[ScientiaOmnisEst]

There's no way to explain this easily, without also sounding crazy.

Oh wait, this is a site for crazy people. I mean this in the best possible way.

I have a lot of guilt, too often accompanied by a feeling that I deserve awful things. I don't know where it came from, but I know I've had it since pre-adolescence, around age 10 or 11.

For a long time I called it "auto-empathy", because my single biggest trigger for it is other people suffering. Real suffering - hearing about someone falling off their bike doesn't mean anything to me. An account of someone being abused, bullied, assaulted, or tortured, however, that's liable to leave me, almost automatically, imagining myself in the victim's position, or at least thinking that whatever it is should happen to me. With the former reaction, I basically learned to detach myself enough that I don't walk around for the rest of the day with a thousand-yard-stare because all I'm thinking of is myself being beaten half to death, or gang-raped, or tortured in some elaborate fashion. I don't want to be thinking about any of that, but once it's there it's difficult to extricate myself.

More often, though, it's just guilt. Just a feeling like I somehow did something bad, in that this person suffered and I didn't. I deserve it more! Why am I getting off so lucky? It's....not fair.

I can't imagine how sick this sounds. In my worst moments I've truly had this desire for someone to hurt me, to abuse and harm me, to break me physically and mentally and subject me to the worst anguish - I've even considered hiring someone to do it. But I have no money and I'm not sure I ever really want to go through the hassle or the shame of explaining what I want. Doesn't stop me from considering it though.

Before anyone asks, no, it's not sexual. There's nothing sexual about it; it doesn't turn me on in the slightest. The fact that I'm probably a sexual submissive by nature actually scares me a bit...then again, I expect sex to be painful and unpleasant and maybe even a punishment of its own. I'll stop there and point out that I fear pain as much as any other person, I'll flinch if someone goes to hit me. Like I said, it's all pretty irrational.

It's guilt more than anything. Guilt that someone else is suffering, that I should be harmed in the same way. Supposedly I've had guilt about other things too - at home I used to lie a lot about little things, and often felt the need to hide things like what I was reading or what and when I ate. To me, it was a boundary thing. I saw my mother as overbearing and overinvolved, and wanted something to myself that I didn't have to report or talk about. That, and there often was irrational shame about my media tastes and such; a fear of criticism. At least that's how I saw it.

I tried explaining all this to my mom one day when we were getting along, and she told me she experienced a similar thing, with similar triggers (particularly in regards to other people's suffering). Then she elaborated and it's actually nothing like me at all. For one thing, her reactions and machinations were never violent. She "punished" herself for no apparent reason by, say, denying herself treats or fun. I lack the willpower to do that, and besides, it's not enough, unless I were to outright adopt an ascetic lifestyle with an emphasis on near-constant deprivation of pleasure (indeed, I've contemplated it before...the stress of thought managed to drive me to minor self-harm).

Also, she had discernible reasons: she was the child of a closet alcoholic, and the guilt arose from carrying that secret around for years. All that fear and confusion manifested against herself. Fine. I have no such experience. I've never been hurt or abused, by anyone. That's almost the core of it - I don't deserve this kind of luck.

Conventional self-help is largely useless because I don't know where any of this comes from. It's not like I can link it back to an event or series of events. It just...is. I deserve to be hurt. I deserve to suffer. There's something bad about how others' suffer and I don't. I don't know where it came from, but I know it's been around for a while.

I tried posting about it elsewhere and someone suggested it could be a kind of pure-O OCD. My issue is that it's not constant enough, nor does it come out of nowhere. Rather, I read or see something that "triggers" me (despite this, I don't believe in trigger warnings and, in fact, I hate the idea of saying "I was triggered". In fact, I often go and deliberately trigger myself, like I'm trying to get past it).

Anyone have any insights?

I know there are self-esteem issues tied in - I often get a very similar anxious feeling from reading things that, basically, set off an inferiority complex. Things that leave me thinking, "I should be more like that; why couldn't I be more like that? I'm a failure, I'm inferior, I'm useless and no one will ever want anything to do with me because of that."

[Tauren]

I wonder if it's a case where you're depressed but you don't have a "good reason" to be depressed. Maybe you feel guilty because you're depressed when other people have worse things happening to them. Maybe you think that if something really bad happens to you, then the way you feel will be "deserved."

[ScientiaOmnisEst]

Originally Posted by Tauren

I wonder if it's a case where you're depressed but you don't have a "good reason" to be depressed. Maybe you feel guilty because you're depressed when other people have worse things happening to them. Maybe you think that if something really bad happens to you, then the way you feel will be "deserved."

I've considered this - it's definitely part of it. That I'm so often depressed despite having no reason for it. No real suffering. If something terrible happened to me, it would be justified. That's definitely crossed my mind.

Oh wait, this is a site for crazy people. I mean this in the best possible way.

[ScientiaOmnisEst]

Originally Posted by jo_thorne

I wasn't trying to be insulting...

[Tauren]

I had sort of a similar thing. I was often happier when really bad things were going on in my life because then I had a REASON for how I was feeling. Becoming aware of it helped a lot. Therapy helped as far as learning to talk about it. Medication helped the most.

