Battling With Self Hatred

It is far from easy to change my time-honored abhorrence to myself. When asked to choose three words to describe myself it would always have been a hateful expression of self disclosure. Mistake, awkward and failure would be ones that would instantly spring to mind.. Self-negativity just comes more natural to me than self-kindness. I can’t tell you an exact time when my thinking began to deviate towards such a spiteful disgust for all that is me, but I can honestly say I don’t have childhood memories where I ever looked at myself with compassion or kindness or self validation. 

So, now that it comes to using the DBT skill of SELF SOOTHE and ACCUMULATE POSITIVE EXPERIENCES I shudder at the thought of doing something for me, only for me. The only way I can describe it is; it’s like trying to be kind and professional to a really nasty customer in a shop. All you want to do is clobber them. You are forced to be nice to them through gritted teeth because you are obliged to, and because the security cameras would capture your every move! 

That is how I feel today. It’s been a rough few weeks since finished the skills group. I feel so despondent and isolated from the only thing that gave me some sort of a life. My mood has been near to the ground and I have been clinging on to every resource and skill base I can access to keep my emotional boat afloat. 

I strained myself to do something nice for myself today. I went and got a massage. I did enjoy it, but found my automatic negative thoughts overtaking any pleasure that was coming through my senses. I was so worried about taking my clothes off, as I have put on a considerable amount of weight since stopping the disordered eating behaviours. For so long I punished my body physically with food and exercise, I ravaged my muscles and bones and skin. So today, when the therapist’s warm hands glided over my body and caressed each part so tenderly, it felt unnatural and wrong. The juxtaposition created by the comforting touch and the undeserving thoughts was too much to contend with. I found it hard to settle into the hour and really relax. Instead my mind was racing with spiteful digs of unworthiness and unpleasant sensations of guilt. 

I guess I can say I was at least WILLING to use DBT skills today, but this one created a worrisome chain of thoughts which I did not intend.

WILLINGNESS to get over this bump and OPPOSITE ACTION TO ENVY

Although I would like to think I am calm, rational and a judicious person when it comes to taking an objective standpoint about transgressions in my own life, simply put, these skills is severely lacking from my toolbox. I find it very hard to push aside the judgements which paralyse me and turn my thoughts into narrow, dichotomous lines which only have two end points.

As I mentioned in the last few posts, my emotions have been amplified to way out of manageable levels this past week.  All this lead to me equating many of these emotions as facts; hence I felt had to act on the emotion. The feelings almost felt like they have a mind of their own, and that I was a vessel for them to carry out their action urges. At the time I felt I had no control, but I am not trying to evade responsibility for how I treated my therapist, as I know I could have been more skilful. I could have used OPPOSITE action to my anger, or even HALF SMILE. In reflection, I see that it could have been a perfect week to also practise DISSTRESS TOLERANCE and RADICAL ACCEPTANCE.

Yesterday morning I received a letter stating that a course I had been waiting to get onto for many months had been cancelled due to lack of funding. When I first saw the letter I was super excited, as I thought it was a start date. I had been advised to hold off going to university by my team for another year until I finished DBT and instead attend this collage as it operates under recovery ethics. It seemed a perfect transitory step for me. I decided to do something creative and less academic, so picked a photography course. I really was looking forward to it. 

Now I am so disappointed that my heart literally hurts. I am so afraid; I feel I have nothing really left to look forward to now.

I went to check in with the community nurse a few hours after getting this terrible news. And I am really so very grateful and abashed to admit that he was not the invalidating type I was expecting. In truth, he sat with me for about 45 mins and listened intently to what I had to say. We came up with a plan in order to help problem solve the solution, and jointly agreed that the best outcome would be for me to attend a crisis resolution based therapy group for 8 – 10 days. It came with a warning that I would have to be willing to work at finding solutions to my problems and not to abandon self responsibility. It seems fair, if like a lot of hard work, but I am up for the challenge. I really am so appreciative for how great that nurse was. I really needed his objectivity in that moment. 

I felt calmer and more in control after the meeting, and was much more willing to stay with my family for the night, I tried not to see it as a suicide watch, but as an opportunity to spend quality time with them. I went to see my sister and her husband who are expecting a baby and are in full blown 'nesting' mode. They are buying my family home off my mother, and have done a beautiful job of renovating it and putting their own stamp on the house. I noticed that I had been avoiding seeing the house as I felt great envy towards my elder sister, who has such a perfect life and gets to have everything I want and more, and on top of that gets to have the house I grew up in, the only place I called home. I am afraid I might never fall pregnant again, so am also reluctant to talk to her about the baby and envious of her ability to carry a child. I (quite skilfully in my opinion) figured out that I was experiencing ENVY which really did not fit the facts of the situation

I put on my DBT SKILLS hat and tried to use OPPOSITE ACTION. I knew that the prompting event to the ENVY was that I was being reminded about all the things I really want but can't have. A stable home, a family, nice things.....

