More boundaries..

I need boundaries..
Because the fear and anxiety Service User is operating within, hijacks my thought processes. I find myself thinking about nothing else. Especially when he starts talking about how he wishes he could just end his life...

More about that latter.

So I will set a time limit of 25 minutes and use this blog as a place to help me to order my thoughts. Open ended rambling or rumination is pointless.

So when he talks about suicide, what do I really think?

1. He should be sectioned - This opens up more problems - he would need to section himself!
2. It is a form of challenging behavior - though I'm good at letting it pass over me and through me (Dune reference) I'm getting hurt.
3. He talks about it because the change he needs to make in himself is so great that it feels as if it requires death - death of the harming self. 
4. It is the ultimate self-punishment, the logical conclusion. Ultimate self recrimination.

He needs help..can a harming self be neutralized by internalizing the kindness of others? Carl Rogers suggest that this is an essential factor in how therapy works. As he isn't at the point where he would go to see a psychotherapist, and psychotherapy is hard work for the client,  healers are our best option.

I handed him the phone number of an acupuncturist who has been recommended...we talked about it a bit. Also talked about Reiki (which he has had). He has taken on my view that if it does nothing, it at least does no harm, and there is kindness - people who do Reiki are kind.

The talk about suicide was triggered by talking about the other recommendation, homeopathic aconite. I keep getting that the recriminations are linked to swallowing something down...
This feeling was why he wouldn't take the SSRI.

It also has an opposite form, one in which he wolfs food, anything down regardless of how hot it is, or social context, a kind of binging behavior. Something done to bring the feelings of shame and guilt to the fore, a kind of ritual I guess.

The hardest thing for me to get my head round at the moment is the idea of epigenetics.

In one pivotal experiment,57 mice were exposed to the neutral (if not agreeable) scent of cherry blossoms. This neutral scent was then followed by an aversive electrical shock. After several pairings, the mice froze in fear when the scent was presented alone, in the absence of the shock. No surprise—this is a typical example of Pavlovian conditioning. However, what is astonishing about the experiment was that this same robust conditioned response was retained through at least five generations of progeny. In other words, when exposed to the scent of the cherry blossoms, the great-great-grandchildren of the experimentally conditioned mice froze in fear just as though they themselves had been conditioned to the shock. Further, when these progeny were exposed to several other neutral smells, there was no response, just as had been the case for their great-great-grandfathers. Incidentally, this generational transmission was significantly stronger through the male line.- Levine Phd, Peter A.. Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory (p. 162). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition. 

For sure the way Service User processes stress doesn't work...and he processes it in the same way as his dad, and his granddad and aunt...

But anyway!
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