I have been doing a lot of reading about various mental health issues lately. As I read how today's young people are handling (or not) their various stresses and issues of dysfunction and abuse in their families, I am also looking backward at my own mental health as a child and teenager. There have been some sobering thoughts.
My physical manifestations of the stress in our home/at school/with peers and my own inability to cope well with it all were confined to severe nail biting, banging my head against my bedroom wall a couple of times a week and constantly peeling all the skin off my lips....I exhibited all three behaviours from the age of 3 until I was about 16, when I finally got a handle on them and quit once I realized that I had developed an allergic reaction to all the medicated creams I used on those bleeding, blistered raw lips that was more painful and ugly than the bleeding blisters!! I stopped biting my fingernails after reading a report on various bacteria a person can ingest from doing such a thing! I stopped beating my head against a wall because by the age of 16 it just seemed like a stupid thing to do. In those days nail biting and lip peeling were considered bad habits, not as symptoms of an actual mental health issue. No one knew I was banging my head against walls so....
As I thought back on those years I began to realize that, had I known about it, I likely would have been a "cutter". That is a frightening thought, but if I am being honest, I am quite certain that the only reason I wasn't a cutter was because I had never heard of such a behaviour. Wow....I am grateful that I didn't know about it, didn't have it occur to me spontaneously. I have more than a sufficient number of body scars from surgeries and accidents without having cutting scars added into the mix!!
It seems that since Dad died I have felt more free to look backward and examine what was going in with me when I was growing up, not looking to blame anyone or any circumstance, not feeling anger or pain. It is a peaceful time of recollection that is bringing more understanding about that time in my life. It is nice to be able to look back NOT in anger, just with an acceptance of what happened and how things were back then and with joy that life has changed so dramatically for the better for me.
I am grateful I limited my "acting out" to relatively innocuous expressions of frustration and anger. The head banging could have been quite serious, but it wasn't in my case. My fingernails grow as well as they can after 16 years of constant abuse along with a problem absorbing calcium that makes them weak and my lips healed decades ago.
YAY! I survived! I pray now for the many who do not...far too many do not.
The prairies are about to experience a week of intense heat. The entire area will be experiencing day time high temperatures of between +32C and +36C every day. THRILLED that we now have a vehicle with AC!! It is only our second such vehicle and how wonderful to have such a luxury this coming week!
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