I think I've reached my breaking point

[justnothing]

Hi,

Sorry I keep posting when in a state of crisis lately... but well I'm in another state of crisis and I don't have too many people to turn to these days.

I've been under a lot of stress lately and today I reached a breaking point and I keep thinking about either killing myself, hurting myself in some way and even though it's work related I'm absolutely terrified that if I tell anyone at work that I need to take the day off tomorrow due to stress I'll end up getting fired.

The thing with my therapist has been completely messing me up lately, I've been thinking about how I didn't treat my mother well enough back when she was alive as well as every other bad thing I've ever done or failed to do in life.

In the past couple of years I've become an atheist - for the most part - but I still have a teeny tiny bit of doubt that God does exist and this thought actually utterly terrifies me because I can't stop thinking that all this stress and every bad thing that's been happening lately is Him punishing me for turning my back on him and/or being disrespectful to my mother's memory (which I've been very much so recently) and disrespectful towards Him. My mother wasn't very religious (though she was somewhat, on and off) but that didn't stop her from frequently reminding me that one of the commandments is "honor thy mother and thy father" and telling me that "God is going to punish" me for disobeying and disrespecting her. She also sent me to a religious school where I was basically taught that she was right in demanding extreme respect and that a good child is one who is willing to "lay down his hands on glass to let his parents step on them so that their own feet won't be cut by the glass" (this is literally something I was told in the 2nd grade) and at the time it made sense because that was pretty much what my mother expected from me.

She was also always so, so very angry at me for not doing well in school and would rage at me every single day because of it... which is why I can't deal with failure at all nowadays and the thing is... recently I've been put on a project at work and guess what I've been failing at it... or at least messing it up by not doing it fast enough (I have no explanation or excuse for why it's been taking me so long) but up until recently I was told that it didn't matter if it took a long time because the due date was months away... well it turns out it's actually due in just a couple of weeks and there is no way in hell that I'll be able to finish it by then. I've been trying every means I can recently to try to deal with the stress in healthy ways but today I just reached a breaking point and nothing I do seems to calm me down more than a few minutes at a time. I'm not even sure what I'm so afraid of... the narrative I tell myself (that admittedly does freak me out a lot) is that if I keep PLEASE READing up I'll eventually end up jobless and that I might not have what it takes to make it anywhere else and will end up homeless... but in reality I think this might just be a rationalization and in reality this is really just fear of abandonment put into hyper-gear because of my therapist (who made it 1000 times worse because of the way things ended with her recently) but the thing I keep thinking about is God and my mother whom I imagine looking down on me in disdain for having turned my back on them. I've also been thinking about how I always end up turning my own back on everyone and avoiding them and this is another reason why I always end up "losing" everyone... basically it's not even that I feel "abandoned by the world" but that I myself can't stop "abandoning the world" and even though it's me doing it, for some reason I'm still horrified by it (I guess because I'm unable to control my own avoidant behavior even though I've tried so many times to work on it in therapy over the course of so, so many years).

Lately I keep thinking almost "objectively" that I must be a horrible person even though I don't even have a specific reason for thinking that... but my therapist keeps coming to mind and so do my mother and ex bf... I think, realistically, it's most likely an abandonment reaction... but it feels so real. I guess this is the thing I probably need to keep in mind in order to get through this period - that all these negative thoughts and all this stress and horror is really just an abandonment reaction and it'll be one of those things that'll pass in a few weeks or moths or whatnot but after this crisis is over I'll be back to normal. In fact just thinking about it right now is making me feel a lot better. I just need to survive the coming period of days, weeks or months without saying or doing anything crazy that'll get me fired or make my bf break up with my or whatnot and I'll be fine... It's just that right now I'm on an emotional roller coaster and the dips themselves are what scare me.

I guess it should be fine and tbh idk what advice anyone could possibly give me about this and I'm sorry for all the rambling... it's just, you know, a rather stressful day. Thank you to anyone who actually bothered reading through all this.

[Methuen]

Hello JN

I guess this is the thing I probably need to keep in mind in order to get through this period - that all these negative thoughts and all this stress and horror is really just an abandonment reaction and it'll be one of those things that'll pass in a few weeks or moths or whatnot but after this crisis is over I'll be back to normal. In fact just thinking about it right now is making me feel a lot better. I just need to survive the coming period of days, weeks or months without saying or doing anything crazy that'll get me fired or make my bf break up with my or whatnot and I'll be fine...

Yes, we want you to be fine

Reading your post, I noticed something:
1) You are being intensely hard on yourself (judgemental?) with lots of negative thinking.  Is that because someone from your past (eg mother) used to say negative things to you about you?  Because if she did, I don't believe your thoughts and your mom's have to be the same.  You can have your own thoughts, and they probably shouldn't be the same as hers.
2) When we think negatively about ourself, it's usually because someone said those negative things to us to make themselves feel more powerful.  I like to believe that when someone uses power the wrong way like that, it probably means those words aren't true. 
2) The moment you wrote that this intense (negative) feeling you are having now can pass (in days, weeks, or months), you started to write more positive thoughts.

