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Cutting v. 2

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What's funny is there's no meds for "abuse" or PTSD. All of my meds are for MDD which I would have regardless of abuse (supposedly), and while they usually do give anti-d's for people with PTSD, in my experience and what I've seen in other people, they don't do squat. They have good reason to be depressed. And forget about DID - there are certainly no meds for that, except maybe benzos to keep from anxiety to keep from switching personalities, but that's no way to live. Therapy is the only way, IMHO.
 
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I agree. Drugs can only fix the symptoms of a problem, not the problem it's self. Even if the problem can't be completely fixed, (you can't correct what's already happened) The person can learn to cope or come to terms with the issue. Which is highly variable considering that 'issues' can happen in two ways, self inflicted and inflicted by another.
BAAH The human mind is so complicated. I want to be a psych. why...? i could be a pharmacist instead XD
 
Im feeling fucked up tonight. Been burning my arm with a lighter as a excuse not to cut. Even the 10mg's of zyprexa zydis seems not to be affecting me much. Fuck this sucks :( .
 
PA, please stop for your own good. Call a friend. Call a hotline. Anything. Please.

We all care about you and don't want to see you hurt. :( Even though I've only known you for a short while, I feel like you're my friend. If someone else was burning you with a lighter, I would kick their ass. Please stop :/
 
im not trying to give u more reason to burn, PA - in fact i think u shud maybe hav more zydis and/or call an emergency service esp if it gets out of hand

however, btrswiet, after my experience with cutting, wen im more regularly a burner, i dont see why u say burning is more severe than cutting

it was so hard to stop the bleeding wen i cut into my thigh i was losing blood like crazy.....had to hold down a huge pile of flannels on it and compress it then raise it till it dried

whereas IME us burners tend to only end up with a huge blister which after a few days pops healthily oozing water and if its cared for with savlon there is no infection

my cut got infected and pussy (probly cos of the flannels - i used old dirty ones)
none of my burns hav

however i guess this isnt an argument - were just trying to help PA and i hope, PA, that u take my advice about the zydis, etc.
10mg zydis might not b enough if ur having a bad episode - i often stick 20mg in my mouth and u know how small i am!

as for the meds debate about PTSD/DID/etc i wholly agree - the best med out there is called therapy
im currently on amytriptyline to help me basically function without trying to kill myself again - im also on zydis like PA (mostly cos i see spirits - genuinely, trouble is no one believes me and they think its long-term effects of meth abuse combined with stress/recent breakdown)

that nervous breakdown i had wud b an excellent example of dissasociating - they call it a psychotic episode cos i dont remember it.......i think i just dissasociated completely that night
apparently i tried to kill myself, rip my hair out and burn myself
dont remember any of that

and ive bn diagnosed BPD long ago last time i attempted suicide cos i was trying to cut myself - they didnt actually believe that it was meth use until i showed them the fucking meth just so they cud get onto another diagnosis as i know i am not BPD......

after seeing my counsellor a second time she says ive probly had PTSD to some degree for longer than anyone realised
i was abused badly as a kid and i dont remember a lot of the stuff Dad did to me
slowly as im having more and more therapy im having more and more flashbacks to the stuff that happened wen i was little.....stuff i blocked out long ago

at the same time more spirits r appearing to me like a little boy who wants to go to heaven or hell or wherever he belongs and he wont leave me the fuck alone
i saw his death (may 19/1947) as if on a movie screen in the mirror, which is where he usually appears and he was hung from the roff by his older brother - he said hell always look after me
ok i know this sounds whacked
it sounds like im either making it up or im crazy

im a christian and i dont believe in playing round with that sort of stuff so i always say gently 'in the name of Jesus Christ go away, Ryan' (he told me thats his name) - then he goes away

and no matter how much zydis i take affects it by taking the spirits away - and interestingly enough wen i use meth they dont appear more
my dads mothers aunt was a medium and my dad sees them too plus my aunt wen she was having brain surgery, came home and while she was recovering, poltergeist activity went on

dont know wat this has to do with self-harm or even dissociative states but i guess its odd how now im seeking therapy all this is coming out - i never used to see spirits
my therapist asked if i ever saw them as a kid and i dont remember but i was always scared of the mirror (interestingly where i see a lot of them) so maybe i did - i just dissociated!
most ppl do recognise ive had a pretty traumatic childhood

my therapist wants to put me under a hypnotic state some time with my consent (shes qualified in this) but im a bit spooked by the idea

havnt burnt since :)
 