My HOT thoughts where:

• 'I will never have what my sister has'
• 'I am such a failure'
• My sister is more successful than I will ever be'
• 'I am inferior to my sister'
• 'My parents think she is the better sibling'
• 'life has treated my so unfairly

The biological changes and bodily experiences I felt with the envy was a slight pain in the pit of my stomach and I was extremely anxious and noticed I was feeling resentment towards my sister and her husband   I began to ruminate about how unfair I felt the situation was and how much of a failure I felt I was. My attention was very narrow and I could barely even talk to them. I OBSERVED how much I had avoided seeing my sister and the house, which had undergone so much renovation that I nearly didn't recognize it! I hadn't even offered to help with painting or decorating because I had been festering in my envy.

Although it is ok to feel envy when others have what you want, the problem here lies with the intensity of which I felt the emotion. I had checked the facts and become conscious that I had not been there to help my sister due to an out of control emotion.

I mindfully asked myself what my assumptions, belies and thoughts were about my sister buying the house and having a baby. I then tried to challenge the hot thoughts which popped up. Here is how I tried to turn the judgments into facts;

• ‘My sister is 7 years older than me, is married and in a good position to raise a child’
•   My sister and her husband have worked very hard to get everything they have and deserve it all
•    I also have many very wonderfully things. I live in a fantastic location and have so many beautiful things. Someday, with hard work, I will also have a house to live in, but for now, recover and health are my greatest assets.
• It is a very good solution to the present economic recession as my sister would not have been able to buy a house like this without help from the family
•   My sister’s children will get to grow up in the same wonderful house and we did
• I am not a failure because I am not the same as my sister, I have other attributes which make me a successful and competent person

My goal is to have a positive and functioning relationship with my sister and brother-in-law, I love them and love the bump too! So my anger and resentment to them was making me avoid them and not nurture and develop a healthy bond with them. That is the main reason that the envy needed to be challenged.

In the moment I made sure to count all my blessings and avoided exaggerating my deprivations, Marsha states that to go ALL THE WAY I must imagine that it makes sense for my sister to have all this, as she has worked hard and deserved it all.

Finally I changed my emotions by changing by behaviors and posture. I unclenched my hands and relaxed my stomach and used HALF SMILE.

I now feel my envy is more in proportion to the situation. I’m not going to lie, it’s still there, but now I feel motivated to work as hard as my sister so I can have what she has. That means I can’t just throw my hands up in the air and moan about how unfair life is, I have to get off my ass and go get it for myself!

I’m really sorry this is so long and thank you so much for taking the time to read this. 

 

Why do we need emotions anyway?

Before fully engaging in therapy, I honestly thought that if I could just 'turn off' my emotions, then all would be fine. This is seemingly a very common request with BPD sufferers according to my group facilitator. Greenberg and Paivio (1997) capture nicely the generally agreed upon functions of emotions, which are that they;

1. Prompt and organize us for action
1. Give us important information about whats going on in a given situation
2. Are for motivating
3. Are for communicating to others
4. Are fundamentally adaptive

So I now realize that my emotions are like a motion-detection or warning system telling me that something is happening that I should know about. Another important lesson I have resonantly grasped is that my emotions never last forever, even though some may last longer than others and I tend to be more sensitive than my peers to emotional stimuli. It also depends on my current level of skillfulness in handling emotion and other factors such as sleep, health, stress, and support.

As Marsha Linehan explains so wonderfully in her book; 

'Emotions are like tides of the ocean, they ebb and flow, they come and go; they're transitory.'

When I forget this simple piece of advise, I am more inclined to act impulsively when in the throws of an intense emotion. But when I can tell myself calmly in the heat of the moment 'This too will pass' I am so much more able to open up a variety of options and not feel so helpless.

When emotions do what they are supposed to do, they are called PRIMARY EMOTION. They are unlearned and fundamental to human functioning. When you hear a loud noise, you jump, you feel afraid. Its a perfectly normal response. They are helpful. 

The problem lies in what are called SECONDARY EMOTIONS. These are complicated, non adaptive patterns of emotions about emotion. You feel shame for jumping and feeling afraid at the loud noise. 