Is it kind of a punishing masochism?

You sound like a genuine empath to me. In case you're unsure, empaths are people who are sensitive to people's emotions and energies. They're also very emotional and are negatively affected by the bad in the world.

Give this article a read if you wish to learn more: 30 traits of an Empath (How to know if you?re an Empath) | The Mind Unleashed

[ScientiaOmnisEst]

Originally Posted by ValentinaVVV

Is it kind of a punishing masochism?

Sort of, at least in thought. It comes out as a twisted desire to be hurt (I shouldn't really say "harmed", since this whole thing applies to mental/emotional pain too). But a need to think of it as a kind of punishment, yes, that's part of it.

Trigger warning?
I think I mentioned there that once in a while, this kind of thinking will actually drive me to some minor self-harm; this thought of "You need/deserve to suffer." Yet in terms of what I do...it's meant to simulate actual punishment. I've never cut, for example. Partly because I'm too much of a coward, but also because that doesn't resemble any kind of real world punishment. I've never heard of, for example, a parent taking a child's arm and cutting them as punishment. I have however, heard of a person being whipped with a belt, or simply beaten with someone's bare hands. And that's what I've done to myself: I'd take a belt (or the buckle end, if it's fabric), and whip myself with it until I had welts and bruises. Once I even drew blood. I've also hit and slapped myself, which sounds hilarious until you consider that every time I've done this, it's left marks. Small ones that faded in a few days, but still. The last time I did any of this was a couple of weeks ago, and the bruises lasted days. It's not common for me to actually act on any such urge, though. It happens maybe once or twice a year.

/end TW

I just made the mistake of looking up "punishing masochism", in case that was a term for a specific thought pattern...all I got was BDSM stuff. There's nothing sexual here.

Originally Posted by DarknessIsMyFriend

You sound like a genuine empath to me. In case you're unsure, empaths are people who are sensitive to people's emotions and energies. They're also very emotional and are negatively affected by the bad in the world.

Give this article a read if you wish to learn more: 30 traits of an Empath (How to know if you?re an Empath) | The Mind Unleashed

Cool article, but I don't think I'm an empath. I can't read people all that well, and I mostly tend to be kind of emotionally insular (in fact, someone told me today that I'm quite hard to read). I just get bothered by hearing about other people's suffering because of some weird guilt complex thing.

The part about not being able to handle depictions of violence or cruelty, even to the point of feeling physically ill, was all that resonated with me. That and daydreaming, mood swings, drawing people (for real, I don't even know why or how. People seem to like me for some reason, and I get along easily. Even though I push away and hint of a deeper friendship or relationship, almost instinctively. That's another problem altogether).

But I'm looking through that list again...nope. My intuition sucks, public spaces actually kind of energize me in a weird kind of way, I'm gullible as hell, and like I said, I can't read people. My mom is actually great at it though - plenty of times we've had totally differing opinions on someone, and she turns out to be right in the long run. Though I do have a somewhat addictive personality, am bothered by some unanswered questions and clutter. However, that thing about not buying second-hand made me LOL - I prefer second-hand. It's cheaper, and has a certain "character" to it. I'm secretly a sucker for paranormal stuff, I wish it was real and would love to have an "experience", but alas, no.

So yeah, not an empath.

[Tauren]

Please, please, please don't take anything from "The Mind Unleashed" seriously. They post a bunch of speculation and snakeoil and plain old hoaxes, and never have scientific backing for anything. There ARE actual tests for measuring empathy, and it is absolutely nothing like those "signs your an empath" and "problems empaths face" articles.

Maybe so, but I DO have a close friend who's an empath and she's probably the only person that I know whom I have difficulties deceiving when it comes to hiding my feelings.

Plus I wanted to be a special little snowflake and offer a piece of advice to OP that nobody else would think of

I didn't mean punishing masochism in a BDSM way. I meant it the way you interpreted it to mean. I meant you self-punish because you feel you need to be hurt.

Like you are a bad person.

And ^ I am not what I call an empath. Although I can read people pretty well. And I can place myself in their shoes. I think it is because I am bipolar and have felt a lot of different moods.

[ScientiaOmnisEst]

Originally Posted by ValentinaVVV

I didn't mean punishing masochism in a BDSM way. I meant it the way you interpreted it to mean. I meant you self-punish because you feel you need to be hurt.

Like you are a bad person.

And ^ I am not what I call an empath. Although I can read people pretty well. And I can place myself in their shoes. I think it is because I am bipolar and have felt a lot of different moods.

Okay, gotcha.

Similar here, can't read people, but can imagine myself in their shoes. That's another reason why some kinds of prejudice or lack of compassion or insensitivity make no sense to me; it's easy to imagine myself in that person's situation.

Who wants to speculate where this guilt comes from, because that's what bothers me. Most likely possibility right now is that it has to do with this perception that my negative feelings are baseless, that I have no "right" to have them, because I've never really suffered. Not in any serious way; my only "trauma" is that a parent died when I was little, but that didn't affect me much, and my relationship with my surviving parent has been declining ever since. But surely that's not enough to justify as awful as I feel at times?