That's awesome that you've been burn free, DW.

Personally I wouldn't do hypnosis and want to know the results. Obviously we all have defense mechanisms and hypnosis bypasses them and can leave you in bad shape if you remember something under that influence rather than waiting for it to come out naturally.

Now, when I switch in session I know my therapist asks me all sorts of things - but she doesn't repeat them back to me unless I, (the main personality), remembers it. For example I told her once that one of my alters (Ashley) was telling me about my father taping my eyes shut with electrical shape and kind of playing with my eyeballs under the tape. Apparently a different alter (maybe Ashley, or someone else who talks to Ashley), had already told her all of this! At that point she told me she already knew because whoever had told her.

Other than that, I guess she might steer homework and stuff in a direction to try to get it to come up in my mind (something an alter said), but that's it. If I (Erica) was ready to remember it, I would.

But, I am doing EMDR which isn't hypnosis but has the potential to do the same thing, so I dunno. I just imagine remembering EVERYTHING in an instant and I know I'd go insane. Little bits at a time are better, at least IMO. And my therapist is licensed in hypnosis as well, but she doesn't do it with people with DID, unless they're doing it to try to quit smoking or things like that.

Also the nervous breakdown you describe sounds a lot like what happens in DID, although most of the time I switch I don't do anything more significant than buy toys or tell someone to fuck off or do drugs, when I personally wouldn't have done that. Yes I've occasionally burned as an alter, but usually I am co-conscious - I can see what's happening but I can't stop myself. I also confronted my parents as an alter and the next day left my house for good. They thought I was doing all of this therapy for something else - and I am doing it for the kidnapping thing as well - but the parental stuff takes much longer to sort out.

It's so hard to understand how parents would sexually/physically abuse their kids... but torturing them, like my parents did to me... it's beyond comprehension. My mom denies it all and she only did a small portion of it and is very dissociative herself, so maybe she really doesn't remember. But dad, good old dad, managed to look normal during the day, but after the sun went down and mom was asleep (or mom was out during the day for some reason), watch the fuck out. If any of you have read "A Wolf At The Table" by Augusten Burroughs, uh that's basically my dad in a nutshell, except he just acted, there is no reasonable verbal communication there. .... I just was going to type something but I'm not going to go there. Let's just say a lot of abuse happened in the bathroom and to this day I get triggered so bad in bathrooms that I have to close my eyes as much as possible while in them.

Oh well, ramble of the day. Hope everyone is well.
 
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lasthurrah19 said:
Personally I wouldn't do hypnosis and want to know the results. Obviously we all have defense mechanisms and hypnosis bypasses them and can leave you in bad shape if you remember something under that influence rather than waiting for it to come out naturally.
Click to expand...

thats kind of how i feel - i honestly dont know how far my dad has gone in wat hes done to me and i honestly dont want to remember.....if my brains protetecting me from permanent trauma so b it

i know it wasnt sexual.......i wont go into details though some of u (the ones that i really trust) will know that the occurence 'last yr' was sexually-based and its changed my life
i refuse to talk about it openly on a forum cos some ppl here wud say i was asking for it (sometimes i even believe this tho therapy is helping my long-term self-esteem problems too) - we hav a mainly decent population in our community here in TDS......however there r trolls that come and go
and the downside to being a mod is u can read evrything.....even once its editted out
believe me, thats bn pretty painful in the past

i know were starting to go off-track and i am hoping we can steer back to talk about self-harm but firstly, lasthurrah, i was intrested, u say my nervous breakdown says it sounds like it has aspects of DID in it.....my psychotherapist has said the same! (well she described it as being 'on the same continuum')
my question to u (and u can answer this by PM if u like) is, do u think, if i had just left that and carried on (as id bn going downhill for awhile and was still getting even worse after that night), is it possible i cud hav ended up developing DID or similar?

