but scared shitless

Alas I'm not sure I'm ready to let go of my pain and let God heal me. Doesn't that sound so freakin' stupid?? Here's the solution, the one thing that will make your life infinitely better and I'm insanely scared of it. The therapists from the DBT group are so right. Pain has become a comfortable friend, something I got so used to living with that I can't fathom living without it. Also, it does validate my identity. I am someone who goes through and has dealt with alot. That makes me special and explains/justifies my sensitivity and self-destructive actions. I hold onto it because it's all I know. Lord, I just pray that You will move me to a place where I'm truly ready to let go, forgive and accept everything bad that's happened to me. May I not get discouraged over my not being ready. That's the sort of thing that gets me suicidally depressed. I believe You will make me ready. Please. For now I guess I'm still getting buzzed.

ok so I'm stuck

My individual therapist agreed. I'm stuck in an air-tight cycle he says. Although I'm definitely better than just a few months ago, I'm in this cycle where I try to do things but can't keep it up because of perfectionist beliefs that run me into the ground so I have more free time to drink and drug which in turn makes it hard to think, causes loss of interest in other things and gives me hangovers so I have less time to do things I tried doing in the first place and on it goes. So today I pushed myself with reassurances that whatever I do is fine and finally got to play some classical guitar, praise music and sing. But I guess that's not enough in general. He says I've got to break the cycle by making public commitments ie. school or work and reduce the drugs. So I'm gonna call two people he referred me to who are supposed to help me figure out and connect to what I want to do in life. The drugs? Well all I can do is keep trying to control the amounts which has been semi-successful but definitely hard. But what's harder is total abstinence and I'm still exhausted from my last failed attempt.

started DBT therapy

I forgot to mention how the DBT group therapy is going. It's been about 3 or 4 weeks and it's going well. I have an individual therapist who is overall gentle but still keeps me on task with goals and homework and then I have the group sessions with 7 other women led by a woman and a man. They go over concepts and use our real-life problems as examples. My general goal is to be less sensitive to everything so I don't overreact in my thoughts and actions. My homework consists of doing the workbook, making a list of things to do when I get emotionally overwhelmed by distracting and soothing myself and trying to do work on creative projects so I can reduce drinking and drugging. In group we talked about the ineffectiveness of our destructive coping skills. It was funny how similar we are in that respect when the lady asked us to list some of the things we do when we get painfully emotionally distressed: trying to kill ourselves, using drugs, cutting/burning/banging ourselves, lashing out at others, trying to control others, eat too much or too little etc... I doubt there can be another room with as much collective baggage as one used for therapy for BPD. This became especially evident when they talked about radical acceptance and asked us what pain we had from things we couldn't accept in our pasts. Most of the group had been raped, have dysfunctional families like having alcoholic parents or abusive family members and one woman even said her mom was murdered horribly and before that she was abusive to her. Mine is like a dialled down version of hers, my mom had cancer for 9 years then passed away and before that she was verbally abusive to me when I was little and always hated being a mom. That was a heavy session and hopefully there won't be more like that. There's just so much pain behind everything for all of us. Just writing this down almost makes me tear. A more positive similarity between us is that we're all artistic. I think it's because we all have a sensitive personality so some people are dancers, there's a writer, DJ, jewelry maker, videographer, photographers, model and there's me the painter/musician. I guess being sensitive is a double-edged sword. It allows you to be very creative but also makes you more vulnerable to traumatic events.