Self Destructive Personalities
 

Are you one? I know I am.

Even if it's just subconsciously, we'll intentionally harm ourselves / our life in one way or another. I know people here can relate. Why do we do that to ourselves?

Best I can figure is it's a survival mechanism. Things aren't as good as they could be, and we get complacent with them, so have a need to "shock" ourselves out of it. Think of a patient on the table, who gets shocked with a defibrillator to jump start their heart and get it back into proper rhythm. Same concept.

Or I don't know. What's your take?

It's interesting to note that people have a plan in life, but they just can't get themselves on track with their plan , no matter how hard they try.

It's easy to drive your car from point A to B without disruptions. But in life its a whole lot harder. I wonder why

It's a good question. It's tough to own up to the dark parts of one's life, but self-destructive tendencies were a part of my pre-sobriety life. From the outside I had a life many may see as a dream life, but left to my own devices the outcome would have been one or all of the following: death by drug overdose or alcoholism, unemployment, divorce, HIV, jail, physical harm.

Especially when I did drugs, all bets were off. I would lose all sense of decency and end up literally roaming the streets at all hours of the night making incredibly unwise decisions and ending up in dangerous situations. The final straw was a night that could have ended my life, and what happened was extreme enough that it shook me to my senses and made me realize unless I changed things I was on the fast track to death.

My sobriety journey has led me to choose life. I don't think the dark parts of me are gone, but I no longer feel them actively present in my life. One of the biggest ways I realize this is that I now enjoy making long term plans like planning a big holiday up to 3 years in advance. It's reassuring to me because it tells me my subconscious believes I'll still be around. :-)

I suffer from self destruction. Been that way for as long as I can remember. In 48yrs old now. It's to a point where I can "feel" when I'm doing it to myself.

In general, I feel I don't deserve a good life. I deserve to be punished.

It's taking therapy to get out of that mode. To learn to address the issues I want to punish myself for. It's hard, because now I want to punish myself for drinking as much as I did, for cheating on my wife and telling her I didn't love her. For losing my wife and kids. For losing my job. For spending all of my 401k. For racking up $40k in debt. I want to punish myself big time.

I'm learning to look at things differently. That I already have been punished. There's no reason to make the future a mess for something I did in the past, especially if I already paid the price.

It's taking work, but I am getting better. Self destruction is the worst kind of punishment. We always tend to be harder on ourselves than anyone else would be.

Count me in. But I ain't gonna let my self-destructive tendencies win. If I don't drink, they have no power. I think I like staying in control these days.

When I drank I was the most self destructive person I knew, everything was on a road to disaster!!

But in Sobriety I have regained the keys and the control back from alcohol, I now write the chapters of my life!! :)

Thought provoking thread. I would say I sabotage my life...and this can include very destructive acts. I don't really know how to be comfortable with ok/good. I was actually thinking this on the way home from yoga. Life is good. I am sober, I have a great kid, a home, my health (amazingly). What more is there? I mean, really? I only have to move in the right direction to make right direction possible. And I do that....for a while. And then, I have to screw it up. Every. Single. Time.

I came from a very dysfuntional family. Good people, all screwed up. I know my parents did the best they could but they were too busy with their own issues or the issues of my 4 older brothers. So the two youngest, me and my brother, were kind of feral. We just had no nurturing or guidance. Life was chaotic, there were no rules or boundaries, there were drugs and alcohol everywhere and I was introduced to them starting at 9 (having a little girl of my own I now recognize how unreal that is). My mother was just trying to keep a smile on her face, my dad was always drunk or irritable. I was molested as a child by one of my older brothers. I was sexually haraased by a man my parents let live at our house in exchange for coaching tennis for my brother. The brother that molested me when I was 3 or 4 (8 years older) began to pray on my friends when they were 13 and 14. To say it was nuts is an understatement. So chaos is what I know. Crisis? Bring me in cause that's where I'm at my best. Calm? I have no idea how to deal with that....well I'm learning...but slowly.

Sorry I'm the Queen of the long post. But I think I just don't know how to be happy for long periods of time. I crave chaos and drama because its what I know. Now to recognize the signs when I start to sabotage. Anxiety is usually the first...all fear based stuff.

Thanks Frickalap, nice post, and I'm glad you made it. Sorry to hear about how things went, especially the sexual molestation -- that's just one of those things that should never happen under any circumstances.

I can relate with the "feral" thing though. That's me too. My mom will always say I was a "surprise", but in reality, I was an accident that happened after a few too many beer during a NHL play off game. They only wanted two kids, not three.

Yeah...

I definitely am. I also came from an extremely dysfunctional family and although I tried to not let it spread to my kids, it did. I suppose I have guilt over that.

I have had lifelong issues with depression. I was last in therapy 20 years ago and on meds on and off since. I've hit rock bottom several times, sometimes with the help of alcohol, sometimes not. Had a pretty good past year except for a few down times.

Curiously, I feel most like drinking when I am feeling pretty good about myself! Figure that one out. lol
I do not crave drinking when I am down.

I have no other destructive habits other than smoking cigs. I have lost weight and taking better care of my health. So why do I want to make myself feel like shinola?

You know what, Troy? That truly sucks. I mean, what parent says stuff like that to their child? It seems like such a simple thing, to be a decent parent, but I know it isn't...If no one has ever validated how wrong that was, I am so sorry.