ive bn another day free of burning, though i thought about it cos therapy was intense but i held in there strong and said a little prayer

funny, ill bet my bottom dollar, at least 1/2 of us hav suffered abuse at some stage in our lives - this is why we think were worth so little that we have to 'punish' ourselves
whether it was a parent/parents, kids/teachers at school or a partner, the damage is already done and in my case im only 'good enough' for 'more damage'
id never talk about anyone else like i talk about myself let alone the things i do to myself, and all cos of how my dad, kids at primary school, teachers (ADHD drives teachers mad) and a bunch of guys treated me well.....
im going to quote Iron Maiden as usual: 'The evil that men do lives on and on, the evil that men do lives on and on.....' :\

has anyone else ever occured that wen we put ourselves down (something i do chronically) we r also self-harming even if in a less physically scarring way? emotional abuse is just as bad - often its why we physically abuse ourselves....to escape it......then if ur like me u look at the scars, wince and start chastising urself
vicious cycle!
 
drug_wench

About your DID question. You can only develop DID until about the age of 5-7; until you are incapable of believing in Santa Clause, and things like that. That's because at that again your base brain and personality are not completely formed - and you can pretend to be someone else, and actually believe it. So could it happen to a kid at 8 or 9, yeah, if they are developing a little more slowly... but not, say, at 12. But once you are capable of creating other personalities, you can do it forever, not just until the "Magical Thinking" age is over... I was abused starting damn near birth and have an alter as old as 21, and I'm 24. You can have alters that are older than you, younger, some people even have animal alters (cats, dogs). It's all in the kid who's being abused mind.

Now, there is the continuum however, and you can go all the way up to right before DID, at any age... if you're raped, in war, abused in any way. How far you go depends on a lot of things. Prior abuse, precieved sense of helpless, if you really thought you were going to die from the situation, sensitivity, other things like that. Even if you don't have DID, you can be at the stage where you have different "parts" with different "names" and everything (they don't have to, but for many people they do). It's essentially the same as DID, except you have more of an idea what is going on, because you don't lose hours of time, and you can "switch", and though you won't be able to control what you're doing, you will remember it.

If you're at that point in your dissociation, it is certainly a big distracting and can cause destruction in your life. For me, my first goal is to get where I don't switch completely if I do switch - try to stay co-conscious. People without DID get to skip that step.

That's a lot of info, but anyway, to answer the question straight up: Only abuse or other extreme trauma that early in life can cause DID. If you were strung out you can attribute it to that. If not, it's very unusual for someone who is not under the influence of drugs to forget whole nights like that, and that's definitely something to look in to... but no, you can't develop DID now if you don't already have it.
 
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thanks, I tried LOL. I've learned a lot about my ailments in the past year

on another note I had a quick urge to burn right after my therapy appt today... first I went there thinking it was at 11 but it was at 1:30 (my mistake), so I drove home, and had to drive back like a hour after that (its about 30 miles a way, a little haul). And then we were just talking about anger cause of when I said on bluelight that I actually felt something, and let it pass, like a normal human. Usually I feel very dull emotions, except sadness. I feel that they are there, but they are hidden in the dissociation that is there all the time because I needed it so much growing up. But even transient moment of anger like that are big improvements for me. Anyway, when I got out of the office one of my alters was mad at me for telling my therapist about bluelight (I just called it "bluelight" and kinda explained the premise), and I had the urge to burn myself really bad...
So, I got some pot instead. Yeah, I know not the best coping mechanism but it was at least a *better* choice.
 
