HuskyPup

I've tried so many things, and am still not having much luck. I also find if I post here, it often becomes kinda counterproductive,more like arguing than 'support'.

So, I thought to myself? What has been helpful? One thing has been friends, via private messages. That has helped more than anything,

Thus I am seeking friends to work on alternative means of recovery with. I'm very funny in person, kinda intellectual and quirky,it somehow gets lost in the threads, I think. Anyway, I'm gay, a furry, an atheist, and feel best talking to people one on one. If yer gonna try and lecture me/convince me on the steps/AA, please, I appreciate the desire to help, but am not looking to talk about that approach.

Hope to hear from some people,this has been a real struggle, and I've been afraid to post here, due to the past, threads getting shut down, fights, all of that. Seems to almost wanna make me drink more, when I do post, and I get negative feedback on my spurts of progress, or just plain ignored. So I think maybe a few friends would be best.

Also, I am 45, and have started to cut, using a sharp chef's knife, I like the way the marks look,and it makes me feel less numb...which seems weird, this late in life, I don't know what to make of it. I see a psychologist, but it doesn't seem to help. Been seeing them since I was 16, maybe 20 therapists over the years??? well,long before I ever drank.

I think because we have a bed-bug infestation, and I bleed anyway from the bites, and have nowhere near the money to treat the problem, given how impossible they are to get rid of. So I figure I'll cut myself, the world seems to want me to bleed.

But it hurts. My life hurts. I often see no point in it, being older now, crappy job, no future, bad credit, no home, no savings, no real skills that anyone wants....


Thanks for listening. Try and be gentle. If you come at me like Mr. tough guy, ain't gonna work.

Pondlady

Morning HuskyPup,
I'm not the Mr. Toughguy type at all. Just wanted to let you know I read your thread and am sorry you are struggling. I think we've all struggled , although in different ways. I don't have any experience with cutting, however I understand the wanting to feel numb part.....that's what drinking wine did for me. I've come to realize that what I thought was numbing me, was actually contributing to my anxiety.

Black

Hey Huskypup,

I do hope you will find someone here who can help you, in fact I am sure you will. I don't have any experience with cutting so would be of no help there. Like Pondlady drinking alcohol was my numbness for many a year and at this point same age as yourself trying to get a focus on things. There has to be a better life for us all.

Will call back later and I am sure alot of folk will have messaged you with some advice by then. Bless

HuskyPup

Thanks for the replies, got one message so far. I think it's better this way, before, when I would post, I felt, well, too vulnerable/fragile, I guess you could say. And there are things emotionally that I would like to talk about that you aren't allowed to on the forums, so I thought it better to have private talks with people. And there are things I'm just too embarrassed to talk about here.

Mainly it's drinking that is the bigger problem, the cutting seems more under control, as odd as that sounds, or at least seems to be lessening.

hypochondriac

Please stop cutting Husky I used to do that too so I completely understand, but like drinking we have to stop doing it in order to recover. There are difficult emotions out there that we have to suffer through but we won't, we just drink and cut our way through them. The thing is it gets a lot easier the longer we are sober, if we work on our issues. If we keep believing that these things work and help then it is difficult to move past them. Maybe you could start by reading some other books on recovery. There is an excellent list in the stickies in the newcomer forum. There are loads of other things that can help but above all you need support and to stop drinking and cutting. You are welcome to PM me anytime. Hugs x

EndGameNYC

Please try to take my comments as information and not criticism. There is nothing in it for me to make you feel worse.

There's a very big difference in "being tough" and "being real" when giving support. Confusing the two or dismissing one in favor of the other makes it very easy for you to imagine that when someone offers support or suggestions with which you're uncomfortable that all they're doing is trying to hurt you. You want help, but only under certain conditions.

Whatever you've tried hasn't worked and seems to have made things worse. Your cutting is a means of controlling when, how and how much you experience pain, and likely an attempt at avoiding unmanageable emotional distress. It's an unhealthy distraction, and a very dangerous and damaging one at that.

You seem to genuinely want help. But because you've narrowed the parameters of the kind of help you'll accept, I have little to offer beyond suggesting that you get as much help as you can.

My program of recovery requires that I be honest, open and willing from the very start. Without a full measure of any of those elements I would surely be lost.

Junegirl

Welcome back, Huskypup. I was wondering about you, seeings how you're my classmate. I'll pm you. Too bad if you were hoping for someone cooler! Lol!