One thing I am learning to be more aware of is how I have spent my life castrophizing things that "mostly" haven't happened in my daily life.  I am trying to recognize when I am doing that a little earlier, so I can stop myself because it takes me to a very negative place, and most of the time, those things haven't actually come to pass.  I just worry about them.  And even if they do happen, imagining it ahead of time only makes me anxious, and nothing helpful to me comes out of imagining all that.

When these negative self-thoughts come to you, can you recognize that they are there?  Because if you can, one way I stop them is to go do something healthy for myself - like go walk in nature, or relax in a hot bath, or go on my meditation app, or do a hobby, or do something physical to work negative energy out of my body so that my brain responds by producing happy endorphins instead of the bad stuff.  I will also eat and sleep better.  Then I am better able to cope with whatever is in front of me at the moment (eg a problem at work)

What do you think?  Do you have things that you like to do that make you feel better?

Your thoughts don't have to be a voice from the past (if that is what's happening, and I'm not sure that it is).  Your thoughts can be yours, and you can take back the power to make them more positive thoughts.

 

I just need to survive the coming period of days, weeks or months without saying or doing anything crazy that'll get me fired or make my bf break up with my or whatnot and I'll be fine...

Yes!  You've got this!  

[Methuen]

I'm really sorry you are going through this really hard spell JN.  I hope you can feel better sooner

[justnothing]

Yes, we want you to be fine

Thank you … I think I will be fine, I’ve calmed down significantly since making the post and even though it’s 3 AM and kind of hard to say how things will go at work (if I even end up going at this point), at least atm I think it’ll be OK.

Reading your post, I noticed something:
1) You are being intensely hard on yourself (judgemental?) with lots of negative thinking.  Is that because someone from your past (eg mother) used to say negative things to you about you?  Because if she did, I don't believe your thoughts and your mom's have to be the same.  You can have your own thoughts, and they probably shouldn't be the same as hers.
2) When we think negatively about ourself, it's usually because someone said those negative things to us to make themselves feel more powerful.  I like to believe that when someone uses power the wrong way like that, it probably means those words aren't true.
2) The moment you wrote that this intense (negative) feeling you are having now can pass (in days, weeks, or months), you started to write more positive thoughts.

1)Yeah… a lot of people tell me that I’m too hard on myself actually… I suppose it can only be because of my mother, because she was the one who raised me by herself… but from what I can remember it wasn’t done in a direct way, of her telling me negative things about myself, at least as far as I can remember. I mean she used to yell at me a lot but I don’t remember her calling me names or anything of that sort… the rest of the time she appeared sweet and loving and very often she acted like a helpless victim and I was often extremely afraid of hurting her feelings. Idk exactly how she did it but somehow I ended up feeling 100% responsible for her and her well-being so I couldn’t afford to not be hard on myself because her well-being was supposedly at stake. To give you an idea of how strongly I felt about it, later on when I realized that some of the abuse was sexual in nature and it started completely eating me up, I still avoided confronting her about it because I was too afraid of causing her emotional anguish.
2) So yeah, my inner critic often tells me that I’m completely worthless and a shower of other insults but I don’t remember ever being called that by my mother or anyone else so on the surface it’s as though it comes directly from “me”. Logically I know that’s most likely not the case but I’m unable to trace where those thoughts do come from.
3) Yeah, my mood actually got better even as I was writing it because the realization helped me feel better. I’ll try my best to hang on to the realization that these feelings will eventually pass, it’s just that it can get a little harder when they run especially high.

When these negative self-thoughts come to you, can you recognize that they are there?  Because if you can, one way I stop them is to go do something healthy for myself - like go walk in nature, or relax in a hot bath, or go on my meditation app, or do a hobby, or do something physical to work negative energy out of my body so that my brain responds by producing happy endorphins instead of the bad stuff.  I will also eat and sleep better.  Then I am better able to cope with whatever is in front of me at the moment (eg a problem at work)

What do you think?  Do you have things that you like to do that make you feel better?

Yeah… well at the time that the feelings struck I was working on something that I didn’t have a chance to get away from. One of the problems this time was that there weren’t really any thoughts that came before the feelings, at least not consciously, which means that whatever was happening was all happening on a semiconscious or subconscious level and I only became aware of it when the emotional tornado struck… which is a bit of a problem because idk how to preempt something like that.

Yes!  You've got this!    

Thank you , I sure hope so… and if I don’t I hope you guys won’t mind when I come back crying in your laps (seriously though, you guys are extremely helpful and I’m extremely grateful for the support you’ve been giving me and a chance to talk here).