Worst night ever...

I'm pretty sure I said, "would you even care if I did the same thing he did?" ...and that's when he got up and walked to his computer and started in on me.

I agree with MUE. I think it would be great if you could work out a way to address this in a healthy way, rather than trying to push his buttons.

Perhaps he's given you that answer time and time again....yet you still need to hear it in one form or another? It can be exhausting to have to constantly reassure someone of something they already know.

I don't think this subject is in limits. He has brought this kid up twice to me and both times, I can tell it still affects him. I want to ask him if what happened with him affects what he does with me...like are we similar or something? He keeps pushing the hospital because he doesn't want what happened to this kid to happen to me.

He said he wants me to not be able to self medicate but common seriously four times in the last couple months? Or hurt myself...which I have NO plans or wants on doing.

there was a thing on tv, I think I was half asleep listening, where I heard a dad saying to or about his kid, "well, I know right now he's probably really mad at me." and even in my half-asleep state, I realized, THAT has NEVER been said about me, where a parental unit recognized my less than exquisitely pleased feelings towards them. Never recognized, never acknowledged to the slightest degree. It was all a game about getting me to agree with them, and forget about my own opinion, make my opinion disappear! So, i think many of us - lost, TC, idk who else - are truly speaking foreign languages when we say something - and T REACTS. Usually no one reacts. No one comes to see us. To see how we are doing. Why would they? They're NOT HOME.

T is speaking from personal, professional experience. I know it's hard to hear and harder to believe about yourself, but you'd be wise not to turn a deaf ear to what he's telling you. Please try to take in what he says.

I can tell you that just buy reading this post, lost, that you remind me of my sister and some of her attitudes. Especially with the "but common seriously four times in the last couple of months?" comment about self medicating. This is a really dangerous attitude to have. If you're so inclined lost, please read the post attached. It tells in brief what I went through with my sister and her self medicating. Let me warn you though, it can be triggering- ok? just PLEASE, reconsider your stance in this. What you say are words I've heard before- words that started with a woman in her late twenties and ended with her in her mid fifties. 30 years of torturing herself and everyone around her.I don't like to think about this and I don't like to talk about it it, but if my experiences with my sister can help anyone else avoid this destructive habit, then I will sing like a bird. No one should ever have to experience this hell on earth. (((Lost)))

http://forums.psychcentral.com/showt...cription+drugs

First of karebear I'm sorry about your sister.

I went through that same experience with my stepfather my entire life until he ended his own life in '09. I'm not going to repeat the cycle. Every couple of months I do ONE pain med once or twice a week, for like 3 weeks. Then I don't touch the stuff for 6months or more. Sometimes I just want the quick fix for my depression that my meds can't give.

I wonder whether what scares him is not the amount of times you self-medicate as such but your impulsivity and lack of emotional regulation when you are in a bad place? You don't need to have a plan to end up overdosing or harming yourself. Sometimes people do it on an impulse because in that moment they cannot tolerate their overwhelming emotions. That's just as dangerous if not more so than someone who is planning to harm themselves.

xx

Hankster, this is really a pretty fantastic insight. That one way to control people (i.e. kids) is to be impervious (blank slate in a deliberate way, rather than a therapeutic way), to not react to them, to not show them how you feel, to not give them a sense that what they say and do impacts you.

This is one of the gifts of therapy, when T's allow us to see how what we say and do has an affect on them-- unless I suppose this goes into the land of "it's all about me". This is also an issue in parenting, too. I want my child to have a sense of my honest reactions to how his words and actions affect me, because he needs to learn that as a social skill. But at the same time, I want to protect him from grown--up things that involve fear or pain or whatever, as there are things that he shouldn't know about. I want to be honest with him and true to myself, but also not expose him to adult things or other things that he's not ready for, things that should not be put on him. It's a dance.

But in T, I know that I am secretly satisfied whenever I elicit a reaction from T that is unexpected, when he breaks his T face (which has a range unto itself) and reveals something else. I often say to him, "what's that face about" and usually he'll say something, or he says that I see things in his face that he's not aware of.

I don't know if this applies to you, lost, in terms of unpacking whether people in your past have not reacted to you, especially to your pain or crisis. It feels to me that some of your out of control behaviors are designed for the purpose of getting your T to react to you, to elicit something from him that you need. If you can figure out what you need, maybe you can ask for it directly rather than trying all kinds of dangerous stuff to get it.

Thanks, Hankster.