Source: The Depression Project

Reposted from mintchocarus via marxen

Something I just realised: while I normally speak or think of myself, I use he and masculine grammatical structures. However, whenever I am criticising myself, I switch to she, feminine words/grammar, call myself fem-coded slurs, I use my deadname. Basically, my inner voice not only bullies me most of the time, but also misgenders me routinely. Rude! lol

But there is a positive. I've always had trouble realizing when I'm being unreasonably critical of myself and shutting down that irrational voice. Now I have a pretty clear cue to tell me that my self-criticism has gone beyond what is proportionate to the situation and has gone into beating-myself-up territory. Read More »

CW for mention of suicide and grief.

I've said often that I'm a clamshell, that I never open up to anyone. Not IRL anyway; journaling is different. After nearly two years of therapy, I finally opened up about a huge trauma that I've never discussed with anyone. About the suicide of my best friend after years of enduring abuse, and the guilt I've felt for that. Something I've carried unprocessed for nearly 25 years, and which directly related to two attempts to take my own life.

I had been building up to tell that story for months, but I always got so scared, that I always found an excuse not to. Finally this week I did it. I packed all my feelings, put them in a locked box in my brain, and forced myself to at least get the facts and chronology out. It still took more than an hour and I barely got the minimum out. At the end of the session the therapist aked me how it felt telling this, and my truthful answer was that I wasn't feeling anything yet. That I had intentionally put up a wall in front of my feelings, so that I can tell the story. Because I couldn't cope with both telling the facts and feeling the emotions. So I shoved them away for another time. Read More »

I was scrolling my feed on the train an hour ago and came across a post that I've seen before, in one iteration or another. The caption is something like, "What would you say to your younger self?" And the image is of "current-day self" bitchslapping "younger self'. 9 out of 10 times I would have reposted that or at least liked it. Tonight... I couldn't. I can't. I don't want to hit or punish my younger self.

Fot the last few months in therapy we've been unearthing old truma for me to process, because I never did, and overwhelmingly I've been feeling profoundly sad about my young self. So much stuff that shouldn't have happened. So much self-blaming and self-loathing, for things that other people - adults - were responsible for and instead I blamed myself for. I don't want to bitchslap young Misha. I want to find him and hug him, and hold him, and let him know that he is allowed to be sad and hurt. To tell him it was not his fault or responsibility. That the grooming and exploitation was not his fault. That when friends died it was not his fault but the entire system that failed them and that he couldn't have filled the entire Maslow pyramid for them - it wasn't possible, he was only a child. Read More »

In therapy the other day we were talking about some BS from my childhood and I mentioned that a weird side effect of that is that my reaction to pain from impact (e.g., being hit during sparring) is to laugh. Made me really unpopular as a sub while I was hanging out with the SM crowd, because the harder Doms hit me, the harder I laughed. And it made it pretty hard to explain to them that I wasn't trying to challenge them but that it's an involuntary reaction.

Without missing a beat, the therapist responded with, "Oh, I know. You do it here, too. Every time we stumble upon something particularly painful you just laugh and laugh." Read More »