Depression leaves me at the eight and a halfs. You know when you are in the hospital, and they ask you to explain where your pain is on a scale of 1 to 10? I explained to someone today that when I get to the point where my internal suffering passes 8.5 on the scale, that there is nothing I wouldn't do to make it stop. I used the analogy that I would cut off my own arm, and that it might even seem logical to do that, to make it stop. I mean, what's crazier, thinking that cutting off your arm might solve the problem, or starting to wonder if it is, in fact, crazy to think it is crazy...
I shared as well the real trauma at the eight and a halfs... The constant failures. The failure to do much more than raise your head above the pillow, to accomplish one single thing beyond breathing all day and then the lumps. The lumps of self-flaggelation, self-loathing and self-hatred for letting yourself and others down yet again...
If only I could just do something, anything, it would be better. I've survived a hundred debillitating traumas, but I can't make my brain do what I need it to do. That's a horrific sensation living at the eight and a halfs.
Showing posts with label self-mutiliation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-mutiliation. Show all posts
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Like a Dirty Sock, Dirty Sock, Dirty Sock
I am back. Was a productive downtime. I really had gone too far, too fast and was in danger of implosion. Implosion for me is to begin to disassociate and to live outside myself, finding solace for my pain in everything and anything that resolves it, even if only for a second. It does lend itself to some guilt that with an illness that takes all of the good from life for so many, that I have found a few little behavioral things that can offer a touch of relief. That is completely said in an ironic voice, as those "things" are also incredibly self-destructive and self-mutilating.
So what have I been doing? Well, the depression that I woke up with on Saturday, the day after my self-imposed blogging exile, has passed. I was doing too much and I am grateful being measure that I got a wake up call before I sunk deeper. Chalk one up to my enthusiasm, and the good sense to surround myself with people who've got good sense, as I seem to lack it sometimes. Since then, life has been ok. Up and down with the SO, but that is a matter of a) my inlaws visiting, always a stressful experience and b) some of the anger she feels towards me bubbling to the surface. I am ok with the anger, and I feel I deserve it, but it is very counter-productive to making things better. I simply don't handle it very well, and shut down emotionally when she's on me. And that is exactly a trigger for her to get angrier. I feel as though her angry side just wants to hurt me, hurt me as I've hurt her, regardless of the consequences. She's let it fly a few times and I feel like I've been in the ring for 30 seconds with a young Mike Tyson. It leaves me dazed and confused and seriously riding my internal self-mutilation pony. I get on that little horse and pound and beat on myself until I am thoroughly ass-kicked and bleeding for all orifices. But while some shame and remorse in this situation is good and needed, it doesn't help that I don't have a healthy way of handling those feelings and only abuse myself with them.
With that, I've exhausted myself again, but I'll be back for another episode of my valiant, vainglorious battle through the Noonday Demons....
So what have I been doing? Well, the depression that I woke up with on Saturday, the day after my self-imposed blogging exile, has passed. I was doing too much and I am grateful being measure that I got a wake up call before I sunk deeper. Chalk one up to my enthusiasm, and the good sense to surround myself with people who've got good sense, as I seem to lack it sometimes. Since then, life has been ok. Up and down with the SO, but that is a matter of a) my inlaws visiting, always a stressful experience and b) some of the anger she feels towards me bubbling to the surface. I am ok with the anger, and I feel I deserve it, but it is very counter-productive to making things better. I simply don't handle it very well, and shut down emotionally when she's on me. And that is exactly a trigger for her to get angrier. I feel as though her angry side just wants to hurt me, hurt me as I've hurt her, regardless of the consequences. She's let it fly a few times and I feel like I've been in the ring for 30 seconds with a young Mike Tyson. It leaves me dazed and confused and seriously riding my internal self-mutilation pony. I get on that little horse and pound and beat on myself until I am thoroughly ass-kicked and bleeding for all orifices. But while some shame and remorse in this situation is good and needed, it doesn't help that I don't have a healthy way of handling those feelings and only abuse myself with them.
With that, I've exhausted myself again, but I'll be back for another episode of my valiant, vainglorious battle through the Noonday Demons....
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Tell Me Lies Tell Me Sweet Little Lies
It starts here.
Lies
I read this posting today and I was floored by the fact that something I've been so crushingly ashamed of actually has a reasonable basis in logic and reason. If I look at it with some honesty (ironic?) I would say that my lying falls into two parts of the definition. First, I am over honest. I spill everything and anything about some of my more intimate details very easily. This blog is somewhat an evidence of that, if I consider it fully. It is certainly evidence of a lack of practice with boundaries and understanding what "normal" is. The other area that strikes me is the grandiosity lies. It strikes me very much as a need to prop myself up and be seen as more than I feel I am. Which if I take a breath for two seconds and look at what I've accomplished in life, in terms of professional and personal, there is no need for a prop. But I can't shake that sense of drowning in the juices of my own stew. I have nothing to be ashamed of for who I am on the inside, and that's something I need to grasp with both hands. Maybe I wasn't born this way, but I sure earned it.
