Sometimes the outside world makes you unsafe. Sometimes people harm you physically or emotionally, even people you should be able to trust.
And sometimes the inside world makes you unsafe. Sometimes you might cause yourself physical or emotional harm, even though you’re the person you should be able to trust the most.
We’ve been discussing the past couple days whether I am safe or unsafe. We’ve been discussing whether I trust myself not to attempt suicide. For right now, I trust that my thinking is just thinking, with no intention to act. If that changes, if I begin to doubt my ability to keep myself safe, I’ll go to other people who can help me with that, other people who can keep me safe. That may even mean being hospitalized, however much I would hate that.
I wasn’t able to keep myself safe from other people who hurt me, but I can keep myself safe from myself. I didn’t have the resources when I was a kid, but now I do. I *will* ask for help if I need it. I swear it. I swear it to myself and to the people who love me.
A counselor who doesn’t know my past very well said to me yesterday, “You’re human. You make mistakes. Nobody’s going to slap you upside the head if you mess up,” and the bluntness of those words made me realize that I’ve been doing that. In the absence of parents who physically hurt me when I did something “wrong,” I’ve been beating myself up emotionally, telling myself I’m a “bad person” or other such rubbish.
You’re human. You make mistakes. That’s okay. Nobody ever should have beat you up for it. Don’t you beat yourself up for it, either, or you’re just saying that what they did to you was right. It wasn’t.
Itwasn’t.
It really really wasn’t.
Work on believing that in your heart. That’s what I’m trying to do. And I’m trying to learn to be kinder to myself, just like they should have been.
