Quote:
Originally Posted by agatha9
When I was younger I was the kind of person who always did what she wanted to. I never thought of the consequences of behaving like that. As a child I went through so much pain, so much abuse, that I decided to live my life as fast as I could. A few years ago, I started hitting myself. I thought I deserved to be punished, but I never really understood why, until now. Everyday I struggle with the memories of what I've done. They come without invitation. They come at the least expected time. I also believe that there is no hope for me, I fear that my future won't be better than my present. And my present really sucks. I believe that I have misled my life so that today I'm not where I was supposed to be, where I dreamed to be.
It's been months regretting every wrong that I've made, every bad decision, every step out of the way. I try to justify myself by thinking that I have a lot of issues, but then I have always had an option, so in the end it was always my choice.
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I think you are very clearheaded. I agree with how you set your goals and support you in your disagreeing with the therapy that involved thinking about the reasons too much.
Do note that you are a mortal, though.
What it means is that you will not live forever.
Your lifespan is limited.
So you need to manage your life keeping in mind that it is finite.
So if you spent months regretting every wrong and emerged from that period of regrets with that solid determination to use those feelings to become a better person, FANTASTIC! time well used.
But if you continue immersing yourself in unproductive regret for much longer, that would not be fantastic - that would be wasting that precious time that is allotted to us only once.
You did verbalize the desire to self-punish, which is very seriously counter-productive. So I think that if you take away the plan to convert those feelings into personal betterment while dropping the self-punishing impulses altogether, then you will have made a clean break and can push the restart button on your life.
Your therapist, instead of insisting on yet more analysis of motivation of past actions, can spend the time analyzing the motivation to self-punish and working towards reducing if not eliminating it altogether.