masochism

2022 07 08

content warnings

this page talks about trauma (including sexual trauma), abuse (including physical abuse), self harm, self hatred, and wanting to die.

it goes over the specific reason for self hatred and wanting to die, and we think those in particular could be extremely triggering for some people 🥺

we encourage you not to read this, or to practice self care, while you read this! before during and after reading, to take care of yourselves. we love you.

masochism

when elysia's body was little, around 12 or 13 years old, she, we, discovered something called masochism.

We discovered this because we surrounded ourselves with things related to self harm, and we learned that it was the enjoyment of, of hurting ourselves.

when our body was this age, we were significantly more addicted to cutting than we are now, and we knew this at the time. We also knew that a part of why we enjoyed hurting ourselves, was because of self hatred.

we think we still understood and realised that, beneath those surface feelings, there was a genuine positive feeling we had towards being hurt. We realised we were masochist, even beyond our addiction and self hatred feelings.

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we also learned that masochism was largely (mostly?) a sexual thing, and that was scary for us! we wanted to run away from the fact we're masochist because it would mean we were not asexual, which was one of the ways we coped and managed with our sexual trauma. it was comforting thinking we were ace!

so, after trying to use it to describe ourselves just once, we hid that fact about ourselves far away from our consciousness, after we stopped sharing. Even after we finally began healing from our trauma many years later, we were too uncomfortable with the idea of us being sexual to be masochist.

modern era.

fairly recently, a friend of ours who likes fighting games was telling us about a certain former fighting gamer who became a video game live-streamer.

she told us that they would have horribly spicy things on stream because they enjoyed it. She seemed to respect them a lot, and it seemed like this was because the former fighting gamer had a doctor come on their livestream to teach the audience that the live streamer enjoyed this, and that masochism was a normal thing for somebody.

this was really constructive for us! she did not stigmatise it at all and seemed to think it was cool that they could embrace something that they liked.

so, since then, we have been using the label to describe ourselves. It is such a convenient label to describe our feelings that fall under masochism, including sexual feelings (which we've since long embraced).

do we still hate ourselves and hurt ourselves unhealthily?

We wonder about this somewhat often.

Is part of the reason we enjoy being hurt still related to trauma and self hatred, or is it actually healthy?

trauma

we think that trauma is likely where our feelings originate from, and can imagine some reasons why (we don't have words to articulate that).

We think that in the event we do fully heal and move past our traumas, we will still be a masochist, at least sexually. It feels healthy in isolation and not like it is some form of self harm, related to our trauma! we associate it with things like affection and intimacy.

in some ways, including maybe sexually as well, it is sometimes self harm, and those strongly seem like trauma.

we have asked loved ones to severely physically abuse us, for example, and we use the masochist label to justify that and similar things. This is absolutely self harm, and absolutely related to trauma from previous abusive relationships.

We aren't actually sure if that would feel positive because we're masochist, we think it is likely but also somehwat unlikely. We don't know :)

self hatred

we think self hatred and trauma are tightly related for us.

in the most recent example of us asking a loved one to attack us, it was specifically in order to force ourselves to do suicide. we knew that it would be very triggering and make us relapse even deeper into our trauma and make it far easier to spiral enough to let us kill ourselves without hesitation.

and part of the reason we wanted to die, was because of self hatred. we hated ourselves for being unable to do the things we needed to, for having limitations, for being disabled, trapped, unable to meet our needs and take care of ourselves and the people we love.

it is okay to have limitations and to not do things we can't and it is okay if we don't know what we can or cannot do. if something hurts we can ask for help and do our best and try to do something else, instead. it will be okay.

mental health

lately, our mental health has heavily deteriorated.

due to a combination of seasonal depression and focused, sustained abuse and isolation. these have eaten away our spoons and ability to do self care and stay safe.

we have been spiralling a lot more frequently lately, and it is a lot more difficult to take care of ourselves, especially to help.

