Taking it out on your body - exploring possible roots

I think so much of femininity is celebrating denial of the self.

IMHO, it's the very heart of femininity.

I was raised like every other girl, forced into a rigid stereotype for 30 yrs.

It was only after my divorce that I decided to cut men completely out of my life and to never care again about them. I cut ties with many people as well because I knew if I didn't, I'd never break free of the vicious imposition of femininity.

I became Self-ish.

How many times have we heard as girls to not be self-ish?

It's GOOD to be self-ish. It means you live each day for yourself and nobody else. It means you CHOOSE who you are, what you want. Each day, when I wake, the DAY IS MINE.

There's this special time for me, around twilight, where I ponder over the day and write in my journal (I've kept journals my whole life). I take this special time to reflect on the day, maybe plan something for the next, make a goal.

Many people might balk at being a spinster like me, thinking it's lonely and so forth but I'm telling you, for every moment I might yearn for a partner there many more moments where I'm contented. I answer to NO ONE but me.

I think my experience is just one of the ways women de-program themselves out of femininity and re-program themselves to be wholly human. You have to find some way out of the pain of being brought up in a patriarchal shit hole, a way to become human again and not an object.

There's not a man reading this that will have ANY conception of this struggle that all females face growing up in a patriarchy.

'When females are born they are doomed' (Hilla Kerner, testifying before Canadian Senate over Bill C-16)

My therapist always asked me what I needed. I became so embarrassed that I didn’t know that made something up

I feel it's down to me to fix everything and I don't know how to say what I want.

Yy Quentin

I should be able to rationalise my way out of any emotion. It's hugely impacted me.

No you can't do this easily, it's different parts of your brain, it takes months or years of rewiring neural pathways. Google the triune theory of the brain. You can recognise though that the emotion might be something to do with your past and not your present and that an emotion doesn't have to lead to a particular consequence. There are very valid reasons you feel the way you do. I still feel the urge to self harm occasionally, but I know where that comes from and there's no way I'm letting my abusive past affect my present. Though I have to say I am already quite a long way down the road of recovery, that might not have been so easy in the past.

Various over the years; smoking, drinking, not taking medication because "I should be able to do without it", still overeating and skin picking.

The reasons for that are that both my parents are (or were) GPs and both are well known in my town. Some of it is feeling like I want to be alone when I’m vulnerable, a lot of it is really negative experiences with the NHS.

The thing with pain and seeking medical attention.... very interesting...

It takes me weeks to make a doctor’s appointment. I will not go unless made to even when it’s quite serious. The NSPCC wrote to the GP to tell them I had overdosed 3 months prior, that’s the only reason they know. It took me three weeks of not being able to see in one eye before someone made me make an appointment with the GP (eventually dx with MS).

no-one really, really knows me as I control myself too much.

This. Precisely this. It’s like having two lives. Only sometimes the lines blur and then you wonder which one is really you.

I'm also autistic with an abusive mother so can relate to most of this. However, for me my biggest problem is binge eating to excess. I'm overweight and hate my body so this just makes me miserable but can't seem to stop

I was very nearly completely broken by the experiences I went through in my early to mid 30s. I cannot deny that they have had major repercussions on my life but I did find a way to process what happened to me and I do believe that if you can face the pain (“the only way out is through”), though certainly not all in one go, you can get yourself to a far better place and, hopefully, help you children navigate the murky waters of life far better than your own parents did. Thar’s my goal, anyway.

I’d like to thank everyone who has shared their stories. The parts about family dynamics and not being allowed to show certain emotions really resonated. Also, the relationship with pain. I’m also not good at seeking help when I’m in pain or discomfort. There are a few issues with my body which I’m trying to sort out myself. OH keeps telling me to go to the doctor but I don’t feel it warrants it.
I’ve also noticed that I find it hard to be sympathetic to other people’s pain - I make the right noises but inwardly I’m thinking ‘don’t make such a fuss’. It’s awful. I think it’s because I hold all my pain in and find it hard when other people don’t.

Heartbreaking thread.

I do believe that an awful lot of mental illness is a rational response to situations people find themselves in. I mentioned RD Laing on the previous thread and while I don’t agree with all his ideas rather a lot of his ideas about family dynamics has struck a cord with me. When user talked about emotion processing being blocked by the family it really rang a lot of bells.

