My Journey Through Self Harm: selfharm

Showing posts with label selfharm. Show all posts

Tuesday, 14 January 2014

My Beautiful Gran

The most loving woman in my world
The most amazing woman in my world
The most inspirational woman in my world

My Gran was loved by so many people and her love for us was unconditional. In her 90s, she still showed an interest in everything we did, never ever commented or judged and even came to accept the modern day things such as piercings and tattoos.

My Gran knew everything. You didn't have to tell her things. She just knew.

One hour sat chatting to her would make her day and fill you with a bit more knowledge of someone who had seen endless changes throughout her long life.

She had known great pain during her life, losing her first child at full term, suffering with chronic arthritis for over 50 years, losing her eldest daughter to breast cancer and hoping and praying as her second daughter fought the same illness. Lastly, losing my wonderful Grandpa, her Tom, who she loved with all her heart.

She had also known great happiness, helping others during the war, bringing up three children, loving seven grandchildren (and later their partners too) and she was also lucky enough to meet three of her great grandchildren. She adored Bethany and Freya but the icing on the cake was when her first great grandson was born and he was named Thomas after her Tom. Her life was complete.

Nothing in this world could have prepared me for the pain I would feel when my Gran passed away. She was ready to go. I wasn't ready to lose her. I remember leaving the hospital after hugging my Mum, coming home and sitting down with my little girl. I explained that "Little Great Gran" had gone to heaven and would soon be an angel. At that moment in time all I wanted was for someone to hug me and tell me the same thing. To lose a Grandma as a child is hard but I had loved my Gran for 37 years and I just didn't know how I could cope without her in my life.

My Gran ~ Her Eyes Sparkled

This emotion was new to me. The tears wouldn't come, the pain wouldn't stop. I self harmed more and more but even that had stopped working so I turned to new methods and switched from bruising to burning and cutting. The next few years would lead to me becoming more reliant than ever on my addiction. It was out of control and I needed help!

Dealing With Depression TRIGGER WARNING

Dealing With Depression

Depression isn't just feeling a bit down or unhappy for a few days. It is when you feel persistently sad for weeks, even months on end.

There are lots of different symptoms that come with depression. Some of the physical symptoms are feeling tired all the time, sleeping badly, suffering from aches and pains, panic attacks, anxiety symptoms such as feeling sick, palpatations, chest pains, the list is endless.

Some of the emotional symptoms of depression are feeling hopeless, worthless, unable to cope, inferior to others, feeling like a failure, tearful, unable to cry, like others would be better off without you, even suicidal.

Depression is a serious illness and not something that someone can "snap out of" or "pull themselves together." These are the worst things you can say to someone who is suffering. If it was possible to do this, then surely they would.

Depression is often triggered by life changing events. Childbirth is often one of them.

My Depression

Standing over my daughters cot, I remember looking at her and thinking "how can I feel sad when I have something so beautiful in my life?" Unfortunately, depression isn't that simple.

What I thought would fix my past had now brought on a new fear. How could I protect my little girl and keep her safe and ensure noone could ever hurt her, like someone had hurt me?

I became obsessed with her safety and could just about cope with her being with close family. Even then I would pace up and down waiting for them to bring her back. I think it made it worse that she was a girl and I knew that I had to somehow learn to control my fears or I would be the one to ruin her life by being so over-protective.

Again, I turned to self harm.

I disgusted myself that I could harm myself with my baby in the next room but she needed me and I had to be able to cope.

As the months went on, my obsession with being a perfect Mother got worse. Inside I felt like the worst Mother in the world. I felt like nothing I did was right or good enough and I couldn't understand why I felt so sad inside. The strange thing was, my baby smiled all the time. She was the happiest baby I could have wished for but this only made me feel even more worthless, like I didn't deserve to have her.

Thoughts of the past started to creep in again, I was self harming more and more and although I had visited my GP, I wasn't totally honest about how I felt because I was so convinced he would send me to hospital and take my baby away from me. This became another massive fear for me.

Depression and anxiety began to take over my life and panic attacks became an every day occurance.

I could go on forever with this section but I will cut it short and cover certain important issues in later posts.

I finally reached a stage where I felt like my daughter would be better off if I wasn't in her life and that someone else could bring her up better than I could. I sat and planned my suicide. I wanted this pain to stop and I wanted to die.

That was the moment I discovered I had a strength inside me that would not let my past win. Nothing was taking me away from my baby and I swore from that day to this, that while I was a Mum, nothing and noone would ever stop me fighting to stay alive.

I spent the next years learning to cope using a mixture of help from family, antidepressants and self harm. My Mum became my rock and on days where my panic attacks were unbearable, she was always there to help me get through them. My Dad had also suffered from depression and I found talking to him so helpful because he understood how I felt and he taught me many skills to deal with my illness.

I started to have more good days and self harming controlled my panic attacks enough to get me through situations that I found difficult. It wasn't the ideal way to cope but it enabled me to work, attend school activities with my daughter, take her to swimming and ballet lessons and give her the childhood she so deserved.

My self harm and past was to remain a secret throughout these years.

Monday, 13 January 2014

Hurt

"I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel ~ I focus on the pain, the only thing that's real!"

Learning To Survive TRIGGER WARNING

Learning To Survive

When something traumatic happens in your life, something that hurts you so deeply that you actually want to die, you have two choices.