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i havent cut for years but things have been utterly shitty lately and i sometimes am tempted to go back to it...

i hate explaining the old scars as it is... new ones prob arent the best idea.
 
i havnt done any burning since i last posted or had the urge to burn :)
maybe this was just a brief thing for me!!

lasthurrah - thanks for the info
i was abused from the time i was 2....but only bashed and beaten and thrown around.....then wen i finally faced him and told him id tell the police at age 13 he stopped and just emotionaly abused me instead
hes a coward
but i remember evry second of his abuse so i can safely say i dont hav DID

wat happened last yr - i didnt remember that but not cos i was strung out tho i was in H wd at the time
i certainly remembered it the next day - i cant remember wen it disappeared from my mind (around the time i was in detox)
i just blotted it out somehow - and it was like a whole week or so (the week i was suffering the upset straight after the event) disappeared for awhile there and has now returned - now i remember feeling ashamed all the time, crying a lot and vomitting evrytime i thought about the ppl involved
apparently sometimes a part of PTSD is to blot out the thing that triggers it until something sets u off (for me it was having another sexual relationship - or trying to....Paul didnt manage to get inside me cos that was wen flashback one happened and i panicked.....there had bn clues leading up to it tho, i didnt like him even holding my hand and i cudnt place why)

sorry i keep coming back to the dissasociation topic cos its off-topic from self-harm
does anyone else who dissasociates/suffers from DID/PTSD/BPD want a separate thread on this so we can discuss in there? if so....let me know
or u can start one urself
lasthurrah, i hav a feeling ud b keen on this, and possibly PT?
if so, go about it how u want - believe me, i will join in

i think half the reason im staying away from self-harm is im not depressed
ive only bn burning myself to deal with a dark depression ive never had before
instead ive bn spending the last few days smoking meth

however im awaiting the depressing comedown (from meth), i need to up my methadone dose (this makes me depressed too) and im in valium rebound wds, as im going down to 29mg in a few days and my body gets used to benzos fast (this makes me more depressed than the methadone/methamphetamine issues put together) so ive got this feeling of impending doom
i know, come sunday or so ill possibly b desperate to flick a lighter and push it hard down against my skin

i hate it cos i know wen it comes time to wear some more revealing clothes or swimsuits ill b so ashamed and regret it!
i never in my life thought id ever actually start self-harming
funny wat lifes obstacles will do to u
 
drug_wench,

First, I'm sorry you experienced that abuse - it's not 'just' being pushed around and beaten, it's a big deal, especially to a two year old and continuing growing up - I imagine how scared a two year old would be thinking that's what the world was like, having so few other healthy experiences. But to your question.

Yes, that repression could definitely be a symptom of PTSD, or it could just be isolated on an abuse memory and not actual PTSD. Depends on if you have other symptoms. But yes, sexual relationships trigger a lot of people with sexual trauma they previously didn't know about, lots of sexual problems are can be related to trauma and people don't realize that (lots of other things are too, like asthma, IBS, somatic pain). I personally have not had sex since my last sexual abuse - which was being raped in December last year, which I mostly don't remember and don't really want to. So I'm sure it'll freak me out, I just need to have an understanding partner.

Triggers are a funny thing with PTSD. I have lots of little nutty things that trigger me, some I know why, some I don't, like... babies crying, screaming, etc are obvious. But also big black buttons (like on big coats or trench coats), luckily in FL I don't see much of that. Also, gloves. One of my abusers made me wear gloves except when using water in some way (bathing, dishes), for about a year. That's a whole other story, but anyway gloves freak me out sometimes.

I'd be cool with a separate thread, I think the theme of Dissociation would be best, as that is the main link between DID/PTSD/BPD, but whatever you choose I'm sure will be fine, if you decide to make a separate thread.