I’m not going to give details from my life - I feel a bit exposed at the mo with all the stuff going on regarding the thing we must not mention, but I will say that good psychotherapy had a profound effect on me and I would recommend it.

to you all.

Dermatillomania is particularly bad atm. I like Winter as I can hide my skin

WomanLifeIsGoodish - thank you for sharing your story

I’m shaking reading this. You are all wonderful, inspirational women and thank you for sharing your stories.

I had a narc mother (her selfishness is breathtaking) and an overbearing father who policed every single word I said. Being bawled out of the room aged 7 for using the word ‘bellyache’ which was crass apparently. Another time all hell broke loose because I said “fart”. I ended up not speaking and even now (mid 40s) I run through every comment I make to him.

I have a complex issue with food and use starve / purge to maintain a slim figure. I haven’t purged for months though so doing really well right now. I never let my BMI get above a certain number and this control is a release for me.

I don’t want to bring this thread round to the current debacle because that’s not what this is about, but the policing of the language triggered in me some god awful feelings. It made me feel vulnerable and anxious.

I end up shutting down emotions and as a result I am a ‘grey’ person. Very friendly, quite popular but no-one really, really knows me as I control myself too much. I don’t ever get drunk because being out of control is too scary and the Fear the next day messes with me for days.

Respect and solidarity to you all.

Interesting thread

^ that describes my current weight loss efforts to a T.
Then I end up looking back at my historical food restrictive times with rose tinted glasses :(

Thanks. It's really helpful to know you are not alone in trying to sort this sort of stuff out. At night when you are staring at the ceiling it is all to easy to imagine you are the only one.

So if some of us know what CAUSED the behaviour, does anybody know how to actively make changes that last? That is the one thing I cant seem to do. I might change my diet and it lasts brilliantly.....I can loose 20lb in 6 weeks but then one slip up means im off the wagon and bingeing on cake and snorting pasties. BOOM- 30lb weight gain

This is such an enlightening thread. Thanks for starting it, Woman.

I have BPD. Love piercings and tattoos. Recovered self-harmer and anorexic. Used to do a lot of drugs to cope with shitty impact of childhood, now I am on ADs and self-medicate with weed in the evening before bed. Also ex-sex worker (teenage)

Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger and the Gabor Mate books are good too. And Stephanie Covington does a lot of practical work around trauma. It's just not widely known enough about.

There is so much wonderful stuff in that book IMO!

The book that Offred mentioned, the Body Keeps The Score was massively helpful to me in understanding what was going on. For years I thought I was depressed, but actually I had a problem with emotional regulation. A childhood consisting of various traumas (to be honest not even things that people might consider "serious") with a father with a personality disorder who had an explosive temper, was very controlling and was incredibly inconsistent and a mother that relied too much on me for support meant that I never learned good emotional regulation. The emotional pain sensors in our brains are in a similar place to our physical pain sensors, and I think this left me feeling things too strongly. This isn't a "thinking error" as CBT would like us to believe, it's a structural issue in our brain - if we do not grow up around people who have good emotional regulation, the neurons in our brain don't develop in that way either. You live with "danger" whatever that is for you for so long it's like having an over-sensitive smoke alarm that triggers you at things that other people would just ignore.

When we rely on inconsistent people for caregiving it's a logical reaction not to blame them when we rely on them to stay alive, so we keep ourselves "safe" by blaming ourselves. It works (in a way) when we are in that situation but then we leave and there's no reason to do it anymore but it's the only thing we know. We have never learned to feel safe so we don't feel safe. My worst period was just after I left home and it all came out, but I still didn't have any support. I'm pretty much okay now after many years, but I think I still have the hyper-vigilance thing going on, I never really relax, I never learned to relax!

Learning that it was the physiological structure of my brain massively helped because all of a sudden I realised it wasn't my "fault" that I couldn't change just by thinking about it. The emotional regulation bits of our brains are not well connected to the rational thought bits. This helped me to forgive myself and to be able to think about it a bit more instead of pushing it down because it was too shameful.

There is much more recognition of the effects of trauma now, there's some good work going on in women's organisations, though not all are up to speed. My experience of the NHS understanding of it is still pretty poor though.

The biggest thing for me is about hanging out with people with good emotional regulation (when you want to drink you hang out with people who also want to drink, who aren't the people who are sorted and sussed!) - though stopping drinking is good too.

I think there are lots of us around. I have been toying with the idea of writing a book telling women's stories of healing from trauma but not quite made the leap yet!

Very true, writers