One of the problems I immediately ran into when I started trying to heal was with learning how to cope in a healthy way. I had lots of things I did to try and regulate my emotions, and almost none of them were good for me. In fact, a lot of them were seriously dangerous. I realized the methods I was using were more like addictions than ways to heal, and I had to learn how to break the cycle.
First I isolated all the things I did to cope. I self injured, shopped, had sex, played my guitar, sang, spent time with animals, exercised, slept for long periods of time, over-ate, did art work, and hung out with my friends. It was immediately obvious that some of these things were healthy outlets for stress. Music, art, exercise, and spending time with animals were all things that didn't hurt me and reduced my stress. Easy enough. At the same time, self injuring was obviously never going to be an ok or healthy way to deal with my stress and it was endangering my life. Then came the harder part of the grey-area items, and this is where a lot of people end up falling.
Things like sex, shopping, food, sleep, and time with friends are all fun things most people enjoy. The dangerous part comes from overdoing and depending on these things to regulate emotions. They stop being fun and start being drugs, and when you are inevitably forced to deal without them, your depression, your panic, and whatever else you're dealing with becomes worse. That's when dangerous coping mechanisms like self-injury and drug use start looking like your only option.
THE WAY I FOUND TO BREAK UNHEALTHY COPING MECHANISMS:
1. Identify the unhealthy coping mechanism
2. Identify the specific void you're trying to fill with said unhealthy action, ie find the root of the issue
3. Identify a way to solve the problem OR a healthy way to cope with the problem to replace the unhealthy action
For example, when I needed to have sex to be ok, it quickly stopped being fun and became a fix I needed to find. I made bad decisions about who involved myself with and would get irritable with significant others if I wasn't getting as much sex as I felt I needed from them. It also caused a lot of emotional pain for me because when I pursued unattached sex, I was unable to separate my emotions and ended up getting hurt when my feelings weren't reciprocated. Sex should never be something that causes shame and anxiety, and that became all it was for me.
I overcame this hurdle by figuring out what emotional pain I was trying to soothe with sex. After some introspection, I determined that I wasn't getting enough love, and since sex kinda feels like love sometimes, I subconsciously tried to fill that void with sex. Sex isn't love, and when it didn't heal the hurt, all I did was pursue it more and hurt more.
After figuring out what was going on, I came to the hard part, which was replacing the harmful coping mechanism with a healthy one and trying to heal the problem. I knew my need for sex stemmed from insecurities about not feeling enough love, and I knew the types of partners I was pursuing were only making that insecurity worse because they were treating me badly and using me. I took a step back from other people and from sex and worked on figuring out how to love myself. I realized that the more I loved and respected myself, the more I enjoyed my own company, and the less I depended on other people to regulate my emotions and make me feel loved and happy. Being alone became enjoyable instead of terrifying, and my urge to self injure was greatly reduced.
It's easy to say LOVE YOURSELF AND EVERYTHING WILL BE OK. The thing is, even though loving yourself does make life a hell of a lot better, it's not a snap your fingers type of deal, and it's not a magic fix. It takes work, it takes screw ups, and it takes time.
Today's media and social expectation encourages us all to hate ourselves inside and out. Outer beauty is never quite enough, and inner beauty is nothing without outer beauty, society says. It's really hard to break that well drilled concept out of our heads.
A lot of my challenges are going to be based on how I learned to love myself. I'm a firm believer in hands on learning, but some people learn by show and tell, so I will be providing both the challenges and summaries of my experiences in this blog. Hopefully people are able to find stuff that works!
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