm in a place of wanting to si, it can be hard to even make the effort to fight it because i'm so convinced that i deserve it. and that's a tough thing to challenge. sometimes i think about it in terms of having to make a leap of faith. everything in my head, everything i feel, is telling me that i don't have the right to resist because i'm such an awful person. so somehow i have to trust that there is more to this than i can sense, that my perspective is limited. i don't know how well i'm articulating this, but i thought i'd throw it out there as an idea.

you're in my thoughts, laura.

dragonfly