In the case of emotional, physical or sexual abuse, you either let this person win, believe all the things they say and choose not to go on with your life

or

You tell yourself that you will win, you deserve to live and you dismiss all the things they have told you.

IF ONLY IT WAS THIS EASY!

So you find a way inbetween the two.

In my case I soon realised that I didn't want to die. I had so many people who loved and cared about me and I had so many reasons to want to survive. Slowly, the following weeks and months would show me that I could learn new skills to deal with what had happened.

My perfect childhood and adolescent years had now been blown apart and I had been left questioning everything about myself. If someone could hurt me like this, I must be a bad person. If anyone found out how bad I was then they would not want me or love me anymore. Therefore, I now had to live a perfect life, without faults and make up for the badness I felt inside.

I would also have to learn to cope with my emotions and find a way of hiding this terrible secret from my family. I had already nearly lost them on that night and I had to ensure that nothing could ever take me away from them again. This was, to later become one of my major problems as it would lead to serious separation anxiety issues, something I will discuss in detail later.

I had learned that night that no amount of crying or begging would stop someone hurting you so I decided from that day onwards, I would never cry again. Another decision, that in later life would prove to be a mistake but at this stage, I was young and just dealing with things in the only way I could.

I couldn't unlove the people who were already part of my life but I could try to distance myself from people more. My new theory was that "If you didn't love someone too much, it wouldn't hurt so bad if you were taken away from them."

I became an expert at shutting off emotion, having a hard exterior and pushing people away who tried to love me. I no longer felt like I deserved to be loved and to deprive myself of love was the first way I learned to punish myself.

Probably the most common way someone deals with feeling dirty after sexual abuse is to wash themselves over and over, scrubbing hard at their skin in the hottest water they can tolerate. This was the first time I realised that physical pain on the outside somehow balanced emotional pain on the inside.

The next thing I discovered was that causing bruises to myself could calm me down in emotional situations and keep my feelings under control. Seeing the bruises also helped me. I was hiding a secret that I could not tell anyone and to carry on, I would have to spend the rest of my life pretending that night didn't happen. Seeing the bruises reminded me that the pain I felt inside was real.

Pushing people away was so hard. So many times I just wanted to reach out and tell someone but I had already started to believe that what had happened was my fault. I could not risk my family or my friends knowing that I was this bad person so I became more and more secretive and I began hurting myself more and more.

I had never heard of self harm so didn't know that this was what I did. I would hit my arms hard against door frames, over and over until the pain kicked my emotions back in. At times, I could hardly move my arms for days. I knew this wasn't right and I often wondered why this made me feel better but I would quickly dismiss the thoughts, cover up the injuries and carry on as normal.

This was to become my way of life!

Sunday, 12 January 2014

Why Does Someone Self Harm?

Self harm is a coping mechanism.

People start to self harm for many different reasons. It is often a way of dealing with feelings and emotions that are too overwhelming to cope with. To many people it must seem so hard to understand how anyone could feel better by hurting themselves but often, the pain of trapped emotion on the inside is so painful, hurting yourself on the outside sort of puts your feelings back into balance.

Self harm can work in two ways when dealing with emotion. Sometimes it is like your feelings have completely switched off and you feel numb. Self harm kicks your feelings back in. Sometimes your feelings are so overwhelming, you feel like you will explode. Self harm calms these feelings down.

When you cause an injury to your body, chemicals are released which work in two ways. They reduce the pain you feel at the time and they calm you down so although self harm isn't the best way to deal with things, it actually works.

Unfortunately, those chemicals and the feeling it gives you is also addictive so before long, your body will start to crave it. In my case, what eventually happened was that the thing that had initially helped me stay in control of my emotions, was now part of my bigger problem and was ruining my life. I was totally reliant on self harm to get me through most situations.

Another reason people self harm is to punish themselves. This is often related to something that has happened in the persons life to make them feel so worthless. Unfortunately, again, this eventually escalates and you begin to loath yourself more and more.

Another reason is because it has become a habit. It is what you do in certain situations, it is just your way. You need to see the hurt on the outside so that you know the pain on the inside is real. Sometimes you even self harm just because you want to.

This is just the tip of the iceburg in explaining the reasons why people self harm and I will go into more detail in later posts.

Jane

What Type Of Person Self Harms?

What type of person self harms?

I have asked people this question on several occasions. Some of the answers have been "goths, sad people, depressed people, lonely people, etc. Often peoples idea of the type of person who self harms is down to things they have read or seen on the internet. The typical photograph of a young girl, dressed in black, crouched in a corner with a razor blade in her hand is NOT the typical type of person who self harms.

I believe that the most important part of a person is their soul. Sometimes souls get hurt and damaged. The cause can be many, many things but I also believe that with the right love, help and support, a persons soul can be healed and they can start to live their life again to the full.

I have thought long and hard about how to write this blog and I don't particularly want it to be written as a story. I have chosen to write it more like extracts from a diary, ones which may switch from present to past depending on what is going through my mind at the time. I will be including some of my favourite quotes and song lyrics that have helped me over the years, not to mention some of the most special people in my life. I also want this blog to be honest and open about some of the sad times I've had but I will also, most definitely be including a lot of happy times too.

To protect anyone reading my blog, especially my family and friends, if a post contains any mention of something triggering, I will always give a warning so that people can choose to skip that post if they so wish.

Jane x