Lack of Self-Care from Shame AND Suicidal Ideation

Cascade · April 11, 2024, 11:40:20 PM

I really feel that my back brain has been and is still in charge, instead of my front brain. Emotions vs. reason and logic. I'm with you, Chart.

Chart · April 13, 2024, 08:35:28 AM

I send you love PapaCoco. I can't feel it for myself but boy can I feel it for you. How to develop empathy for ourselves still remains a mystery to me. I lay in bed this morning hugging myself and crying. Why couldn't my biological father love me? I know this is a moot point now but this question echos like thunder from my last failed relationship. The relationship could have worked if I had been healthily attached. Ifs, woulds, coulds... somedays Im strong and okay to see the truth. But most others I just fold in on myself. Is there ANY consolation, PapaCoco, in the knowledge that you can see through the lies of childhood and Religion? I keep looking for some kind of "sense" in all this human dysfunction... I don't know. I just keep coming back to the relief I feel talking to you, people who see and question and suffer like me.

Cascade · April 13, 2024, 05:34:23 PM

Hi everyone,
Maybe by expressing our compassion for others, continually and repeatedly, we can start to see some ways to do it for ourselves. One of the supposed benefits of therapy is that a good enough therapist will model a safe relationship and how it works. This idea doesn't bring me any epiphanies of how to get out of this depression, even though I understand I deserve better. The idea of expressing our care and concern for others here is just a snapshot in time, of what I'm capable of right now. Papa Coco and Bach, I honestly don't know what other steps to take. I guess the hope of it evolving into self-care at least glimmers somewhere in the distance.

I can't even cry anymore or anger out anymore. I feel sad and mad, and I guess also futile about expressing it. Chart, keep hugging yourself and crying out the tears. It's painful to feel that our fathers didn't love us, I know.

Compassion and support to all,
-Cascade

Papa Coco · April 14, 2024, 11:52:10 PM

Chart, Blueberry, Bach, Cascade,

Thanks for the kind words. I certainly can appreciate the difficulties between knowing about self-love and feeling it. I struggle with that also.

It's the trauma that blocks us from feeling it. It's not a rational sense, but it's real. Someone taught us to not feel it. But here, on the forum, we have a lot of compassion for each other. Know that you are deeply appreciated for your openness and sharing here on the forum. Folks like me and you and all the others who respond to each other and share are all in the same boat. Maybe our love for one another can help ease the sense of not being good at turning our own love inward toward ourselves.

We're in this together.

Blueberry · May 30, 2024, 11:40:56 PM

Quote from: Chart on April 09, 2024, 08:59:12 PMCarolyn Spring has a great podcast on suicide. I found it absolutely brilliant.
https://youtu.be/2G2cuf3aVM8?si=1c3A7nr_1AoQcTZV

Thanks for this link! I don't have the stamina to listen till the end, but it was helpful. Now I've listening to another of her podcasts about helping a trauma client who wants a quick fix, there was also the one about being stuck. All useful to listen to.

btw Chart if I compare what you wrote in the post I've quoted to what you're writing on the forum these days, I sense a lot of progress.

For myself, I know I've taken one of those huuuuge steps backwards but I will come out of it again.
I feel ashamed of myself atm which is one of my reasons for re-reading parts of this thread.