Tuesday, March 29, 2011

self harm

This is a post by upsi that just gave me a lightbulb moment. It's called "Pickers" and it appears many of us adult children of narcissists are just that.

I started biting my nails when I was four. I'd been destroying them for years, chewing on them until my fingers were all bleeding and I couldn't do anything with my hands.

When I met my husband, I started managing to leave the nails alone, but started biting my cuticles. Whenever any skin would "stick out" I had to pick at it and then bite it off. Actually, I still do it, but go through phases when I'm able to "abstain". Then I "only" bite the inside of my lips.

My theories?

For one, many say that self-harm habits like these form because one turns aggression towards oneself, instead of the person causing all the anger. Narcissists don't allow any blame, anger, aggression, heck, any negative comment directed at them. I was never allowed to display any dissatisfaction with my narcissistic father at all, not even in the privacy of my own room or my own diary.

Then there's the perfectionism. We were forced to be absolutely frigging perfect. Make no waves. Always reflect well on the parent. If we notice anything imperfect on ourselves, anything sticking out, anything marring our surface, we'll pick at it until it bleeds. We were trained to do so. We're just acting in accordance with our conditioning.

Then there's the constant anxiety. Are we wasting time? Are we doing anything worthwhile in our lives that will bring concrete achievements? The fear, the terror, the abyss is always right beneath the surface. The fear of being deemed worthless and our lives wasted. We can never relax.

Then there's the guilt. Even if we're doing well and everything's fine, we don't deserve to be happy, because we're evil, heartless, cold, apparently. So the least we can do is punish ourselves with pain and blood and disfigurement.

Then there's the self-loathing. I deserve to be destroyed, crushed, annihilated. If not, well, at least I can damage myself a little, right?

Any more pickers/biters out there? How do you explain it? What do you do to stop this behavior and how does one truly eradicate it in the sense of eliminating its root causes, instead of just dealing with the symptoms?

2 comments:

  1. Oh yes, I relate to both. And the reason why you do them too. Amazingly, once I put that N out of my life entirely, the urge to self harm lessened.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh yes, I relate to both. And the reason why you do them too. Amazingly, once I put that N out of my life entirely, the urge to self harm lessened.

    ReplyDelete

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