Self harm in adults with ptsd

[Anna]

I been really bad lately. Chatting with guys on the internet I meet randomnly.

Need to stop it before the promiscuity rears it big fat ugly head AGAIN.

I have had enough, of trying to be nice. What is the point? Most people are just shit and throw it back in your face?

I cut down on the drinking. Now this is happening too. Seems to be the only way to relieve stress.

Guess I need to go back into therapy again. I feel my illness is getting worse and out of my control.

 

[Britt.f7]

I found, though I've been a cutter my whole life(before people even talked about it), if I wasn't cutting I was doing something else to hurt myself. I'm in my forties now and still trying to find my way out. I'm lucky to have an understanding husband and therapist.

Rationally, I know it is all wrong and that it will not make things better. Sometimes that thought pattern helps, but not as much as I wish it would.

 

[maddog]

I'm self harming badly again at the moment, in my 3 favourite and long-term ways - starving myself, denying myself of sleep, and exercising ruthlessly and obsessively. The cycle feels never-ending, and for every day on which I do better with these things, there is always another stressor, leading to another slide, leading to the contorted mix of relief and distress that I feel to know I am harming myself so constantly.

I want it to be different... but somehow, I don't want to make it diferent. Does that make sense to anyone? I want the behaviour to be gone, but can't make myself want to do the things that will make the behaviour gone.

Maddog

 

[Abstract]

I want it to be different... but somehow, I don't want to make it different. Does that make sense to anyone?

Yes MD. I am sorry.

I have been through various versions of feeling like that (if I am understanding). Some part from it feeling right and comfortable and what I deserve and something different feeling wrong and uncomfortable and almost triggering more self hatred. Some from an almost obsessive rut that I get into. Some from pure hopelessness and lack of energy to fight it.

Sadly I think the only way out is to take one small thing at a time and give ourselves small goals and continue like that. I had to give myself no choice in the matter but needed a lot of support with that.

I found the change always made things feel much worse initially and don't mean because of the removal of a means of emotion moderation here and rather the deeper more metaphorical "benefits" that it seems to give. Especially the type of self harm you are talking about.

I actually had to take exercise out of my life entirely for vary many years as I could not trust myself and it would set off a number of other things like constantly knocking over a set of carefully positioned dominoes.

I hope you tell your t the bare truth with this. These things thrive on being hidden.

 

[BlackbirdSinging]

Right now I'm struggling. I feel like the only way to make it stop is to self harm. I don't want to. I want relief. My thinking feels like I can't have relief without doing it. I hate this.

 

[Abstract]

I am pretending to myself that what is happening and has been for a long time now isn't. Typical of what appears to be my speciality - deluded thinking to point of craziness.

 

[circe47]

When I was really little, I used to try to break bones and on a few occasions tried to crack my own skull by dropping onto my head from the tree in the front yard. I also used razor blades and fingernail clippers to cut the cuticles of my fingers and the callouses from my toe pads. I used to stick needles or pins under the callouses and cuticles and twisted until the skin broke and I could pick and pull at the new injury.

As a teen, a few times I almost drank myself to death. If not for a friend I would probably be dead for passing out and puking up blood. My sister got scared and called my friend- who came and shoved speed down my throat to counteract the effects of too much liquor.

I drank and did various other drugs until a few years ago when I started getting migraines. The SI I engage in now is picking the skin on my lips. Sometimes I rip, knowing it is going to hurt and bleed, but an unable to stop. I also pick my cuticles still.

 

[Abstract]

Does anyone use very graphic, extreme visualisations of self harm as a means of getting to sleep?

 

[Britt.f7]

Don't know if I use it to get to sleep, but I know of thought that way before going to sleep.

 

[circe47]

Abstract-
Can't say that I do.....

Witnessing violence causes dissociative symptoms- especially when I get visuals of myself self injuring when little.

When I try to go to sleep, I fill my thoughts of how things SHOULD have been. I think about myself and my significant other as the teens we once were and play out scenarios that SHOULD have happened between us but didn't. I visualize myself as a young girl in love with her best male friend and doing all the lovely things that young teenage loves do. It's a way to re-write a past gone wrong.

 

[Abstract]

Thanks for answering Britt and Circe. Circe, that sounds like a lovely visualisation.

A bit concerned about how f'ed up I am, excuse the phrase. I won't describe it as it is likely to be triggering but sometimes its the only way I sleep. Think horror film stuff. And I am not one to watch anything gory.

When I am going through a triggered phase I sometimes get intrusive graphic images of it too.

 

[BlackbirdSinging]

I don't do that to go to sleep. I think it would trigger nightmares for me. I've noticed I do that when I'm overwhelmed though.