So most of y’all know that I am in therapy. I had therapy today and I really wanted to share what my therapist told me today. I don’t know if it will make sense to anyone else but it makes a lot of sense to me. I think this concept can help you give yourself a little grace when struggling.
I’ve never been shy from talking about things I have struggled with, one being self harm. The temptation to go back has been high again and I can’t really figure out why so I was talking to my therapist about it.
February 14th will be 6 years purge free. Around this anniversary is when the urges to go back to that get back. April 1st will be 3 years self harm free. This one always starts acting up before hand.
One thing she said that really hit me was that this is because my brain is trying to protect me. My brain wants to protect me from the feelings of disappointment if something were to happen or just the hard emotions that come during this time. My brain wants to protect me by reverting back to what I used to do to protect myself, which was self harm. Self harm was the way I handled all hard emotions.
She said that the protector side of my brain is stuck in the time that I struggled the most, which is in my teens. This side is stuck in that area because that is where my inner child was most hurt and so it just stopped. My inner child wants to be protected from hard emotions and stuff so the way my brain does that is by reverting back to coping skills I had in the time frame where my brain is stuck.
If my brain is stuck in that time of my life, it would make sense for me to still struggle like I did when I was a teenager.
So from what I know, people with BPD have a smaller amygdala because of all the trauma. The amygdala is the one part of the brain in charge of all emotions as far as I know. Please correct me if I am wrong. So that would mean that the amygdala really stopped developing when I was younger which could have been during that time of my life I was struggling the most which would make sense for my brain to revert back if that is when the emotion center of my brain stopped growing. I may be wrong but this is just something I’ve heard and it makes sense from the little bit of psychology I can remember.
If my brain is underdeveloped because of my trauma, it would make sense it would be stuck in the responses I had from dealing with my trauma like self harm.
I know this is really short but I just wanted to share in case someone else needed to hear this to kind of understand themselves more and learn to give themselves grace.
Hold onto hope and stay strong.
Madison Rae <3
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