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depression and post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues...
When I first started facing my issues, I recall noticing, sort of out of the blue one day, that I always had a lot of bruises and could not remember how I had gotten them. I wasn't having black outs or dissociative episodes, I just had bruises on my legs and arms and couldn't remember what I had done to cause them. The bruises were not just little brown spots - some were the really impressive purple, red, green and yellow type with significant swelling. When I thought about it, over the next few weeks and months, I realized that I was banging into stuff a lot - moving suddenly and banging my leg on my desk or against a chair or car door -- but I still didn't have memorable events that I could connect with specific bruises.
I decided that I needed to slow down and be present in my body and that I would try to notice when I banged into something and stop and feel the pain and say to myself something like "ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow" and add something nice "geez, you didn't deserve that". I felt dumb doing this, but, over time, I became more likely to be able to say where I had gotten a particular bruise -- "that bruise on my thigh, I got that on Wednesday when I turned around too quickly and banged into one of the wooden desks in my classroom".
My overall goal was to feel the pain, stop myself from engaging in automatic self-critical thinking that happened whenever I hurt myself, and to, eventually, slow down and be more careful how I was moving myself around in the world.
The issue about automatic self-critical thinking came to my awareness when I visited my sister and her two kids. The youngest was about 4-years-old at the time and one night, after he was supposed to be in bed, he was running around his room and banged into a piece of furniture and started crying really hard. My sister went to the doorway of my nephew's room and then stopped when her husband walked towards her to ask what was going on. My sister volunteered that my nephew didn't like people to touch him when he was hurt. I thought about that a bit and realized that each time he hurt himself my sister and her husband would instantly start criticizing him -- he should have known better, he shouldn't have been out of bed at night, he shouldn't have jumped on that piece of furniture, he sure was a stupid kid.
I was walking with him and my niece the next day and he was running on a gravel road and fell down and his knee started bleeding. He started crying and looked at me with fear in his eyes. I said that it really looked like he had hurt himself, that he had fallen hard and that I was really sorry to see that he was in pain. He limped right over to me and put his arms around me and we stayed there for a few minutes until the worst of the pain subsided and then I offered to carry him home and he let me. He volunteered all by himself that he sure wasn't going to run on that gravel road anymore. The moral of the story: He didn't need anyone to tell him to stop doing what had just hurt him. He did need people to let him feel the physical hurt without piling on emotional abuse immediately after he hurt himself physically.
I realized that my sister was showing the same behavior with her children that my parents had shown to us when we were kids.
So, to stop the pattern of behavior that led me to be accident-prone as an adult, I needed to teach myself to act like a warm, loving parent -- to say kind, compassionate things to myself when I had hurt myself; to slow down and feel the pain when it happened; and to allow those experiences to change my behavior so that I slowed down in the world and moved more carefully and got hurt less often.
I rarely have bruises now.
P.S. While I talked about bruises above, I also frequently twisted my knees and ankles. I remember sitting on a concrete floor one day and my foot fell asleep - I stood up suddenly and heard a nasty sound as my ankle bent in a way that ankles aren't supposed to bend. I was on crutches for about a week after that. I wrenched my knees on stairs and walking in snow. Even worse: I was so anxious and on such an intense adrenalin high all the time that I wound up in 7 auto collisions in about 10 years. I was really, really lucky that I never had any major injuries and neither did anyone else involved - it is a miracle that that is so.
I don't know if my experience will connect with yours, but I wish you the best figuring out what is going on with you.
:hug:
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