I am very tired again. Emotionally worn out, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I am working hard with muscles that I've frankly never to very rarely used. I want to keep going, to move forward, more and more, but I am tiring quickly. I am still doing my three things every day, and it feels good. Somewhere on my list of next baby steps is my physical fitness level, but I am only cautiously stepping towards that one.
Realizing that I am a normal product of the chaos I grew up in is a safe feeling. I like safe.
Lies
I read this posting today and I was floored by the fact that something I've been so crushingly ashamed of actually has a reasonable basis in logic and reason. If I look at it with some honesty (ironic?) I would say that my lying falls into two parts of the definition. First, I am over honest. I spill everything and anything about some of my more intimate details very easily. This blog is somewhat an evidence of that, if I consider it fully. It is certainly evidence of a lack of practice with boundaries and understanding what "normal" is. The other area that strikes me is the grandiosity lies. It strikes me very much as a need to prop myself up and be seen as more than I feel I am. Which if I take a breath for two seconds and look at what I've accomplished in life, in terms of professional and personal, there is no need for a prop. But I can't shake that sense of drowning in the juices of my own stew. I have nothing to be ashamed of for who I am on the inside, and that's something I need to grasp with both hands. Maybe I wasn't born this way, but I sure earned it.
I am very tired again. Emotionally worn out, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I am working hard with muscles that I've frankly never to very rarely used. I want to keep going, to move forward, more and more, but I am tiring quickly. I am still doing my three things every day, and it feels good. Somewhere on my list of next baby steps is my physical fitness level, but I am only cautiously stepping towards that one.
Realizing that I am a normal product of the chaos I grew up in is a safe feeling. I like safe.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
We Aren't Going to Go There
Went to the marriage T tonight. I am ambivalent about the experience, but after a sleep, I expect to be all cool with it. The MT went through all the systems and processes for how he runs his deal, and it all made real sense. It is based on the IMAGO approach from some guy who wrote some book about getting the love you need. It broke down into the same lizard brain versus the frontal cortex discussion that I've focused my depression T on and my mindfulness approach to doing 3 little things every day. So I was all cool. Then he said that we weren't going to get into the betrayal at this first session as it is too charged with emotion. I thought, cool that makes sense, and lines up with my trying to approach things with the antithesis of my usual approach to charge headlong and aggressively into everything I "go after".
So, near the end, we started doing one of the exercises, and what do we end up talking about? My infidelity. I felt crushingly shamed sitting here talking to some guy I just met about the singularly most shameful acts of my existence, in front of someone who is still very hurt and angry about my actions. It kicked my ass a bit, to be totally honest and I am feeling incredibly emotionally fucked up. I am living with a weight of shame and remorse, and I don't feel terribly much like adding to that burden while I am also trying desperately to lift my head out of a major depression. I am not trying to make a cope out or excuses, because I am responsible for what I've done, I am just trying to find a pace of healing that lets me survive this. Yes, these are my actions, based on compulsions I can't understand or quantify, to self-mutilate in search of something, something I know not totally what I was looking for. I do know that I damn near destroyed myself in the process, and hurt my SO so greatly that I am still at risk of losing her.
I know I need to make amends, but I can't do it if it will destroy me in the process. It is clear to me that I need to take time and place with this, even at the risk of hurting her a little bit more, because I want to survive this to make it through. It sounds dramatic, and overwrought, but anyone who's been to the darkness knows that you don't compound your exit from it with more horror. I need a beachhead of safety and relative personal sanity, and I am getting there. This is not a rip the bandaid off moment, that's my usual self-mutilating stupidity.
So, near the end, we started doing one of the exercises, and what do we end up talking about? My infidelity. I felt crushingly shamed sitting here talking to some guy I just met about the singularly most shameful acts of my existence, in front of someone who is still very hurt and angry about my actions. It kicked my ass a bit, to be totally honest and I am feeling incredibly emotionally fucked up. I am living with a weight of shame and remorse, and I don't feel terribly much like adding to that burden while I am also trying desperately to lift my head out of a major depression. I am not trying to make a cope out or excuses, because I am responsible for what I've done, I am just trying to find a pace of healing that lets me survive this. Yes, these are my actions, based on compulsions I can't understand or quantify, to self-mutilate in search of something, something I know not totally what I was looking for. I do know that I damn near destroyed myself in the process, and hurt my SO so greatly that I am still at risk of losing her.
