What I Told Him

This is what I showed Gary the psychologist. I've found a way of blogging on my lap top and transferring it.

I feel a lot of my problems stem back from when I was a teenager related to something that I did which I regretted and had a big impact on my teenage years. I have always regretted what I did as, not just because it was wrong but it had a big impact on my family. It has only been within the last week or so in which I have linked this event to further events which had a big impact on me as I was growing up. I think that it was this initial event which made me feel as though I had to get other people to like me, and not think badly of me.

When I was 13 I stole a sum of money from my grandparents (my Dad’s parents). I did this with my friend who lived next door. It was over a period of time; over the summer I was 13. When my family found out we moved house. I avoided my grandparents for as long as I could. I still kept in contact with my friend even though I wasn’t supposed to.

It was not long after this event that I met a boy through my friend. He was a year older than me. I used to meet him after school and he wanted to take things further. I didn’t want to but was easily cajoled into sleeping with him. I think I felt that I needed to be accepted, my friend had told me she had slept with someone and I wanted this lad to like me and so saw this as a way of making this happen.

A similar thing happened about a year later when I met someone who was 16 (I was 14). Again I felt unsure about it and didn’t want to but felt pressured in to it as though I couldn’t say no.

When I was 15, my Nan (Mum’s mum died). I was really close to her and saw her a few times a week and stayed over at weekends. This hit me quite hard and I was devastated about it. This happened just before Christmas.

In the February I went to Tenerife with my parents. Until recently this event hasn’t had an impact on me except at the time in which I got over it (seemingly). I spoke to a counsellor about it before and I feel it was in talking about it again it has become quite a big issue for me. There was a guy who was 30 who ran the entertainment and activities for the hotel. One afternoon he asked me to come to his office so that he could have some help translating from Spanish to English on something he wanted to write down. When we were in the office he said that he liked me and tried to kiss me. I pulled away and said it wasn’t what I wanted. But he did it again and it went further. I didn’t put up any fight and didn’t say no again even though it was not what I wanted. I don’t remember much else from this time other than going back to the hotel room and really crying about it. I told my parents I wasn’t feeling very well and I stayed in the room for the rest of the day. The rest of the trip I tried to avoid being on my own with him. The next night he was running the evening’s entertainment and he started talking about his wife and how she was pregnant and I remember just feeling so used and dirty, which I suppose was the same feeling I had after the times before also. He did try to get me on my own again and asked me to come to his office but luckily there was usually someone else around.

The past week or so I have linked these events to how I am now and to my self-harm. I feel that because of my doing wrong it gave me a poor self -image which was even more confirmed by later actions and letting people take advantage of me. I think if I was able to believe in myself more and like myself more then, the self-harm would have not started. These events have always bothered me but, I hadn’t linked them to how things are now as I thought I had dealt with them at the time. I hadn’t linked the first event to the subsequent ones but I do now think that they are all related.

When I self-harm I don’t think about these events and they have never come to mind when I have self-harmed in the past. I feel it’s not the events themselves which have led to the self-harm but how I feel about them and how I feel about myself.