SELF-HARM, PSYCHOTHERAPY, AND ANOTHER ANTIDOTE

Pets can have a calming effect on the agitated. So can people. Yesterday, I had my annual. My doctor took my blood pressure before and after, finding that it had dropped 15 points during that time. I told her that she has a calming effect. She demurred claiming that this drop is very characteristic.

In any event, we are equipped to comfort one another. Consequently, a young lady who had a history of self-harm stated:

·       I still suffer from depression. Recovery requires daily maintenance, and even the plateaus feel like hard-won triumphs. Through therapy I have learned to contextualize with language the feelings that seemed to me so inexpressible as a teenager. I have not cut myself in a couple of years now, and it is becoming harder for me to understand the person I was back then, who left behind such scars for me now. But if I could speak to my teenage self or to any teenager who feels plunged in despair, I’d tell him or her to hang in there, because happiness, or at least something like contentment, might just be a game of learning to stick around. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/heroin-florida-addiction

I think that we need more than self-talk or even therapeutic talk. For many years, I had practiced self-talk to address my non-physical self-harm – self-loathing. However, the “cure” soon lost its impact, even as I would feed myself more and more grandiose sermons to “correct” all that was plaguing me. In the long run, my self-talk served to delude me and further alienate me from any real solution.

The solution came through Jesus Christ, who arrived with the perfect antidote to my self-loathing – His forgiveness and assurance that He loved me so much, even while I was His enemy, that He died for me (Romans 5:8-10).