June

Carlotta

Diatomaceous Earth is very cheap and will kill bed bugs. It works by sucking the moisture out of them when they walk on it. Look it up.
Also, look at your mattress for brown or red spots...spray with a mix of bleach and water to kill them then encase your mattress in a plastic casing (large trash bags taped will work if you are very broke) so they get trapped inside.

Best of luck to you

soberhawk

Hi Husky,

I think I am little tired this evening or something, but your post almost left me speechless.

And then you throw in bedbugs.

Life is not always kind.

You are not ignored and feel with you but I can not find the strengths or arrogance to say anything helpful.

Is it not possible to get rid of those bedbugs? That can not be right,

I do hope something will get a little brighter soon.

Take care friend.

HuskyPup

Hey everyone, thanks for all the comments and suggestions. I'll get to replying to any PMs hopefully tonight; this sober musician friend of mine is coming though town, somebody I met on an entirely different site, but we ended up becoming friends IRL,and he's had 20 years of not drinking, so he's been a big help to talk to. We plan to go have milkshakes at this diner.

@hypo-Yeah, I can definitely see these things don't help. Luckily, the cutting is not frequent...it has only happened a few times when I have drank way too much. And then, it's like the contemplating of it is oddly the main obsession; sharpening the knife on a stone for many minutes, thinking. So this has been a few times, and only this year. But it did concern me, I still have to talk to a therapist about this. For now I figure if I can avoid drinking, I should be able to avoid other harm.

@Endgame. I know what you mean. I'm a very honest/open person, and very introspective. My main problems seem to be impulse control, in certain ways. I don't mind honest comments, and I've kept my parameters pretty wide open. I did try AA for a few months, just didn't go well, many different meetings, just didn't like the format---I wanted to have conversations, ask questions, talk, interact, and it seemed more like a kid sitting in church, and feeling bored.

But as for tough love, I recall a commentI hot here once on the steps page:

it was something like this:

"Go ahead and drink yourself to death, for all I care".

Which didn't help at all. Stuff like that tends to make me stop posting, I've found.

@June-Got your PM, will reply soon. And you seem plenty cool!

@Carlotta-Thanks for those suggestions. I've used that before actually, for a carpet beetle problem. I'll have to get some more. I've tended to do my own pest control in the past, and order supplies from a few places on the net, with good results. I often think professional exterminators never really solve/end the problem, because if they did, they'd lose a customer.

@Soberhawk-Thanks for the empathy! I'm hoping to work via friends to find a cheaper place to live.That would help a lot, each year, rent goes up 5%, and my wages have been falling. I work for the state, and they keep raising the deductions for benefits, and have not given any raises in 5+ years...so the take home part keeps shrinking. We joke at work that given enough time, we'll have to pay them to work there.

The bed-bug battle can be pretty tough...probably the hardest insect to get rid off, due to how small they are, their ability to hide anywhere, and their resistance to many pesticides. They've become a huge problem on the east coast of the US.

I was thinking: I had a friend from Finland visit, and he couldn't believe how poor the US was. He was very sweet, but bewildered how a society could have cities like Baltimore, with so much decay. And it is indeed odd to me, how the US has so few safety nets to help people, compared to other wealthy nations. And yet the gap between rich and poor just keeps getting bigger...

Well, I'm going to have a late lunch here, but thanks for the feedback. I guess it wasn't as private as I had thought, but when I first posted, I was feeling more fragile/vulnerable/scared. I think people can maybe relate to that next day 'fear' feeling; hard to put into exact words, that feeling.

hypochondriac

I am glad you have a sober friend IRL there husky

Try not to take much notice of nasty comments like that, they say more about the poster than about you. People betray their own issues when they react like that. I know that when I have responded in a less than supportive way it has been because of my own frustrations and issues anyway.

From an outsiders perspective you actually seem to have a lot going for you Husky, I mean you have a job, you have friends. You have a place to live, even if it is infested Sometimes it is hard to see positives but we have to cling to the good stuff sometimes. Enjoy your milkshake x

Threshold

Not to turn the focus on bedbugs but....I know that one of the ways they exterminate them is using heat. And I was thinking...recently I moved and I was able to purchase a big plastic bag that went round my entire mattress. I wondered if we put that round the matteress, taped it shut and put it in the SUmmer Sun if it would get hot enough to kill the nasty critters without poisons etc...

brainstorming...

Well, Husky, I can't do a darn thing if you choose to drink again, but I DO care.