we believe in ourselves to recover, and that we'll be able to. a really lovely way we've able to internalise this healthily is that, when we are in crisis mental health recovering is an interative process and takes time.

we progressively spiral less severly and less frequently, and we slowly regain more spoons and capacity to love and take care of ourselves. recognising that it is slow and being okay with that has helped us on its own, too 😭

we think that this is the first time in years where we have had recurring suicide ideas and plans, and where we have actively done and thought about doing physical self harm. It is scary for us to think about this when we have high spoons, and self hatred surrounds all of our thoughts when our mental health is negative (previously something that never happened).

it is overwhelming because it feels like we cannot do what we like about ourselves, or engage with the reasons we love ourselves. we can't use our good words or brain constructiveness because of our mental health, and we hate this and it makes us extremely insecure.

perhaps it would be good to think about how persevering through suffering is one of the reasons we love ourselves so much! we think it would help to think about this :)

we've created a crisis card recently, which we recently learned about. They are meant to be accessible documents for us or a caretaker to read while we are in pain to help guide how to help us!

we've previously advocated to lovers who were experiencing depression and anxiety that they write down strategies for taking care of themselves that they discover, so they can read them when they have no spoons and to make it easier to do self care, and we think this is basically what a crisis card is.

a main difference is that crisis cards are documents that can also be read by others to help. We think we internalised this too much, and tried too much to write ours to be for others, rather than ourselves. We tried to make the words accessible to anyone, not just ourselves, and this seems to have severly limitted how effective the words are for helping us. this seems to have had the side effect of also draining the words we used of much of life!

we do think that crisis cards written as a personal reference are useful to others, and if we wanted to continue to have it be accessible for most people, we can have a glossary or go into more detail elsewhere. We think we'll do this.

We really want to find words to emphasise how important telling us something will be okay and convincing us of this is for our health when we are spiralling. We also want to emphasise the importance of gentle accessible and inclusive words, and expand on what those mean. We also want to add littlespace!!! we are amazed we did not write littlespace onto the webpage. if we remember, we think it was because we thought that was implicit based on other things we wrote.

we're really glad we learned about crisis cards. we think making ours pretty will also make it exciting and positive to read.

spiralling is painful because it is compounding everything at once!

self harm

cutting

we're scared of becoming very addicted to cutting again. we've been getting more blades to give us freedom to cut when we want and accessibly, and have blood lust and love the appearance of cuts aesthetically.

most of the time we want to cut it does not feel like a need, which is good. it is usually always because of blood lust or aesthetic. we are scared of doing cutting regularly and normalisaing it as an activity and interest, because it is addictive.

we really like cutting and love our cute cuts on our pretty body. the latter is probably exclusively positive, since we do not hate ourselves for cutting! we like it and it makes us think about us and what we like about our brain.

other self harm

we've been doing physical and mental self harm more actively lately, and think this could be really harmful.

we know we're able to heal from mental self harm and overcome it healthily, and like thinking about how proud and safe our ability to do that in the past has made us feel.

physical self harm is more ambiguous, because it is in some ways stimming, which is healthy. despite it being somewhat positive, it is something that we imagine as bad or horrible and so doing it is terrible, and that mindset puts an enormous amount of pressure on us, and makes us unable to move or speak, eliminating potential self care!! letting ourselves do it and being okay with that may be healthy, so we no longer put pressure and mean things on ourselves.

recovery

in general, the perception of ourselves, our stability, and our mental health, heavily contribute to how we feel, like, in practice. If we thinnk that we are bad, we will hate ourselves. If we think something we say is destructive, we will hurt ourselves for that and spiral. If we don't believe our words are good we cannot be comfortable with our articulation, which is neccesary to avoid spiralling. If we don't believe we will recover, we view self harm and pain as a better resource than self care, and so we do self harm (understanding and realising that self care is almost always an effective alternative option when we want to do self harm has really accelerated our recovery, we think. so was realising that not only was it basically always an option in the same scenarioes, but that we like it more than self harm almost always! always!!).

