THE T-SHIRT THAT SAVED MY ARM
I certainly can't say that when I'm at my lowest it's easy not to want to cut myself. When it's bad, it's bad. The other day I was working on a t-shirt, making it smaller so that it would fit me. It's a great shirt. I was feeling really crappy, very depressed and bad about myself. I looked over into the sewing kit and saw all kinds of implements to use to cut myself: needles, seam ripper, pins. These are my weapons when I want them to be. I didn't think of it at first, I simply looked over. Then I realized I feel bad. Why don't I just cut myself. You have to realize that when this thought comes to me, it means relief more than pain. I understand that cutting releases endorphins. So, no wonder I feel better after I do it. To help you understand, I feel a warmth on my skin after I cut. It feels like the world is lifted off of me for a moment. I looked. I looked. I looked. And then I looked down at the shirt I was mending. I suddenly realized that if I wanted to wear this shirt and not look like a pin cushion, I probably shouldn't cut myself. So, with a heavy heart, I didn't cut myself. I happened to look up again and noticed that Miko was sitting across from me, looking at me look at my shirt.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Now I'm trying to really work Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. I have a workbook that I'm using on my own. I showed the description to my therapist and she said YAY, so I said YAY. Basically, it's a way to negotiate and moderate emotions so that they don't get to you before you get to them. For instance if I'm thinking about cutting myself, maybe I concentrate on my breathing and then do something else that I enjoy. It's not easy because I'm so trained emotionally to concentrate on the negative thoughts. It just comes automatically. DBT is a way to help me short circuit those bad thoughts. It doesn't mean that they'll go away. It means that I can deal with them when I'm not overwhelmed. Wish me luck.
Posts
2 comments:
I wish you great success in your DBT! Purrs to you.
Good luck!
Thing is, I've come to the conclusion that when one thinks in a certain way, about a certain thing, something physical is happening - one's neuroconnections are firing off in a particular way. It's not abstract - one may not think about a given thing in any *every* conceivable way - as you point out, one *learns* to think in a certain way.
So, DBT, like any other "talking" therapy, has as its goal to enable you to think in different ways about given subjects (stuff that's troubling you, presumably, because there's no need to have you think differently about stuff that you're OK with!). In order to do that, any talking therapy (or, more accurately, the therapist), must be capable of giving you alternative ways of thinking about this stuff, because if they can't, then they're going to be as stuck as you were.
Does that make any sense? So, a couple of people have told me that they cut, because it provided them with a sense of release (from what, they weren't able to tell me, although that's probably not important). The goal, then, is to achieve that sense of release, without resorting to self-harm.
What is it, then, that provides this alternative source of release? Painting? Writing? Reading? Talking? There are probably no end of alternatives, in fact.
Matt
Post a Comment