The Power of Self-Empathy Detering Emotional Illness

Brothers and Sisters,    

I have lived the illness of schizophrenia for forty-six years. I have had to live with countless visual and auditory hallucinations that have plagued my existence on this Earth. My body and mind has had to experience many physical and mental breakdowns caused by the effects of my illness.

I have attempted suicide as many times as I have fingers and toes. I have abused my body using sharp objects, electrodes and lit cigarettes to numb the emotional turmoil that I live with daily. My body is scarred and abused from emotional outbursts that have strangled my feelings and blackened my moods.

I have lived in searing fear, anger, and shame from my behaviors that are seemingly uncontrollable and overwhelming to the point of exhaustion and blinding frustration.

In my childhood, my parents misunderstood my behaviors as something as simple as a childhood faze that I would grow out of given time and the passing of puberty. I was given countless psychological evaluations in my elementary and Highschool years. My parents dealt with these studies as they dealt with my drinking, absolute denial.

I live in moments of absolute clarity with extreme calamity all bunched up in a single event. A typical episode is a successive flash of images that are accompanied by violent emotions.

 I am watching a movie and see a person being arrested by the police. To anyone else this situation could be considered to be a scary event that is quickly absorbed by the audience as nothing more as a fictional story.

In my mind, I will see myself being wrongly accused of a crime, beaten by the police with their sticks, pistol whipped, handcuffed, beaten even more, thrown in a cell and tortured by the jail guards, then left in a bloody heap on the floor dying alone.

All of this is accompanied by the emotions of fits of anger, rage, shame, guilt, remorse, sadness. Then to finish everything off, I will have another flash of successive visions of me sitting ontop of a building with an automatic machine gun killing every cop in my sights, with the emotions of, joy, elation, contentment, and serenity for the revenge I have just taken. All of this will happen in seconds sometimes lasting days and even weeks with nothing but rageful thoughts of revenge against a hallucination of jumbled images and feelings.

I have found that I am able to manage my behaviors using a Nonviolent Communication strategy. Now when I have an outburst of emotion, I stop myself and apply self-empathy. I have trained myself to look at the emotion I am experiencing, break that emotion down to a basic feeling then discover my needs.

I am an extremely sensitive individual; I feel empathy for others deeply and am able to read peoples emotions being three steps ahead of their next thought. I have a tendency to blurt out emotions I am feeling in others, surprising them into angry upsets that can easily cut them deeply.

This behavior has gotten me into allot of trouble when I want to build friendships and be closer to people. People become afraid of me, some saying I get a thrill out of saying disruptive things to people causing them pain and discomfort.