the fore. I'm sure that there are other people who go through what I go
through and that's gotten me on a line of thought.
Love is a beautiful feeling and its life-affirming and misery-making. If
there was more of it we'd all be happier. If there was a lot more of
unconditional love and compassion a mental healthcare system need not exist.
In the present though love and relationships and dating are a mindfield
for mental health and those who suffer mental illness.
For self harmers first sex is probably harder than for people with HIV.
The scars are freakish at the best of times. They're a death knell to
spontaneous passion and intimacy. It means I never sleep with people who
don't know me. It means that everyone I do sleep with has to be an
accepting person. Its a sort of positive in a horrible negative. I've
been self harming on and off since the age of 15 and the scars have
always inhibited my sexual relationships. Its gotten worse in the last
few years because during the acute epsiode of psychosis I was going
through a few years ago I was self harming prolifically. The scars fade
but there are a couple of gashes and cigar burns (yes, cigar burns from
my student days at a time when I was so dead inside that I barely felt
it) that will be there forever. Every sexual encounter, every hope of
future amour is always dogged by them. What could be done to help self
harmers through this I don't know. I'm sure many have found there own
ways to deal with it through honesty with their partner or resilience to
being thrown out by a person frightened by the freakishness.
Psychosis and paranoia make relationships a tough thing to handle. A
friend of mine who's recently been upgraded to a bipolar diagnosis from
schizophrenia (and schizoaffective before that) started dating someone
who was under section and had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. His
possessiveness and (perhaps) paranoid delusions made a relationship with
him difficult early on but she's used to being with people who are going
through unusual experiences of consciousness and has had them herself.
Her unstigmatising, accepting attitude is a quality I rarely see. Its
what comes from personal experience. More of it is needed if people who
have suffered from mental ill health are to become less disadvantaged in
this area of life.
People with anxiety and social phobias can also be disadvantaged in
relationships. Depression can be the scourge of a happy relationship and
can end relationships because of the impact of the externalisations of
misery or the apathy and reduction in libido commonly associated with
depression (but not always lost, hence the cluster of symptoms
approach). I wonder how many people are secretly self-loathing on the
inside? Or they focus on one small flaw, for example size in women or
penis size in men. If it wasn't for alcohol many people would be
severely disadvantaged but the social lubricant of choice is a potent
uninhibitor and that's so necessary for many people trapped behind their
masks and psychological shells.
Previous relationship traumas can colour future relationships and
expectations in some people. Its an understanding (from the Bayesian
model of the theory of the mind if I remember right) that previous
experiences inform interpretation of future experiences (this is the
Bayesian theory explained badly I think). People naturally expect things
to go the way they did before and can mistakenly intepret events to fit
their previous experience though some people may stay resilient to the
individuality of every experience and every person. In fact that's
probably a mentality that therapists promote. Some people's previous
experiences of relationships may cause them to construct conscious or
unconscious ways to get out of getting into a relationship through
damaging the relationship before it starts.
It must be awful for people with dissociative and personality disorders.
I could imagine that Antisocial Personality Disorder (analogous but not
the same as pscyhopathy) would be a curse of solitude and this may be
often seen assoicated with people with this diagnosis. Dissociative
Identity Disorder (or multiple personality disorder by its old name)
must come with many problems and relationships would probably be
impossible, but perhaps people have learned to cope. I'm a strong
believer in the power of every human being to adapt to misfortune or
difference.
Guilt can keep a person from entering into a relationship. Low
self-esteem can be another. If a person feels unworthy or damaged in
someway that may create a complex that means they will rationalise out
of entering relationships. I'm not sure if its guilt or some other
emotion that relates to my not getting in a relationship rational
because of the high likelihood that I will end my life (though I'm not
thinking about it now and am fairly far from that stage which is why I
can open up about it). Saving myself from guilt that I'll never
experience might be a better term. I understand the ripples of death and
suicide. At some point I made a decision that I wouldn't have a partner
(for a number of reasons) but the expectation of finding my own way to
peace meant that I couldn't burden anyone else with that was a major
one. I'm actually coming to question that now in recent days.
In the only relationship I've had in the last decade I got dumped fairly
regularly but we got back together fairly quickly. I understood that my
partner was going through a very difficult and stressful time and she
kept on lashing out at our relationship perhaps because she saw it as
the cause of her problems but I don't know why. I understood it as that
- the externalisation of her inner distress perhaps correctly or perhaps
as displacement. She had a diagnosis as well but I didn't understand
what it meant. It wasn't depression though. I became angry at the thing
that I thought was causing her distress but never at her because I knew
what she was going through. Eventually we did split up after we didn't
get back together after a breakup. It still hurt every time it happened
and at that time I couldn't do it anymore. I accept my failure in that
because I accept that I am human.
Perhaps if people understood that everyone finds relationships
difficult, not just those experiencing mental ill health, then perhaps
relationships could be a little easier. There's still a high stigma of
mental ill health and the externalisations of it and I don't know how
that will change. Its happened to me many times in the past. My madness
and the detriment its caused to my life mean that I'm worthless to some
people who measure their partners qualities on normal measures. Crazy
guys and girls are often lonely, but I think they get used to it because
its not just in amourous relationships from which they're excluded.
This may be an obvious form of the disability caused by mental ill
health according to the social model of disability. Thinking about it
now and extending the idea I was wondering if there would ever be a
relationships discrimination law. It would be an impossible law to get
through because it would infringe on what may be consider a personal
freedom - the right to fancy who you fancy. It would be impossible to
police. I envision some dystopia where there are quota that are needed
to be met every year for relationships between the different diagnoses,
cultures, ages and the like. Its an amusing thought though and one that
shows me a little of what utopia might actually be like but without
those rules.
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