When I learned about the different levels of emotion, I felt relived. It all started to make sense. I had never understood why I felt such random emotions in reaction to a situation. My secondary emotions were very often generated and intensified by judgments I had about how I was supposed to feel rather than how I actually felt.

My 'Judgement' Counter

The best thing I did to help me OBSERVE the judgments which lead to SECONDARY EMOTION was to get a counter. I found one in my local knitting shop, and its actually a stitch/row counter. A tally counter can also be used. I carry it in my pocket and click it every time I realize I am having a judgement. I observed how critical I can be of myself when i catch my reflection and I noticed how cruel I am with my self talk.

Try it out for yourself. I bet you will be surprised at the results of you judgement monitoring.

HALF SMILE your way to acceptance

Two elegant yet, sheepishly impatient women are making rapid glances around Starbucks, hoping to nab a free space to sprawl out and natter after an afternoon of window shopping. You can tell they are the leisurely type. I overhear them giving out about the lack of seats, and can’t help giggle as the hand approaches the first single digit on my watch, signifying my third hour sat in the comfortable chair by the window which seems to have moulded to my frame by now. I am not moving. I even turn my chair to get a better view out the panoramic glass wall.

People-watching is a not a new hobby of mine, but observing the finer details of said people is. I recently acquired a very helpful possession for this pursuit; eyesight! For some reason or another, cost and hassle being the most likely, I had not replaced my broken specs when the arm unhinged its self from the frame last year. I had grown used to the blur, and liked not living in focus. But when I passed my own father on the street, I thought ‘enough is enough’ and got them fixed.

There are two categories of people who meander up and down Grafton Street in winter. The fast paced snakes who weave their path in plaits around the care-free traffic blockers, who are much more easily distracted as they gather in large semicircular groups around each of the buskers dotted on the side of the street.

The girls compete in the small city style wars, and the guys compete for the most stealthily glances and puffed up chests. The dramatic outfits somehow seem to conspicuously blend in a contradictory fashion with all the rest and it’s the plain and ordinary which stand out. The frizzy haired student, the make-upless lady and the elderly man with a walking stick all seem out of place in this world of perfection and antagonism.

Once, a woman smiled at me as I walked by in a daze. It shocked me, and my initial reaction was to wonder if I had food or bicycle grease on my face. Why it was that something so pleasant made me react in such a capricious manner? I was a suspicious mess, and was almost angry at the woman for evoking such an unstable feeing in me. But of course it was not her error; it was my own lack of self confidence which made me react that way. Then I realised that it was not just anger stirring up in the pit of my stomach, it was jealousy. I wanted to be that woman, who could smile at the world and warm the hearts of others. 

So I guess that the point of this post is that the DBT skill of HALF SMILE is a valuable one. The idea with this one is that there’s a biofeedback mechanism between the face and the brain. If your face is tense, the brain gears up for trouble. If on the other hand your face is relaxed, it tells your brain that everything is fine.

I’m not sure yet how this ties in with accepting reality, but then there’s a lot I don’t understand about accepting reality generally. The book says ‘Half smiling is accepting and tolerating with your body’. DBT seems to ease you gently into ‘accepting reality’ before finally hitting you with Radical Acceptance. I’m hoping that after we’ve covered radical acceptance I’ll understand more where these breathing, smiling and awareness exercises fit in.

I’ve used this skill several times since I learnt it. On the bus when I saw my reflection and realised just how anxious and cramped my face looked. In a crowded market today when I felt overwhelmed and my face was agreeing with me. Both times I consciously changed my face to an ‘I can cope’ expression. And cope I did… Coincidence perhaps; I need to experiment more but I’m definitely prepared to try it out.

FACTORS REDUCING INTERPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS

Get out of my head!

In the wise words of DBT's creator Dr. M. Linehan; 

"The less you know, the more you worry, the worse you feel, the more you can't decide what to do, the more ineffective your are, the more you worry...

The more you experience non-giving, authoritarian environments, the more you worry, the less you practice, the less you know, the worse you feel, the more you can't decide what to do, and so on.."

This post has been more than a little bit difficult for me to write. I have scoured the internet looking for others views on this topic and came up with nothing except confusion. You see, I am ashamedly, immensely self limiting when it comes to my interpersonal relations. This is mostly due to my crippling inability to be NON-JUDGMENTAL. The resounding tone from the group today when introduced to this module with FACTORS REDUCING INTERPERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS, was an echo-chamber of the like-minded, nodding heads and understanding smiles.

