Wow. He really said that. Now granted, he didn't put the two things in one sentence. But he did say each of those things, and when you put them together, it really fucks with your mind. Or, my mind, I should say. (I'm trying to look at this while still keeping a safe distance, which makes for some really weird sentence structure.)
It makes my brain hurt to try to untangle just why that's so cognitive-dissonance inducing for me. But I'll try: Like, dude - so, don't you get that the whole reason people get suicidal in the first place is because nobody wants to be responsible for helping them? Anwer to self: No. I guess that would be a 'no', he doesn't get it.
Noodling further - I think I stuffed that one away at the back of my mind because it was too overwhelming to deal with at the moment, the stream-of-consciousness barrage of anger and accusatory, shaming, judgmental comments was too much for me to parse, make sense of, put together all at once.
In retrospect it feels like he was basically saying, Sis, this is too much for me, I can't handle it, back off. In the process he used a lot of language that, if I hadn't already done as much work as I have, might in fact have been a real trigger to push me over the edge. As it was, I merely retreated for a week, and am just now recovering enough to venture outside my mental shell. Yes, I've continued to go about the daily business, but it was with large portions of my mind on 'standby' or something, to give me time to recover from the shock.
So my defenses are beginning to work in more useful ways, yay! Keep nibbling, keep nibbling. I think we're getting close to two steps forward, one step back here. Which, believe it or not, is a sort of progress :-)
When I get overwhelmed, I'm learning to selectively block out bits of the damage (kind of like hospital triage) and only deal with the bits I absolutely have to until I get calm enough to look at things from a bit of distance. This is the pattern that gets set when one grows up with emotionally unresponsive parents, especially with an utterly misattuned mother during the pre-verbal years. Maybe that's why I became verbal so early? She said I started out speaking in complete paragraphs, as if I'd been studying up til I had it pretty well figured before I said anything. Interesting idea...
Cycling back to the first sentence, taking another small, manageable bite of that truly overwhelming, incomprehensible-at-first idea.
No. Not ready yet. Will come back, or start new post, when it feels safe. Hermit is safely tucked away in shell.
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