@Magpie2 wrote:
I'm also sure you didn't mean to stigmatise by saying 'I'm not a habitual self harmer', but in a thread all about de-stigmatising can I say that distancing ourselves from an identity associated with an action kinda is stigmatising that identity a bit?
Sorry @Magpie2 & everybody else. As you say, no offense was intended, so I'm sorry if I did so. 😬 It's hard to know the linguistic rules some times, bumbling in to a topic you know very little about. I was just trying to convey the pertinant details of my own situation.
@Paperdaisy wrote:
It's interesting you get the impression someone is in control of what they are doing "Like they are in control of their bodies while they do it." I'm wondering if you think the stigma around this is what has lead to that belief?
I'd say it comes down more to the testimony I've heard from people who do it. Maybe my information supply is limited - perhaps deliberately narrowed by the media - but in all the testimony I'd heard, the people who self harmed had their reasons for doing what they did. There was a certain degree of deliberateness in their actions, even if they later regretted those decisions.
This, as opposed to say, someone with Tourette's, who do things they don't want to do, because they can't control their bodies. My experiance was more like that.
@Paperdaisy wrote:
You mentioned you had "given up" in your experience of it and I'm sorry to hear that happened to you, I imagine that was a very difficult place to be in.
I'm wondering how you manage distress tolerance all those other times that you didn't have this one off experience?
Most of the time, I just sit and stew in polite silence. Or lay in bed till all hours, unable to get to sleep.
The thing about my one-off incident was that I was unintentionally goaded in to it by my therapist (awful woman!) She made some offhand remark about injuring myself during one session, and the next thing I know, that night, I'm self harming. It was like all the horrors of my long treatment had just come to critical mass, and I just flipped my lid and lost my body.
I'm not trying to shift any personal responsibility, but I think it's undeniable that she was the deciding factor in this very unique incident in my life. If I'd never been under her "care", I would never have done it. And with her out of my life, I've never had anything even remotely like that incident occur again.
It was just so out-of-character. I think that's probably what disturbs me most about the whole thing. I've made mistakes before; some really bad ones, too. I can own up to all of that because those decisions/actions were "me". But this incident wasn't "me". It was like my body was hijacked.