Third thing, this is really none of my business and I'm sure you and your doctors have it all under control, but it seems like you're riding a big roller coaster, even with the methadone/valium, but adding in meth... ech... just want you to know I'm concerned. Also know I've never even seen meth, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

Please try not to self harm. I haven't since the beginning of May - right after my birthday, things were building up as my birthday was always a day of really bad abuse - and my parents totally blew me off and I had a big argument with some friends, that's when I burnt 'CUNT' into my arm :/ Well one of my alters did. It's right where doctors take blood pressure so I can't wear anything besides short sleeve or long sleeve shirts until I get it healed somehow or at least so it doesn't look like the word... it healed not too badly but you can definitely see it.

I personally, as Erica, haven't self harmed since about September last year, when I had some months clean from all drugs and fucked up - not only was I puking for hours because I ate too much tylenol (from percs), I also burned a big hole in my arm because I was so pissed at myself for using. That's another reason I don't like the 12 step thing, it made me feel like a complete loser when in fact I had had the most clean time ever when I used and should have just made it a one time thing, but I had that overwhelming guilt coming from everywhere. The world is not black and white, maybe all of us addicts with PTSD running around think it is, but it's really not ;)

Take care, also I started blogging on the site if you haven't read the thread where I mentioned it. :)

Not to make this post any longer (sorry), but I did have the urge to burn last night... after trying to explain to my friends how I know none of my abuse is my fault, but as much as I know that, I'm programmed to believe it, and I can't just turn it off without re-programming myself, and that's what I'm doing with EMDR. They just want me to snap out of it. Anyway it got me kind of agitated and then I was at my mom's house for several hours and she said something brash to me and I got really anxious/aggravated for no reason but my mom stayed up with me until I felt better. There's nothing like former abusers helping you in the present... ha... but I'm glad someone was there. And I'm still awake from yesterday, but probably not for much longer. Okay I'm done :!
 
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Hey guys I haven't read the whole thread but decided to ad my 2 cents to the discussion before I start making my way through it.

I used to cut myself on my arms with razor blades, knives and broken glass a few years ago. I definitely did not do it for attention or anything like that, I would usually be really drunk or high on something and get emotional after a bad night. I guess thinking about it now it was a way of "punishing" myself because I thought that I was such a fuck up.

I have told a few of my very close friends about it but most friends and none of my family don't know about my problem, I've been wearing long sleeves for the last 3 years pretty much... It's not that I really care what people I don't know think about it, i've tried wearing t shirts and stuff out of the house and I just feel very uncomfortable with everybody staring at me out of the corner of my eye.

I haven't cut in like a year, there isn't one thing in particular that stopped me. I just realized that it was making me feel worse about myself and having big scars on my body was so detrimental in so many aspects of my life. ai can't go to the beach without being very careful (i actually wore long sleeve shirts to the beach on a boiling summer day before).

I'm sorry I can't offer any advice about how to stop this very bad practice, apparently some people cut themselves for pleasure or endorphin release and I don't know much about that. All I can say to people who want to stop is that there are much better ways of dealing with emotions than running a blade across your wrist. Try meditation, exercising or just talking to people about how you feel.

To all those people who don't do it and don't understand it please be sensitive. I live in constant regret of how i've disfigured my body and every time some asshole makes jokes about people who cut being little emo kids or something I get fucking furious. Why make some lame played out joke for one laugh when you could be making one of your best friends feel fucking terrible about themselves without realising it.

Anyway good luck to anyone out there dealing with this problem. Just remember there is no best way to sort it out and only take advice that you know is right in your heart even if it might be very difficult.
 
My ex was the one that got me to quit cutting. Even now that we're not together I don't think I'm going back. It severely hinders getting a job, which I need right now, and obviously scares some people and would cause them not to talk to you. Which I don't need right now. I need to show I'm a survivor.
 
Most of my scars have faded away and are just light pink and not very raised. Still have one massive one that sticks out and is bright red even a year after I did it.
 
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