Growing up as a kid, both wanting to live and die - contradiction?

[Ecdysis]

Growing up with trauma, neglect, abuse from very early childhood, I think I've always wanted to both live and die...

Obviously, I've got that normal evolutionary instinct to stay alive and to want to stay alive that's present as a baseline in all living beings.

But at the same time, there's also that evolutionary response of wanting/ choosing death when life becomes impossible.

I guess it's a spectrum and ppl with a good life will be on the want-to-live end of the spectrum and people with unbearably awful lives will have a greater likelihood of being at the other end of the spectrum.

I've had both major trauma *and* some genuinely positive things in my life, leaving me in the confusing middle of both wanting-to-live and wanting-to-die in pretty much equal parts.

I'll give one example: in 2020 I was very suicidal and had to do IOP treatment for a few months... so, very much wanting to die. In the middle of that, Covid hit, and initially seemed quite scary and I remember my survival instinct kicking in and I was doing everything I could to protect myself from that.

And I remember thinking omg I'm an idiot - I'm suicidal and want to die but then my brain is like "Yeah, but I want it to be my choice and yes I want to die, but not of Covid!" ....??

And that paradox pretty much sums up my conscious and subconscious situation since childhood - simultaneously trying to stay alive and die at the same time...

Intellectually I kind of "get" it... it sort of makes sense... But on a personal, subjective level, it's beyond confusing and I have no idea how to resolve it, or whether it's even possible to resolve it, since it's been like that since early childhood?

 

[arfie]

we're all walking contradictions
partly truth and partly fiction
taking every wrong direction on our lonely ways back home

i find recovery much simpler when i don't try to make sense of it. it is what it is, whether i understand it or knot.

may the atrocities we survived as children NEVER be declared sensible. just praying.

 

[Movingforward10]

Your post pretty much sums up my last few months. It's so incredibly confusing having polar opposite thoughts and feelings at the same time.
It's what is making my think about a disassociative diagnosis. Because of the intense confusion around it.

Do you think it's different parts of you wanting these different things?

 

[Mach123]

I’ve always been like this too. I had good things happen but then was my trauma response which doesn’t just function when bad things happen. So my subconscious was in the way always. Whatever is in there . Since I’m in therapy again and suicide is such a loaded word with them you know? We have been discussing it and I tried to remember was there ever a time I wasn’t kinda suicidal. I mean at a really young age or something? Idk. No I can’t even remember. I had these terrible regressive traits like not being able to give up the pacifier or the pajamas I wore till my feet were out through the little bottom footies . I know that was all about mom. I think she knew it too.

 

[parrotthepolly]

It's not so much wanting to die but instead not to live this this anymore.

 

[Ecdysis]

Your post pretty much sums up my last few months. It's so incredibly confusing having polar opposite thoughts and feelings at the same time.
It's what is making my think about a disassociative diagnosis. Because of the intense confusion around it.

Do you think it's different parts of you wanting these different things?

No, I don't think so. Having "parts" doesn't necessarily = a dissociative disorder. For example, Freud says we have the ego, the super-ego and the id. And countless other psychological theories about how the mind is structured identify different "parts" like Transactional Analysis or IFS. That's just normal psychology. I guess like so many things, it's a spectrum, with those "normal psychology" parts on one end of the spectrum and full-blown dissociative identity disorder at the other end, and then with various degrees in between? Just looking at Freud's "parts" - you'd have the part of you, for example, that goes to work to earn money and to be "good" in the eyes of others and yourself - and then there's a part that wants to stay home and not go to work and just do fun stuff. Those "parts" are at odds with each other, but they are in every single human being - no need for any dissociative diagnosis for that.

I'd say that childhood trauma has pushed me a little bit along that spectrum, so I have slightly more parts than just the standards psychological aspects we all have... ?

I think different aspects of myself are probably of different opinions about wanting to live or die, but I think overall, it's a confusion that runs throughout my conscious and subconscious pretty evenly... I think there's this background of "life is pointless and being dead would be the better option" but I am always trying to seek something positive and worth living for - sometimes that works, sometimes not so much.

 

[Mach123]

It's not so much wanting to die but instead not to live this this anymore.

Yes and at my age this this is getting more and more difficult so the feeling gets exacerbated

 

[Dark.Green.Feathers]

for me wanting to die is often about wanting to escape the bad stuff, but living being better also has the same result so I don’t see wanting both as completely opposite ends of each-other. just different levels of desperation. I want to live but sometimes I want to die/self harm/whatever because getting the better qol feels too stressful and difficult and I need some respite *now*. I haven’t self harmed (in the more traditional senses) for over a year but still the feeling of needing to go away somehow comes and goes for me. “this is too much I need something to happen” is a feeling I get and it feels like not wanting to exist. often happens before parts shuffle around which makes sense.

trauma throws in the helplessness and relentless factor that makes the qol solution lean towards erasing the need by not having a life to improve anymore.

I want to live for the good things in my
life but I can get in ruts that I feel I can’t get out of so shutting down everything feels appealing too. I want to change things but I don’t know how/can’t yet so at the same time it feels ideal to not deal with it anymore

 

[Grasping Hope]

I can relate to this, I can be running around washing my hands and disinfecting everything because of the horror I have of contamination, which seems like a drive to live, and within hours be lying in bed sobbing and repeating to myself over and over that I want to die. I do think in my case dissociation is a factor. The parts with the fear of contamination are young children who were put through horrible scenarios where they learned they were responsible for bad things happening to other people. In adulthood this presents as an atypical kind of OCD. (You gotta admit... during COVID there were millions of people suddenly acting like they had OCD, it was a sign of the times.) But I can also get into that same OCD-type behaviour around contamination issues where no one else is involved, and I have tried to tease this out in my mind, wondering why so much fear of contaminating myself? In my case I don't think the fear of getting seriously ill is a drive to live, it's more that I don't want to die in pain, out of control, or alone. I just wish I could fall asleep and not wake up.
So yeah... that's how it plays out for me. I always feel the need when writing something like this, to add that, no, I am not suicidal.... sigh.