I know I need to make amends, but I can't do it if it will destroy me in the process. It is clear to me that I need to take time and place with this, even at the risk of hurting her a little bit more, because I want to survive this to make it through. It sounds dramatic, and overwrought, but anyone who's been to the darkness knows that you don't compound your exit from it with more horror. I need a beachhead of safety and relative personal sanity, and I am getting there. This is not a rip the bandaid off moment, that's my usual self-mutilating stupidity.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
I Wanteth but Can Not Yet Haveth
I mean it. I am not kidding, nor am I playing. I am serious, and I wish I could make that unequivocally clear. My wonderful and talented wife is struggling with my betrayal, and I wish I had a magic wand to fix it. I believe she wants to make it work, I do, but I also know she is hurt by my actions. I can't say more than I am sorry and that I will do anything I need to, in order to make it right. That is not out of some preservatory instinct of saving my home and hearth, but a simple truth of my realization that it is what I want.
I never meant for it to get like this, to be so low in my flow as to seek shelter in puddles of acid. I never meant for that. But my head hasn't been right for a long time, 7.5 years, like I said yesterday. My depression, a wicked, wicked beast, put me in a place where I made all the wrong choices. But therein lies the rub, it was a choice, or repeated choices, and for that I am, and I am alone responsible. I need to own my choices and be accountable. I didn't cheat because she is a bad person, I did so to play out a drama to soothe my inner torment. I didn't have to do that, but I did. It cannot be differently said. I could have done a thousand things, but I chose to do something that would hurt someone I hold very dear the most.
You might ask if it is because she is some wallflower that she is seeking to make this work. It is in no way true, and in fact is diametrically the opposite from my perspective. She's gotten so much better in the last few years, and is so much more aware, and has grown as I have shrunk. She can care about me, even in this state, and even in this place, becuase she is strong. But she feels de-valued, and I can't fix that with a bon mot or two. I wish, and want nothing more than to ease her burden. This isn't about her, it is about me and my failings, my going untreated for a brain ravaging disease, choosing the safety of a replay of my causal pschyo-dramas over being a grown man and asking for, and getting help. I am not self-flagellating, I am speaking my truth in the hope that I can be better for accepting it.
I want what I can not have, some sanity and safe harbor for her. At least not yet. But I want it more than anything I have ever wanted.
I never meant for it to get like this, to be so low in my flow as to seek shelter in puddles of acid. I never meant for that. But my head hasn't been right for a long time, 7.5 years, like I said yesterday. My depression, a wicked, wicked beast, put me in a place where I made all the wrong choices. But therein lies the rub, it was a choice, or repeated choices, and for that I am, and I am alone responsible. I need to own my choices and be accountable. I didn't cheat because she is a bad person, I did so to play out a drama to soothe my inner torment. I didn't have to do that, but I did. It cannot be differently said. I could have done a thousand things, but I chose to do something that would hurt someone I hold very dear the most.
You might ask if it is because she is some wallflower that she is seeking to make this work. It is in no way true, and in fact is diametrically the opposite from my perspective. She's gotten so much better in the last few years, and is so much more aware, and has grown as I have shrunk. She can care about me, even in this state, and even in this place, becuase she is strong. But she feels de-valued, and I can't fix that with a bon mot or two. I wish, and want nothing more than to ease her burden. This isn't about her, it is about me and my failings, my going untreated for a brain ravaging disease, choosing the safety of a replay of my causal pschyo-dramas over being a grown man and asking for, and getting help. I am not self-flagellating, I am speaking my truth in the hope that I can be better for accepting it.
I want what I can not have, some sanity and safe harbor for her. At least not yet. But I want it more than anything I have ever wanted.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Bang Your Head! Metal Health Will Drive You Mad....
This scares the hell out of me. It almost scares me to death, to be frank. I played a lot of competitive sports as a kid, through my twenties and early thirties. Sports for me inevitably involved me being knocked out cold. No joke. In some sort of macho, testosterone-induced masochism, I would partake in only sports that were violent (hockey, football) or sports I could make violent (soccer, baseball). I led with my thick skull and initiated more than a few fights which involved knuckles bouncing off my pretty face and granite-lick cranium. I feel for Mr. Duerson and his family.