My mother had a lot of narcissistic tendencies. She was that golden child, the pretty teen, prom queen and all that. In some ways she never outgrew that view of herself I guess. I had to get to a place of forgiveness with her because she wasn't going to change for me. I tried changing her, it didn't work. She was never wrong, rarely apologized. She didn't see how her words hurt others. I had to work out how to heal from it, and it took some time.

I hope you learn a way to forgive those who harmed you, and forgive yourself for perpetuating the abuse against yourself. That is the joy of being a sober adult, no one has any real emotional power over me any more. I get twinges of, "Hey! That's not right!" but it passes pretty quickly now that I fully trust my instincts and my faith that I will get through stuff intact.

I have 100% record for making it through bad days :)

I think it is human nature to gravitate to what we know even if it is bad. I know how to live in a world of pain, shame, and chaos. Living sober is a scarey place because I don't know the rules.

How do I live when lying, cheating, and stealing is no longer the way I chose to live. What does it mean to have friends and be successful?

Sobriety is uncharted territory for me and sometimes a part of me wants to go back to the hell I know because that is who I was for a very long time

I have thought that before.

I do some stupid and self destructive things. Reminds of the movie "two for the money" and Al pacinos character. He has everything but still is an idiot and risks losing it all.

Walter Abrams: You're a lemon. Like a bad car. There is something... there is something inherently defective in you, and you, and you, and me, and all of us. We're all lemons. We look like everyone else, but what makes us different is our defect. See, most gamblers, when they go to gamble, they go to win. When we go to gamble, we go to lose. Subconsciously. Me, I never feel better than when they're raking the chips away; not bringing them in. And everyone here knows what I'm talking about. Hell, even when we win it's just a matter of time before we give it all back. But when we lose, that's another story. When we lose, and I'm talking about the kind of loss that makes your a$$hole pucker to the size of a decimal point - you know what I mean - You've just recreated the worst possible nightmare this side of malignant cancer, for the twentieth goddamn time; and you're standing there and you suddenly realise, Hey, I'm still... here. I'm still breathing. I'm still alive. Us lemons, we f**k **** up all the time on purpose. Because we constantly need to remind ourselves we're alive. Gambling's not your problem. It's this f****d up need to feel something. To convince yourself you exist. That's the problem."

Yeah Troy, I was the same. After I became an adult, my mom told me that they had planned for only one child but she loved the attention she had gotten when she was pregnant with my sister so much that she stopped using her diaphragm so she could get pregnant with me. That explained why I always felt a ton of resentment from my father and my older sister. I was the extra mouth to feed he had never wanted and the sibling my sister never should have had, taking all the attention away from her. Even though no one talked about it, and she never knew that story, the dynamic was clearly there.

It was incredibly selfish of my mom to do that and perhaps wrong of her to tell me, but it also gave me so much insight into our family dynamic that I am forever grateful she did.

Self destructive? You bet. Living as the unwanted child made me always feel like I didn't belong anywhere and I behaved accordingly. I've drifted along in life, never making much in the way of long term plans and always having the idea of taking myself out of my misery tucked in the back of my mind. It's the ultimate comfort to know that if things ever get really bad I can fix it all with the click of a trigger or the kick of a chair below the noose. Most of the time I don't think about these things, but they reside inside me like a deep, dark guest. Not sure I will ever be able to change that.

I have the same thought about escaping, Retread. I have carried it with me for 30 years. It's always in the back of my mind, comforting in a way. But, a few years ago I had to have major surgery and it was risky due to a couple of factors. I put things in God's hands and let His will be done. BUT I discovered I sure hoped he didn't want me to die!

Yeah, when I was in the hospital last week I realized I don't want to die, either, though if you'd given me a choice between dying and being in that kind of pain, I would choose dying for sure.

This made me go on a tangent in my head. An autistic boy I know cannot get a drivers license. It's not that he's dumb; he's not. He just has no attention span. He has memorized all of the rules of the road and is such an obnoxious backseat driver that it's ..almost... funny. But he would never be able to get from point a to point b because he cannot focus on one thing.

We can drive from point a to point b, but can't stay focused in real life on staying sober, because....

I think that's why they say one day at a time.

I thought I had a self destructive personality for many years. Turns out I was just confused...I'd been told I was no good so I believed it and then I willingly poisoned myself for a few decades to try and make the whole experience a little shorter.

My path to healing began when I realised I was a good person, I had value, and I found a way to forgive those who had messed me up.

D

Dang y'all are hitting the nail on the head left and right for me! It's all those things, growing up feeling like a bad, unwanted thing. Feeling most alive on the edge of destruction. Always having the mental escape hatch of suicide.
I'm grateful I have barely had those escapist thoughts of death in the past few weeks. But, there's still a f$#* it attitude beneath the surface that will cancel my plans to sit at home and eat iced cream. I'm afraid of the long haul: a full life lived on life's terms. I cannot picture myself 10 years from now, even 5 years from now, even 3...
But I'm not going to be where I was a year ago. I'm going to keep pushing forward. Thanks for this thread.

What D said

I've been wondering about this for years. Drinking does seem to be related to the urge to self-destruct. Hang-overs particularly seem a form of self-punishment that drinkers, regardless of how they bemoan them, are hooked on.

But I'm not sure that drinkers have uniquely self-destructive personalities. We choose to self-destruct with alcohol, true, but I've seen so many people self-destruct in other ways that I think it may just be part of the human condition.