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Rising Up

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Justin87

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Hi Everybody,

My wife and kids are out of town this week. I’m at our house alone. This past Saturday, I was feel very lonely. The neglect and abandonment in my story being severely triggered. I got drunk and beat myself up. I beat my ass with a board and did a whole bunch of other humiliating things to my body. I woke up 5 hours after I started drinking with bruises all over my body, the house was a mess. I pulled the bathroom vanity and a towel bar out of the wall! I found chicken and a bottle of wine in the hallway. I was crazy black out drunk. At one point I remember passing out naked in in our shower and falling face first into the tile. Didn’t end up bruising my face too bad though, but I did flood our bathroom floor with water. I feel like the alcohol totally collapsed all my defenses to my self-abusive thoughts and it is pretty damned scary. The last two nights I’ve stayed with friends, not wanting to be by myself at night. I talked to my therapist and he said it really just sounds like more of the same patterns just with the added element of alcohol. I’ve really only been drunk one time before nearly 10 years ago. Clearly I don’t handle my liquor well!

Anyway, it’s ironic because all this self-punishment just makes me feel like I deserve to be punished more. It is a self-destructive cycle and I don’t want to participate in it any longer. Whether it is spanking or biting or withholding care from myself, or the constant verbal and mental abuse I give myself; I don’t deserve this treatment. I want to stop. I managed to make it to church the next morning, was feeling so ashamed. I wore long pants and sleeves to cover the bruises. I sat in the back. The sermon was on Proverbs 24:16, “For though a righteous man falls seven times, he will rise again.”
 
I've been there. It's been a long time since I self abused, but the memories are fresh. Alcohol worked for years to sedate my flashbacks, but the side effects got really bad. And I would self abuse around the sexual abuse, both when drinking, and when I couldn't drink.

I have thought about using a board on myself for relief to the body memories of physical abuse, but somehow I knew it wouldn't do any good. Instead I did the sexual abuse type self abuse and that worked some. I don't do it any more, but only after a lot of work. Untangling the memories, flashbacks, and feelings have been really difficult, but it's come with time.

So, I like the sermon. I have struggled with this for years. Every time I fall, I get back up. What else is a person to do? The sermon for you might have been a "God Shot" for you, which means something God throws at you to give you a little help.

You are the first one I ever heard call it a "board". My mom called it "the board". That's what she beat me with. Did someone who abused you call it that or is that your word?
 
Thanks Intrepid,
I guess “board” is my word. My parents used a ruler or dowel rod. I guess I was recreating that since I actually used a yard stick that I snapped in half to be more like a ruler. Along with a real 1x10 board I found in the garage. Ugh, it feels so messed up. And the reality that all that came out when I was drunk and uninhibited has really shown me the self-harming center of my struggles. I keep trying to cover it up.
 
I think of self abuse as a coping mechanism. I can't really beat myself up over it, because like you said:
self-punishment just makes me feel like I deserve to be punished more.

Doing self abuse has been a way to survive more awful stuff underneath. So, I've had to be really forgiving of myself. The thoughts can be really powerful. It's like, "I'm going to get beat anyway, so I might as well get over it," or "I fail at everything, so what's the use?" These thoughts have often been stored in dissociated parts of me, so that arguing with them is a waste of time.

The underlying problem was how to survive the beatings without going psychotic. At times I lost touch with reality. I have had to remind myself over and over again that I didn't deserve the beatings, and that there was nothing I could do to change my abuser.

I'm still working on this. I don't do the worst of the self abuse any more, but I still binge on video games, sex, food, and just plain isolation. I've been doing these things since I was 12 years old, right after the beatings stopped. I recently fell apart and my therapist is back to the basics: getting me grounded and getting my anxiety under control.

I wish I had a better answer for you.
 
When the beatings stopped I was left out of balance. I didn't know how to act around other people. I felt completely misunderstood. I really got used to those beatings. I didn't know how to live without them.
 
For me, punishing myself stabilized my emotions. It was a kind of reservoir where I dumped all my anger, anxiety, fear, rage, and pain. When I was in college I completely stopped all the behavior for around 5 years. But now I realize I just walled off the core to my being which had been so compacted down and intertwined with the beatings I gave myself, I was like a shell of myself. Whenever situations in life touched those core issues of my personality I freaked out and wasn’t able to handle it. Now that I am really dealing with my core, I realize how stunted my emotional growth has been. I feel like a child in so many ways, like a part of me stopped growing when I started punishing myself. My therapist told me last night that it’s almost like I have to go back and teach myself a lot of basic relational things all over again and not pretend like I already know it. This is going to be a long long journey.
 
Wow this was helpful to my issues for today - lifeskills. @Justin87 yeah I just made a post about that Ive stopped growing due to whaty I had to surivive. I have to go back and teach myself basic things in general not all over again since I never learned them, but just learn them. I also played out like I knew these skills, but really I realise that Ive been in severe fog the first decade of my life and completely at a loss.

Indeed its going to be a long journey.

But I have the hope that to take the steps will be well worth it.
 
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I used to fantasize about being raped and spanked and all that. I would not actually do it to myself, but I would do this to put myself to sleep before I started getting medications to help me. Once I have been medicated and been in therapy, I have stopped doing these things. I am free from it as well, due to my believing in Jesus and what He did to free us from all this kind of stuff. Reading my Bible every day, about 4 chapters or so, also helps. I am reading the Psalms right now, and I can see a lot of emotions being expressed in them. King David went through every emotion we have had, I think. We are not alone.
 
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