Quote:
Originally Posted by sunrise
both the depression and the SI are a reaction to pain or stress in one's life; they help one deal with the pain--survive it. If one can work on solving the cause (the pain or stress), then the behavior (depression, SI) will often extinguish. If one works on fixing the coping mechanism (e.g. having a person who SIs instead snap a rubber band on their wrist) instead of the root cause, then it will frequently be tempting to return to coping in an unhealthy way if the cause of the pain has not been resolved.
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This was my experience. As I slowly uncovered and dealt with the reasons BEHIND my use of bad coping mechanisms, they slowly faded away.
I agree with Eileen, too. As a child and young adult, I was never taught any way to cope, and I didn't have any good examples around me that I could follow. When I was very little, I coped by dissociating...as I got older, I "coped" with SI, food, alcohol, drugs. It really wasn't until I started therapy that I began to learn other ways to cope...and it wasn't until I did some hard work on the underlying reasons for the *need* to cope that I was able to regularly use the new skills I was learning.
It takes time to unlearn a lifetime of anything.
