Before

[herebedragons]

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

It won't change much other than I'll stop obsessing about hurting myself. It will probably make me more likely to cut the next time because what would I have to lose. I don't want to get into that cycle again.


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

It will calm me down, help me to think more clearly, make me less anxious it will also, as I mentioned above, make it very easy to do it again.

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?

In the long run, the long run is one of the things that is giving me trouble right now. I don't want there to be much of a long run right this minute. I'm not saying I'm going to kill myself just kind of hoping that if my disease is planning on crippling me that it just goes ahead and kills me instead.


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

How long will the relief last...hmm. Depends upon how badly I injure myself I guess. Probably not very long before I'd want to do it again. Not long enough to justify the hassle of having fresh injuries.

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 wake up my husband or my son so that I'm not alone. Alone is not generally a good thing when I'm in this kind of mood. I could go outside and do some yard work- getting out and into the sunshine couldn't be a bad thing. I could get my son up and ready for school a bit early and we could head for the garden plot before school starts. All good ideas I'm just having trouble getting the energy together to implement any of them.

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

Bad but with probably less obsessing over hurting myself, probably more focused. And not as bad but possibly still obsessing etc.


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 want to go back in time, my self protective instinct wants a time machine. Barring that I don't know. I want to have a healthy train of thought. I want to stop thinking about MS all the time and stop thinking about our other problems all the time. I want my family to be happy and healthy and functional. We're actually surprisingly functional but it seems like we're on the edge of disaster- if my son's school doesn't work out, if I have another attack that hampers my functionality again, if my husband can't get out of his depression.


urges aren't necessarily the enemy. they happen for reasons, and they're an expression of a desire to stay alive and stay sane and keep coping. remember that.

More Before Questions To Answer



Why do I feel I need to hurt myself? What has brought me to this point?

As above- I'm sick of thinking about everything. I'm angry because I want to get things back to normal even though things haven't been normal in a hell of a long time. Maybe they never were. I want to be able ot will myself into being less affected by my MS and at the same time I feel guilty for being angry because I'm fairly lucky all in all- I can walk albeit with a cane and with more falling than I'd like. And then I kind of resent having to feel lucky and blessed. I feel so lucky and so glad and so grateful that we can finally have real conversations with my daughter and then some small petty dark part of me resents having to feel grateful for things other people have the luxury of taking for granted. Last week when someone gushed about my having such a great attitude about things rather than thanking her I felt the need to point out the ways in which my attitude (under the surface) kind of sucks. Heh.

Have I been here before? What did I do to deal with it? How did I feel then?

Not exactly here, but this has been building for a long time.


What I have done to ease this discomfort so far? What else can I do that won't hurt me?

Many many things. That's a cop out. Ok. I've watched tv, I've been social, I've gardened, I've called a friend, I've talked and cuddled and other stuff with my husband, hung out around people, made sure I'm not spending time alone so I don't have the oppotunaty to cut, I've written in Place, done a bit of knitting, gone outside, petted the cats

How do I feel right now?

depressed, rung out, on the verge of crying but a little too subdued to cry.


How will I feel when I am hurting myself?

I think I will feel an emence amount of relief but I may be building it up in my mind at this point. I imagine if it doesn't work as well as I think it will it would be a crushing blow for me and I'd end up even more depressed and additionally feel quite hopeless. In a twisted way the idea that I could cut is giving me a small feeling of something like hope.


How will I feel after hurting myself? How will I feel tomorrow morning?

I would hope that after I hurt myself I would feel better and more focused and less obsessed but if I dont' feel that way and it doesn't work I can easily imagine myself feeling completely the opposite and just wanting to escalate things until I dont' have to deal with anything anymore. I could see this heading in a bad dirrection. Already last night I was contemplating how nice it would be to be unconscious.

Can I avoid this stressor, or deal with it better in the future?

Stressor=life sooooo yes I could avoid it but that's not terribly healthy. Obviously I could deal with it better, people deal with it better all the time. What I'm dealing with and much worse, I just need to be stronger, deal with things better, not be such a candy-*ss.


Do I need to hurt myself?

YES FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE YEEEEEEEEEEES. Well ok. no. not particularly.

[LBC]

Hi herebedragons

I'm sorry that you're dealing with MS and all the changes that come with it. It's great that you're facing it with what sounds like a mostly positive attitude, but...you're human. I don't live with MS, but I live with physical disabilities, and they come with very real challenges. You're allowed to admit that it sucks without worrying about the perception that it sounds like you're complaining.

I don't know how long you've had MS, but with the onset of any health problem like this (MS particularly, because physical disability is often a part of it), there's a period of mourning, because your life just is going to be different that you thought it would be. Now, "different", does not necessarily mean "worse"; but it's natural to feel sad for a while.

Bearing these things in mind, can you be easier on yourself? You've listed some good distractions; what are some ways that you can nurture yourself right now, particularly on days when you are not feeling well?

Do you have a t right now?

[herebedragons]

Hi, thank you very much for your reply. I think you are onto something with the idea of mourning. I've had MS for about 15 years but was just dxed at the end of October. (They thought I had a couple of other things.) I think I held it together pretty well when I was first dxed and then it was the holidays and we had a ton of family in town and then the weather went to hell and we were busy with family coming over to mooch heat and electric because no one else had any and I was BUSY. Nice and busy. Plus I had the whole "being strong for everyone else" thing going on.

I have some new symptoms from my last attack which was last fall that I am having trouble dealing with. Most of the symptoms (ears ringing all the time, ballance problems, vertigo, anxiety, fatigue, weirdness with my depth perception etc) I've dealt with for so long that they, while a hassle, aren't that big of a deal. Well ok the fatigue is and always has been kind of a big deal. But the weakness I have now I just can't wrap my head around. It was fine for the first few monthes but now it's like "Enough already I'm ready to be over this." None of my symptoms before made me feel so infirm.

In all likelyhood I will never improve from where I am now and it's almost certain I'll get worse. And perhaps to make matters worse the examples I have in my life for dealing with physical infirmity are my aunt (who killed herself shortly after being dxed with MS.) and my mom who refused medical treatment for something easily treatable and died as a result when I was six (a month and a half or so after my aunt who was her best friend.) My mom had spinal muscular atrophy but refused to use a cane or anything and never wanted to be disabled. She was a bit but she kind of refused to deal with it. At the time people thought she was brave and strong but I think she was in denial. I think if she had dealt with the idea that she was going to have some degree of disability she might have gotten care for her ulcers and not ended up bleeding to death internally.

Bearing these things in mind, can you be easier on yourself?

I actually have been a lot easier on myself since I got the dx. This is me, being easier on myself.

You've listed some good distractions; what are some ways that you can nurture yourself right now, particularly on days when you are not feeling well?

I'm not really good at nurturing myself, I'm not even 100% I would know how to. I am eating today which is an improvement and I have been trying to get more rest but getting as much rest as I need is kind of depressing in and of itself because I need so damned much of it.

Do you have a t right now?

No. I tried a t a year or so ago and it was pretty disasterous. To have therapy right now through our medical insurence I would have to go back to the same office and I don't want to deal with that therapist or have a therapist that she would be talking with. In a nutshell what happened is that on my third appointment I got the nerve up to tell her I couldn't stop thinking about killing myself, and told her my plan and she pretty much blew me off. She didn't believe I was really depressed she just thought it was some way of me dealing with my anxiety. (and I do have some fairly signifigant problems with anxiety.) I found that experience extremely disheartening. Of course I haven't killed myself yet so I guess she was right.