Triskelion wrote:This! Exactly this! Glad I made some sort of sense.
Glad I could put it into words to relate.

Sometimes putting something into words is the hardest thing.
Triskelion wrote:Well, for me it definitely was, and seems to still be, tied to my moods. If I'm energetic and feel good about myself, I never have the urge to harm myself. It's when I'm low on energy and feel either sad, bad about myself, or essentially numb / empty that it seems to play on repeat in my head. I often did it in the past as some sort of punishment or to try and feel anything.
I guess mine was somewhat related to mood, in that I had chronic depression, so my mood would sort of go between low and really low without a lot of feeling good about things at all. Much of mine was about trying to feel something when heavily dissociated, and it would work, sort of. Until I dissociated the pain I'd just caused and I was back at square one.
Triskelion wrote:If I think really hard about it, I suspect the hallway resembles the ones from my own time at high-school the most. I don't have very clear memories of high-school, but the things I do remember are things that make me feel insane, stupid, embarrassed, and disgusted with myself. So maybe it's both then. Flashbacky and a mood based urge.
I've learnt that the effects of triggers don't always show up instantly following an incident. I had a therapist I used to go to, and some days I'd turn up saying "I feel horribly anxious and I don't know why". A bit of probing and we'd often find an event a few days earlier that was the trigger. And I learned to question where and what the trigger was more often. Almost always there was something within about the past 5 days that had been the trigger. Whether it was my dissociation that made me forget or just a delayed reaction to it, I'm not quite sure.
Triskelion wrote:Don't happen to know a good way to deal with it other than grit your teeth and white-knuckle through it?
Not really. Distraction and keeping occupied is about all I can come up with. Learning to understand my own triggers in general has helped a little- doesn't make it go away, but knowing why it's happening and maybe what I can do to get away from the trigger or feel safer from it can help.