Of the five factors covered; LACK OF SKILL, WORRY THOUGHTS, EMOTIONS, INDECISION, ENVIRONMENT, I feel that the one which stands out is clearly WORRY THOUGHTS for me. 

I am always worrying about what others think of me, how I look. "Do I fit in?" "Am I acting right?" "They wish I wasn't here" "They would rather not talk to me". These thoughts distract me from being able to met the social demands of an interpersonal situation.

Mr. Worry!

Another way that I feel my judgments impede my ability with regards to dealing with people, is what I think about others. I am very quick to generalize people based on very little information! I suppose this is the diagnostic criteria of black and white thinking rearing its nasty head. When someone comes out with something I deem unattractive, I am altogether too quick to totally write them off. One acquaintance recently came out with;  "Children are so annoying!". We were in Starbucks, and the local toddle waddle team had set up base beside us. Making lots of noise and very distracting. All of a sudden, I was dismissing my friend and blanking on all her great qualities. All I could think about was, how awful a person she was for saying that. "What a horrible person she must be if she doesn't like children!". I let my judgments get in the way of having a good time and a nice chat. I was stand-offish for the rest of the time we spent together. I short. I wasn't very personally effective! 

What happens when I have a judgment about someone is that I then search for proof of it. I look for ways that that person then conforms to my judgment, and I ignore ways that he or she doesn’t conform. I build a case for my perception and create a story about that person, which then interferes with my reacting purely and simply and EFFECTIVELY in the moment to that individual. My ideas and story get in the way of seeing the whole truth about that person. Furthermore, my reactions to him or her are bound to be quite negative when the story is a negative one, whether I am conscious of that or not. What happens when I feel negative or react negatively to someone? Usually, I get a negative response back, which reinforces my negative feelings. I don’t realize the part I played in creating that negativity. If you were being judged, or even just sensing the negativity behind an unspoken judgment, how likely is it that you will feel positively toward someone and act accordingly? Judgment produces judgment, while love produces love. 

The trouble I see with judgments is that they keep me from connecting withothers. They maintain a sense of separation because what I am judging is the fact that I or the other person is different from me or different from an idea or ideal I hold: either myself or he or she “should” be this way or that way.

I am looking forward to learning how to get past these factors, and with Christmas fast approaching, the timing couldn't be better!

Are Borderlines manipulative bitches, or just in need of validation?

As some readers of this blog may know, I am currently in therapy. More specifically, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. I am almost four months into it now and have covered three of the four modules which are; mindfulness, emotion regulation and distress tolerance. We will be moving on to interpersonal effectiveness next week. Just in time for the silly season too! And thank goodness, because Christmas tests everyone's ability (not just the emotional unstable's) to relate effectively to others.

After a particularly bad week, regarding ability to think, behave and generally function at reasonable level, I plonked myself down in my individual therapist's chair, ready to blow off steam and I suppose, get some sympathy for my shit week. As always, I tentatively handed over the diary card (a tedious twice daily exercise with which I have a particularly Black/White relationship). I hate this part, detest it even.  I find it so cringe-worthy, and shameful letting someone else know my most private and secretive behaviors urges and actions.

Anyway, so what I wanted was someone to validate how shit I was doing. And don't get me wrong, my therapist obviously was paying attention during that part of training, because she is an expert at making me feel like I have a right to feel the way I do. Yet she also knows how to push the boat when it comes to pulling the dialectic of change just a tad too hard for for my liking.

She used the words 'you have the ability to evoke a nurturing response from people when you are upset'. Oh lordly, what a thing to say to a borderline. My head went into a spin of judgments about myself, about her... the running commentary was a bit like this; 'what does she mean evoke a response!' 'Does she think I am a needy bitch who wants attention all the time?' ' She thinks I am faking, doesn't she!' 'She must think I want to feel this shit so others feel sorry for me' 'How dare she!' 'She is sick of me' 'She is going to kick me out of therapy' 'She hates me' 'I hate her!'and so on and so forth!

Thing is... on reflection, she's right. I love to feel like someone cares about me, that someone thinks and feels for me. I find myself thinking does she think about me in-between sessions? Have I made an impact on someone? Will they remember me?

So I guess the point of this post is to reflect on the point she brought up about needing to feel cared for. Its something that I am now aware of that could be problematic for me. I rely on the feedback from others that I am deserving of nurture and care, but shouldn't I really be fostering that for myself, and convincing myself that I don't need external ques of love and affection to feel validated? The answer is clear. Yes. but how to go about doing it? I haven't the foggyist!