Posted by Dinah on July 17, 2003, at 8:42:56
In reply to Well, I finally called my therapist, posted by judy1 on July 17, 2003, at 4:11:48
I'm sorry, Judy. I know how discouraging that can be.
I hope you don't mind if I share some of my own half baked ideas on self injury. I think that sometimes those of us who habitually dissociate don't listen to ourselves very well. We tend to shut out the internal messages we don't really want to hear. So sometimes self injury is the only way that we can scream loudly enough to get our own attention. Maybe someplace inside of you, there is a part of you that is ready to deal with your feelings for your old therapist in a way you weren't ready to do before. And maybe it couldn't get you to listen to that unwelcome message.
What I do to try to stop the self injury is to try to give my deeper selves a way to communicate. So I might try to focus on my emotions and then make a series of statements. "I would really like to see my therapist again." or "I have feelings about my former therapist that are scary to me." Things like that. And then I wait and see if I can feel an emotional response to those statements. That gives me an idea of what's going on deep inside, and it gives deep inside a way to tell me without screaming in self destructive ways.
I don't know if any of that applies to you. But if it does, I've found it a more useful way to deal with the self injury urges than just to cut them off as best I can.
Good luck, Judy.
poster:Dinah
thread:242783
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20030711/msgs/242806.html