I wish I knew if there was some causality to the depression I've faced. I certainly haven't had the sheer quantity or intensity of the collisions that a pro athlete faced, I still know that there if they took a slice of my brain, there are significant Tau proteins gumming up the works. It scares me in light of my inability to complete rid myself of depression. I've been depressed, as far as I can tell, for the last 7.5 years. There've been no real non-depressed moments in that time. There's been an ebb and flow in the severity, like now where it is more dysthymic than major depression, but it never leaves totally. I worry, worry, worry, that I am never going to feel normal again. I saw this cartoon today, it spoke volumes. I can't shake the sense that it just isn't ever going to be right, what with the abuse, neglect, self-mutilation, shame & even the physiological effects working against my, like the tide rolling in and me with a bucket with a hole in it.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
A Day Spent Fishing
Don't really like fishing. Seems cruel to my gentle soul. But I am reeling a bit. Not in some terrible way, just from the hardness of my T session and coming to grips with realizing how much I hurt myself, over and over, with the same repetitions of the very trauma I've sought to escape. It seems so sad, so very, very sad that I've done that to myself over and over. It isn't funny, nor is it deniable in any way. It is who I've become and I am a little distraught over it, to be total honest. I hurt myself, in the exact same way that I've been hurt. I re-victimize myself. It make me well with emotion to even consider that I've done that to my self. But I have, and I haven't even been aware.
My wife sat me down today and asked me what would happen when work became boring. She looked me straight in the eye and asked me what would happen when I wasn't getting the big brain validation any more and I got restless, where would I turn. It was a rotten question, even if it is entirely valid. I held myself together as much as I could and said to her that I had no idea, I was working on much more basic shit at the moment. I haven't shared with her the outcome of my T session yesterday, mainly b/c I am afraid of getting into a whole "you are a cheating douche-nozzle who I don't even know" conversation. I am those things, but it is still so raw for her that I am not able to share any context.
Why did I cheat? Easy in the context of my T session yesterday, and something that I've had some awareness to. It wasn't a sex addiction thing, that just isn't where I was at. It is as easy as having two sisters violently sexually abused for years and subsequently going off the rails and no longer being function human beings. It is as simple as the violently sexually abused mother who tried to escape her childhood traumas but never did, disappearing one day when I was 10, two weeks after her abusing step-father passed away, never truly to be heard from again as a parent. I've never made it back from either the immediate nor progressive nature of the horrors inflicted on me by the culmulative horrors inflicted upon them. Not an excuse, but in the context of me going outside my marriage, to find the most fucked up and damaged women I could, to run a gambit of trying to bring safety and stability into their lives... It was myself replaying my life's traumas in a short beat. Everyone of them, and there were 3 longer relationships in the last 3 years, was the same abused, broken and neglected person as the last, and the same as my tormentors. I saw it at the end, in the last person, who was very much my most abused sister's latent twin and it repulsed me. I saw what I was doing and decided to stop.
It still hurts to write these things, and I am reeling from the scars I've caused my gentle inner kid. I've really hurt him, and I am sad for that. I've spent most of my adult life consciously protecting that 10 year old, yet I was also his greatest tormentor. I am those things, and in that I reel.
My wife sat me down today and asked me what would happen when work became boring. She looked me straight in the eye and asked me what would happen when I wasn't getting the big brain validation any more and I got restless, where would I turn. It was a rotten question, even if it is entirely valid. I held myself together as much as I could and said to her that I had no idea, I was working on much more basic shit at the moment. I haven't shared with her the outcome of my T session yesterday, mainly b/c I am afraid of getting into a whole "you are a cheating douche-nozzle who I don't even know" conversation. I am those things, but it is still so raw for her that I am not able to share any context.
Why did I cheat? Easy in the context of my T session yesterday, and something that I've had some awareness to. It wasn't a sex addiction thing, that just isn't where I was at. It is as easy as having two sisters violently sexually abused for years and subsequently going off the rails and no longer being function human beings. It is as simple as the violently sexually abused mother who tried to escape her childhood traumas but never did, disappearing one day when I was 10, two weeks after her abusing step-father passed away, never truly to be heard from again as a parent. I've never made it back from either the immediate nor progressive nature of the horrors inflicted on me by the culmulative horrors inflicted upon them. Not an excuse, but in the context of me going outside my marriage, to find the most fucked up and damaged women I could, to run a gambit of trying to bring safety and stability into their lives... It was myself replaying my life's traumas in a short beat. Everyone of them, and there were 3 longer relationships in the last 3 years, was the same abused, broken and neglected person as the last, and the same as my tormentors. I saw it at the end, in the last person, who was very much my most abused sister's latent twin and it repulsed me. I saw what I was doing and decided to stop.
It still hurts to write these things, and I am reeling from the scars I've caused my gentle inner kid. I've really hurt him, and I am sad for that. I've spent most of my adult life consciously protecting that 10 year old, yet I was also his greatest tormentor. I am those things, and in that I reel.
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