we're proud of ourselves, and think we are incredibly, very strong. metroid prime 3 skytown.

being around our partner and having a recent appoitment with healthcare provider that we really like has been a major source of outside positive words and engagement. Social isolation is a major trauma related thing and basically destroys our mental health, and these people help us avoid social isolation and are also extremely good for us on their own.

we've also began participating in community events again, which is helping a lot too. we love people. we love people.

there are limitations to how much we can heal, we think, and that is okay, because we can get to a point where we have strong mental health to make those limitations less big. Our barriers (abusers) do make it more difficult to reach a point where we are fully stable, but we have been able to do it before so we can easily believe in ourselves this time.

it's going to be okay, elysia. it is going to be okay.

words about suicide prevention

we've been more actively interested in being validated for the feelings we know we have, so we have been reading about suicide. we're particularly interested in suicide prevention.

a long time ago, we read a guideline someone made to help people in online community spaces take care of people in crisis well, and we really liked most of their words (we noticed one or two cases where the things they said would be destructive for certain people).

but, at a larger scale, cultural and media understanding of how to take care of people in crisis seems, inadeqeute. We can't quite describe this feeling fully. god we fucking love trams and thinking about sharing them with our partner.

We've asked a couple of our friends what they think, including some who have been on the receiving end of it before, and they all seemed to have different ideas, none of them felt like we could fully identify with as well.

we find suicide prevention strategies in the form of policy by a leadership organisation particularly interesting.

we want to know why those are the common strategies, what are the supporting and dissenting reasons for them, their statistics and deployment. We found it comforting that where we live, it seems like, at a policy level, self death is destigmatised and decrimminalised.

We read about bridges and the techniques used to block people from jumping off of them (something we have thought about a lot in the context of buildings). Fences. Huh. we do hope they realise that most people can climb.

we're thinking about if that is even an equitable thing to do. is increasing barrier of entry a valid form of suicide prevention in the first place? It feels like a stopgap solution, unthoughtful, and feels similar to tokenism policies, rather than actual care.

this is also one of the rare cases we dont feel strongly about systemic effects being changed. Systemic policy and culture being changed to be more inclusionary would absolutely work to prevent suicide, because there are less things pushing people to want to die. We don't have interest mainly because it isn't as elaborate as other strategies, and because we don't actually know how effective it would be. We don't have a good reference!

we personally wish we had access to therapy, and think that would help us be stable significantly. but we also know that could be damaging if culture doesn't shift towards viewing therapy more healthy and making good therapy more accessible.

we think mental health hospitals would also be good for us if they weren't secretly quite cruel, and have an underlying motive to see you again due to profit incentive. Even if the public healthcare system is completely inadeqeute and systemically harmful, going to an actual hospital would probably be more kind and constructive than a mental health hospital!

we want people to be okay. we like people.

today

today we have been mostly high energy and very excited :)!

our brain is so fast and excited and our interests feel intensely positive to engage with. we have stimmed really a lot today it's so good.

we like this! some of the things we have been thinking about is how pretty some video games like minecraft and zelda wind waker are, trains (a lot), hermitcraft, and super smash bros. ultimate competitive.

we are incredibly good today! we have played minecraft and had fun looking at osm and exploring the internet and do not think we have accidentally done self harm today, even when doing things that make it easy to accidentally self harm. our brain moves when it wants to! yay!

we are listening to our feelings we think and doing things for ourselves and it feels awesome. we want to make a crafts project and play with them.

we want toy trains.

kitten system is happy and we love her :) our soft friends have been at the computer too with us all day and they love her too :) 🥰mmereiooowwwww

this is good. we like this. our brain is constantly stimulated to do things and those things are healthy and we can change to something else quick;ly and aren't forced into executive dysfunction! we're healing. we haven't been able to overcome executive dysfunction even slightly at all recently.