You do not trust yourself to NOT self harm The fear rises within you – it looks like this:
- Heart beating fast
- Thumping or skipping beats of the heart
- Churning stomach
- Difficulty breathing
- Trembling
- Sweating
- Tingling
- Suffocating feeling
- Iron band around head
- Dizzy or light headed
- A lump in the throat
You want to FIGHT or RUN or you might feel FROZEN on the spot – the fear feels bigger than you – stronger than you – ready to overtake you and send you crazy. The fear might feel so big that you think you are going to die. Your body and mind feel like they are splitting apart – you stand outside of your body looking on. Your body feels detached like you don’t exist or that you have fallen into a deep hole disconnecting from the reality of the world. Frightening thoughts cling and the more you try to forget them the more the thoughts stick. The fear feels like it has taken hold of you and you have lost the power and control over your own life. You are left standing alone, unsafe and overwhelmed.
And right at this moment when you are left standing alone with your emotions left raw from the intensity of your fear – you feel a sense of sadness and anger engulf you and you begin to wonder – You reflect on the fact that you want to feel real – you want to feel something other than fear – you want to be like everybody else – you just want to be ‘normal’. BUT you can’t be normal you keep telling yourself – how can you be normal when you cut your own skin. How can you trust yourself not to cut your skin?
It doesn’t matter if you don’t trust yourself right now – I am not asking you to but I want you to know that you are not a coward and you do not have to cure yourself. You let your mind and your body do the curing – stand aside from your body and let the healing process take over – your mind and your body have been responding to the wrong messages – these messages are from your past and they come from someone who has told you that you are worthless and undeserving. You need to learn new messages and you can learn these new messages through the support of others including professional support. Once you have learnt new messages – trust your mind and body to respond faithfully to these new messages just as the mind and body has responded so faithfully to the wrong messages.
DO NOT let these wrong messages continue to stop you from living a life that you deserve. DO NOT stop trusting yourself. DO NOT stop believing that one day it will be different. DO NOT give up on life because peace is just around the corner. DO NOT forget that your mind can become tired from fighting the fear. DO NOT let anything stand in the way of reaching your full potential. DO NOT stop surviving. DO NOT despair because I know how easily you do despair.
One day, not today but one day – with support, guidance and empathy you will be able to trust yourself again and once you trust yourself again – your skin will breath a new lease of life and be forever radiant to the outside world.
This may be completely counterproductive and unhelpful, but having self-harmed when I was younger, I didn’t feel like this. I didn’t feel detached, I felt restrained in my body. I felt too large to contain. I didn’t want to be “normal”. I wanted to unleash everything that was boiling inside me. For me, it was a way of getting everything out. It made me feel I was in control. Not in a healthy way of course, but a way nonetheless. I learned better ways and I will not ever self harm again, but one of the most important things for me as I dealt with my issues was reading that I should be grateful for my defense mechanisms, no matter how destructive, because they got me through to a place of safety where I didn’t need them any more. I learned to say, “Thank you, but I don’t need to do that now”. I trusted the reasons why I did it and I never have, and never will, feel that I was “wrong” to do it. That is the way of thinking that worked for me.
Hey Cerebral, you have nicely described what Rebekah captured in some of her earlier self harm blogs.
I love that you got to a point where you thanked the voice of self harm and nicely refused it: “Thank you, but I don’t need to do that now.”
And…you won the money, you won the money [sung as Megan dances around Cerebral, wrapping her with organza ribbons in Christmas reds and greens].
Hi Cerebralmum
Thank you for your reply – yes control and power are very important in the act of self-harm – as mentioned by Megan – I talk alot about this in earlier blogs – this blog is more for the self-harmers who feel anxiety – and as you would know although self-harmers can be similar in their reasoning – self-harm is an individual act for all different reasons.
QUOTE – I wanted to unleash everything that was boiling inside me. For me, it was a way of getting everything out – thank you for this insight – because for alot of self-harmers – self-harm is a way of letting out the emotion that keeps getting stored up inside.
Rebekah