Posted by daisym on June 12, 2004, at 20:00:35
I'm really struggling to understand how I can get so totally overwhelmed that I start to think I can't continue to live with all of this. Really. I push away the thoughts of what it will mean to my kids and it is almost as if a whole other person, who is completely done, takes over.
Most of the time I fight these thoughts. I tell myself that it can't get better if I'm not here to makes sure it does. I tell myself that I want the pain to die, not me. But sometimes I catch myself working out the details and realize I've been thinking about it for a long time. I convince myself that while I have the wish sometimes, I'm too responsible to act on it.
But there have been two times now (last October and last Thursday) when I scared myself. I couldn't get back to rational thought. I was split and all the sides of me were yelling at each other and at the core was this desire to make it all stop. One part of me was trying to keep me safe. She took me away from home to a safer place. She called the therapist. She signed into Open with "I'm in trouble" and made me connect to others until I was calm enough to go home and stay safe. In the words of Racer, she wore the seat belt.
On Friday, I got up, went to work for a little while and then came home and just hung out in my swing. I didn't talk to my therapist until 5pm -- 24 hours after I called. (That's a different story altogether.) By then I was beyond the crisis and not in any real danger. I felt tired, beat up and bruised instead. But I still told him about it though it felt weird and dramatic to repeat what had happened. I felt like someone telling a story about someone else. And it felt like it happened a long time ago and really far away.
This makes no sense to me. How can you go from really suicidal thinking and feeling to this flat emotional place so fast? I'm not on meds, so it isn't a change there. It occurred to me that perhaps these really horrible feelings connected to the suicidal ideation might be old. That maybe as a girl of 11 or 12, I thought these thoughts. And now we've touched them off again by going to the dark places in my mind. Maybe that is why they come and go so fast. But we've been working through the memories for months now, so that doesn't completely fit. And yes, life has been more stressful this week, especially at work. But that has happened lots of times.
Maybe this bounce is normal. You go completely to the bottom and hit, and go up again. It just feels wild and out of control to me. And I don't do "out of control" very well.
I really want to understand it so that I can try not to go there again. Anyone have any ideas about this? Can where you are in your therapy cause this too? And have you found that talking about it with your therapist makes it better? I'm sure he is going to want to but it is hard to explain how it got so bad so fast when I'm not there anymore.
Thanks, btw, to those of you who hung in there with me Thu/Fri (via email, IMs and Open). I really needed you all and feel blessed that your support was available.
poster:daisym
thread:356168
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040603/msgs/356168.html