Some are just better able to deal with the daily punches of life

Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or f**king beatings.
The world ends when you’re dead, until then, you got more punishment in store.
Stand it like a man, and give some back.

- Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) on HBO show Deadwood; S02 E07.

This Too Shall Pass

The worst kind of suffering is the one you know there might be a way out of.

If there’s no way out of it, it becomes easier to bear.

~ Alan Watts

Ennui

Many fear boredom – even the faintest whiff of boredom sends them scurrying right back to the game.

Schopenhauer said that willing itself is never fulfilled - as soon as one wish is satisfied, another appears. Though there may be some very brief respite, some fleeting period of satiation, it is immediately transformed into boredom.

Every human life, he said, is tossed backward and forward between pain and boredom.

~ Yalom

We all have some kind of scar

The thing about an emotional injury is this sense of unfairness.
It's like a car crash, where everyone was in the car
but you're the only one who went through the windscreen.


"If you can sit with your pain, listen to your pain and respect your pain 
- in time you will move through your pain." ~ Bryant McGill

Slow Progress is Better than no Progress

Final hurdles are Coming

More Game of Thrones please and less of this academic pressure...

 

Warning Signs for Suicide

The best predictor of suicide attempts in both women and men is a verbal or behavioural threat to commit suicide, and such threats should always be taken seriously.

 

One of the most destructive myths about suicide is that people who talk openly about suicide are just seeking attention and do not actually intend to carry out the act. Yet research shows that a high proportion of suicide attempts - perhaps 80 percent - are preceded by some kind of warning (Bagley & Ramsay, 1997). Sometimes the warning is an explicit statement of intent, such as 'I don't want to go on living' or 'I won't be around for much longer'. Other times, the warnings are more subtle, as when a person expresses hopelessness about the future, withdraws from others or from favourite activities, gives away treasured possessions, or takes unusual risks.

 

Other important risk factors are a history of previous suicide attempts and a detailed plan that involves a lethal method (Chiles & Strossahl, 1995; Shneidman, 1998). Substance abuse also increases suicide risk (Yen et al., 2003; Passer & Smith, 2009).

 

There's an enormous amount of pain in the world. Not physical pain but psychological pain. It's an ache in the mind. It's an ache of the negative emotions. It's the ache of guilt and of shame, and of loneliness and rejection. It comes from thwarted, blocked, frustrated, trampled upon psychological needs. And if I were to commit suicide, it would be in terms of my frustrated needs. And if you were my therapist, I would be grateful if you understood me, not in terms of my biology or my parents or my psychodynamics, but in terms of what needs were bugging me.

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''The grief of the worshippers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release''
                                                                                                                                                                     ~ Mark Twain

Samaritans                                     Pieta House                                 Turn2Me

Ireland: 1850 60 90 90                   Website: www.pieta.ie                 Website: www.turn2me.org

 

Some Principles that allow me to understand Self-Injury.

With 12,000 people attending Irish hospital emergency departments in 2010 due to self-harm (Ring, 2011), it is important that ways of alleviating its prevalence in society are addressed. Furthermore, it is believed that cases which present to hospital are only the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately there is no panacea to ameliorate the suffering of the person who self-harms, and it would be naïve of me to assume that the following principles alone would be enough to suffice for an approach to understanding and responding to self-injury. Nevertheless, they stand out amongst others.

        
The first of these principles is that 'the injury is not the problem'. You would be by-passing a host of problems if it was only concern for the person’s actual injury. Having an erroneous assumption that the injury should be the focal point of attention would only be delivering a lump of verbal refuse to the client.

             

There should instead be a focus on their feelings before their behaviours. Most of the 'problems' with self-injury are nothing to do with the person who hurts themselves. While the scars may be psychologically detrimental to them, underlying deep seated issues should be regarded as a lot more insidious. The injury has to be viewed as an outward expression of their inner pain.