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My disgust and hatred for myself has started me to picking at my body again. I have marks all over my stomach and arms from picking and scratching until I bleed. I don't know what's wrong with me. Can it still be from my childhood abuse? I don't see it being that. I mean I know it has some bearing on this but come on, how long does this go on? I am so sick of trying to tell my T and myself that I'm ok.
Hi Smiley,
First I want to tell you that I struggled with that kind of darkness and self-hatred for decades (sorry I know that’s scary!) so I want you to know that this isn’t about you just feeling sorry for yourself, or refusing to change or any of the other horrible stuff you’re telling yourself. The truth is that childhood abuse is incredibly damaging with really far-reaching consequences and it can be very long and difficult to heal from it.
One of the biggest problems with childhood abuse is that we had no way to process what was happening to us or any way to handle the very deep, scary feelings that came along with it. If the abuser was someone who was supposed to be our caregiver,we were in an even worse bind, becaues the very person we should have been able to move towards to handle our feelings and how overwhelmed we were, was the very source of what we were dealing with. This left us nowhere to go and no choice but to bury some really significant feelings. Feelings which often led to us forming very deep beliefs about ourselves which from a child’s viewpoint and our experience make TOTAL sense, but are nonetheless not true. And a big part of that is a very deep, far reaching belief in our own worthlessness or even a belief in our intrinsic “wrongness.”
One of the very deep fears I had to work through in therapy was the belief that if someone could really know me they would leave. After all, the last time someone knew me on that level, they left. After treating me really badly and telling me I deserved it and no one would love me, including my mother, if they knew what I had done.
There seems to be only one way to heal from this: we must dig up those buried emotions, express them and look at the beliefs they created in order to mourn our losses and heal from them. This is not solved by the right mediciations or by thinking positive thoughts! If that were enough, we could just read the right book, obtain a correct intellectual understanding and toddle off. But the truth is that so much of this is encoded in our right brain and in emotional experiences we had BEFORE our frontal cortex even came online, so the only way to heal it is to let the feelings out in the presence of an understanding other. We need to experience acceptance and understanding, that someone cares enough, that we matter enough to listen to. One really important thing I learned from my T was that our sense of worth ALWAYS comes from outside ourselves. But when we’re children we can take it in on such a deep level and at a time that our understanding of our worth becomes an integral part of ourselves. For those of us who have the unenviable task of learning our own worth later in life, it is never quite as robust or easily believed, but we can achieve it. I can honestly say now that while I have a much more realistic picture of who I am, including my many faults (which were too threatening before to acknowledge), that picture also includes my many strengths. I like who I am, and know that despite my very ordinary life and all too clear humaness, I am a worthwhile person.
The problem is though, that this task takes a long time and a lot of repititions. Our experience as children were small things that happened over and over and over again and laid down strong tracks in our brain. We have to build up tracks that are strong enough to overide those and the only way to do that is to keep returning again and again and pushing back on our wrong beliefs.
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I continually get up and go to work, make my day ok, come home and go to bed. Next day same thing. My day feels like it's fake from beginning to end. I'm just moving along like I'm supposed to do. No real meaning to anything.
I remember the feeling of “fakeness” you’re talking about. I had a lot of very deep strong feelings buried very deeply which meant I couldn’t go near my feelings because they were too dangerous. So instead of reacting to my life and using my emotions to inform me about it, I decided how I was “supposed” to feel and then worked very hard to feel that way. But that involves a lot of not being honest with even ourselves and to not feeling authentic. As I have learned to have my feelings, that sense of really being who I am has grown as has my feeling of being “real.”
And I think the self-injury is a strong sign of buried emotions that need to be processed. Human beings have feelings, lots of them. And no matter how hard we try to push them away or push them down, they have to come out. I believe that you hurting yourself is an attempt to acknowlege the “ugliness” you are carrying inside. The root of the problem however is that you believe the ugliness is yours when actually it’s the ugliness of what was done to you. Only in looking directly at it can you see the ugliness for what it is: not yours.
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My life has alot of good in it and I should be happy. I just can't seem to shake the bad in me - the feelings of yuck. What are you supposed to do?
I actually said this to my T, that what’s wrong with me that I have SO much to be thankful for, what was my problem that I couldn’t just let it go? I want to leave you with the same answer he gave me. All the food in the world isn’t going to help if you’re thirsty. Just because your needs might be getting met now doesn’t remove the buried pain of not having them met before. Those unmet needs are stopping you from feeling what you’re getting now. Not some shortcoming on your part. There is a way out Smiley, but it’s long, slow and can be painful. I’m sorry you have to walk this way, but I do want you to know that there’s hope and another side to this despair.
AG
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