And I always stay aware of the fact that for every member reading a post there are many many many silent readers, guests etc also reading. When we respond to any post, we are responding to many many people, not just the one post ahead of us. Whatever Husky, or any of us are experiencing, so are 100 others out there who haven't chose to post about it.

Telling someone you don't give a crap if they go and drink themselves to death...is sorta like saying that to a lot of people who were in one way or another identifying with that one person the post was aimed at. Ouch. but hey, maybe some people DON'T care, so who am I to talk?

I ran into people who said that sort of thing. They offered to give me 50 bucks and drop me off at the nearest crack house if I shared that I'd been thinking of using. I guess they meant well.

EndGameNYC

Yeah, I get that.

I'm not fond of the "tough love" approach, though there are times when versions of tough love are indicated. It's not something people should do arbitrarily, just because it seemed to work for them.

What will work very much in your favor is to continue asking for help, and being open to things that, on the surface, may not suit you.

Few people make progress by doing the same things that have failed them in the past.

I take very seriously the quote from William James in my sig, and read it again every so often when I comment.

longbeachone

Hey Husky, I'm sorry you're feeling so blue. It's hard to imagine giving up drinking when everything else seems to be so bad. All I can say is how about reversing the equation? Is everything so bad because you are drinking? Therefore, if you quit, possibly things will quickly improve. What have you got to lose?

By the way...what's a furry?

pinkdog

Dear Pup, Here's a hug.

Starflyer

Furries are people who like to dress up in animal costumes and enjoy role-playing as their animal “fursona”. Sure, not all furries actually dress up, some are just fans of the furry world, or only role-play online.

Dee74

Hi Husky

I merged your two identical threads here. I realise you're trying to get as much support as possible but multiple threads are confusing and are against our rules.

I am sorry you feel that public discussions aren't for you - in my struggling days, I actually got a lot out of the viewpoints that challenged me... but I understand we're all different and I respect your choice.

D

LadyBlue0527

EndGame, I commend you for that post. You put it perfectly and I couldn't agree with you more.

HuskyPup, what EndGame is telling you is on the money. What we get in replies is not always what we want to hear but it's sometimes what we need to hear.

One thing that I can tell you is that I have had a horrific experience elsewhere on another board and you will never find more caring and understanding people than you will here. They are genuine and replies are meant to be nothing more than support and help.

Typed words are so hard to interpret sometimes because there's no body language nor tone inflection. Often times I find that how I am taking a reply is really more about how I'm feeling that day rather than the person who is replying.

Please keep that in mind, everyone has your best interest at heart and you can't find a better place than this.

Boleo

I don't know anything about cutting per say, but I do know quite a bit about self-mortification. I can't go into details here but if you were to shop for a cilice you would get some idea of what I am alluding to.

There have been times in my life where I was suffering from so much despair that I would deliberately use "techniques" to make my life so uncomfortable physically that it would distract me mentally.

Fortunately for me, when the despair stopped, the need for the self-mortification stopped with it. I can't say as I beat it outright, it simply seemed to be a bi-product of some underlying issue.

DayTrader

I hesitate to use the term "most" but, looking back, a very big chunk of ideas that helped me, things to do that helped me, and advice that worked out to my benefit all came in forms I didn't want.

It's that notion above that led me to pick the signature line I use on this website. I, being the person who led myself into the mess I was in without really knowing I was doing it, probably wasn't the foremost authority on what I needed or what to do to get out of this mess.

Surrender is, to me, a very important first step. Surrendering to the notion that I know it all. Surrendering to the belief that I know what I need. Surrendering to the advice of educated and experienced people who'd been where I am and know the way out. Surrendering to actions I don't like, don't want to take, that don't feel good at the time I'm doing them, and don't really seem to make any sense. That's when I started making progress that everyone around me could see and that even I couldn't deny.

That old saying, "Do you want to be right or happy," came to mind a lot in my first couple years of recovery. Truth was, most of the time I would have rather been right. .........and that mind was the mind I'd hung my hat on getting me out of my discomfort? Not for long.....thankfully.

Husky, I just hope (and believe you will) get what you need. Whether it's what you want or not remains to be seen. If you're anything like me, you'll dislike most of it but it. But that's a good thing because certainly you've tried all the stuff that seems good and makes sense but that stuff hasn't produced the results you want. So, by default, the answers HAVE to come from somewhere outside your comfort zone.

Best of luck.