Coping mechanisms

[Aiden]

I'm stuck.  I have parts of me I like that are more maculine but the feminine parts are to obvious.  I never cared what I looked like before really.  I dressed in whatever, didn't care enough about my body to really take care of it or look good or anything.  I still don;t care about it lol.  But I do care about being seen for who I am inside, and understanding now what made me different has opened a door for me to express myself once more in my internal identity.

But I can no longer stand to be called female.  And it hurts more when people can not see who I am.  They look at me and see me as a freak.  This man/woman thing.  Or this weird woman lol.  Yet I also keep getting told I am a pretty girl or I can be one.  But I can't see that, I can;t accept that because I'm not a girl.  I cringe at it. 

For a while I wondered if I really had GID because I felt like my body didn't fit but same time I had managed to disconnect from it enough that I practically wasn;t aware of what I looked like, or didn;t care.  I just wanted these things off my chest and the bleeding to stop but again I didn;t think anything could be done.

Coming out to myself, I have become more aware, and it's painful.  It's frustrating.  I can't ignore it anymore. 

[Elwood]

I didn't experience body dysphoria until I was distinctly female looking... For most of my life I looked quite androgynous.

[Adam]

I'm stuck.  I have parts of me I like that are more maculine but the feminine parts are to obvious.  I never cared what I looked like before really.  I dressed in whatever, didn't care enough about my body to really take care of it or look good or anything.  I still don;t care about it lol.  But I do care about being seen for who I am inside, and understanding now what made me different has opened a door for me to express myself once more in my internal identity.

But I can no longer stand to be called female.  And it hurts more when people can not see who I am.  They look at me and see me as a freak.  This man/woman thing.  Or this weird woman lol.  Yet I also keep getting told I am a pretty girl or I can be one.  But I can't see that, I can;t accept that because I'm not a girl.  I cringe at it. 

For a while I wondered if I really had GID because I felt like my body didn't fit but same time I had managed to disconnect from it enough that I practically wasn;t aware of what I looked like, or didn;t care.  I just wanted these things off my chest and the bleeding to stop but again I didn;t think anything could be done.

Coming out to myself, I have become more aware, and it's painful.  It's frustrating.  I can't ignore it anymore. 

I feel the exact same way, Aiden. You should know you're not alone.

[icontact]

I just try to ignore the whole thing, as most of the time I am either in school, with friends, or doing schoolwork, and I don't have any excuse to think about TS issues. And I have other, quite unhealthy coping mechanisms such as the dissociating which has always happened since forever, undereating, self harm, exercising too much, etc.

Now I'm just so constantly dissociated that I don't feel any pangs of anger looking at myself in the mirror, it just looks like some other kid, anyone, just not me. Or my brain will say something like oh, you just have huge pecs, that's why. Things that are completely illogical but I don't have the heart to correct myself.

[Jamie-o]

Jamie, if you find that James Green reference, I sure would like it. I have read the book and have my own copy, but I didn't mark that passage for some reason. I guess if you haven't finished the book, the passage must be pretty early on?

Hmmm.  Hard to say.  I have a tendency to skip around in non-fiction books.  But I'll make another search for that book.

Most days it's fine, if I get stressed or anxious or anything I toddle off into my own head and everything in reality subsequently becomes better (I resume real life much calmer and happier, I've found). It's the days where I can't stand the mental me being *only* mental, and that I'm not physically male and cannot say some magic word and POOF! I'll be really and properly me for the entire world...those are the hardest days, and that's when I sort of go into zombie-shutdown mode. ...

... They don't happen often, thankfully, and sometimes an "attack" will only be an hour, while on other occasions it's been weeks on end , but everything always seems to return to normal. Those are the days when I realise that I really am transgender and seriously consider that I might be transsexual, and that I really should make a doctor's appointment and ask to see a gender therapist... But then, when it's all over, I feel completely androgynous, and don't see any need to see a therapist or anything (which makes it all *really*confusing ).

I've been here so many times.  It's like, once the "attack" is over, you become numbed to the pain of dysphoria.  And then it seems as if staying in your safe little cocoon is so much nicer than risking that pain again by facing it.

[Lutin]

Yes, absolutely. It's sort of like, "out of sight, out of mind." If you're not in the agonising throes of dysphoria, and don't feel too bad, it's like the problem's just not there, and so you needn't worry about it. Unfortunately, it's those times when you feel great that you *should* be thinking about it and understanding everything, 'cause in all probability you'll sure as hell not want to think about the dysphoria when you're in the middle of it. Oh for an open-minded society!!!

[Northern Jane]

I remember that space Arch. I was there from about age 19 to 24. I didn't cope, PERIOD - I was on the slippery slope to oblivion.

What kept me going through the dark times was DOING something about my situation, anything and everything I could do to work toward my goal and to be ready for it if it came - SRS in 1974 was virtually an impossible goal. (I was fortunate - it BECAME possible with little warning and I was GONE!

When you are feeling down, DO something, anything positive toward your goal so at least you feel you are moving, making progress. (Things are not nearly as bleak today so you should be able to achieve your ends.)

[Ender]

Yeah, when I finally wrapped my head around the fact that I can do this--transition, be a man physically, drop the fantasies and wishing and just make it real--it was hell.  My coping mechanism was really convoluted or so I thought--I'm really surprised & glad to see that I'm not the only one who pictured myself as physically male way before even realizing that I could transition (for too many years I thought that only MTF transitioning was possible, because that's all that I was ever exposed to or heard of). 

In my head, it got to the point that I thought that maybe, just maybe, other people saw what I saw in myself.  That ended abruptly when I finally realized that this is not, nor ever was, the case; it was awful having my only coping mechanism go out from under me.  I felt like a fool for thinking that others could see me for what I am, when in reality they were attracted to what they and the rest of the world saw--a small female, hidden perhaps under layers of clothing and black and aggression, but still undeniably 'girl' and 'cute.'  I was invisible and I couldn't handle it anymore.  So now my coping mechanism has become moving forward with transition, slow as that process might be.  I still do a bit of dissociation, though now it's more seeing the potential that this female body has for becoming male. It's short but otherwise not that bad (the whole 'can't have a proper penis' thing still gnaws on my mind though... really wish there were better options for that).  Anyways, best wishes to you for getting through this rough patch; take 'er easy, dude.

[Arch]

When you are feeling down, DO something, anything positive toward your goal so at least you feel you are moving, making progress. (Things are not nearly as bleak today so you should be able to achieve your ends.)

Jane, I'm exercising a lot. Not much else I can do. But the more weight I lose, the better. That's progress toward transition. And exercise definitely helps with my brain chemistry.

I feel down when I wake up in the morning, so I come to Susan's first thing. That's generally a boost. Then I try to persuade myself to exercise. Sometimes it takes awhile to get on the bike, but I tend to feel better afterward. In the evening, I feel myself slipping, so I exercise again--get on the bike one more time or hike around the neighborhood. Unfortunately, my bad ankle is starting to feel the strain. I hope it holds up.

I'm still feeling lost and lonely inside, but this system seems to be working for now. I hope I'm feeling more in control when I go back to work later this month. I'll be obligated to other people, and I won't be able to jump on the bike anytime I want to. But at least there are a few people on campus I like to socialize with on a casual basis. I plan to hunt them up. My therapist thinks it will be good for me. I know that he's probably right, but I would rather hide inside my head.

And I would, too, if there were still somewhere to go up there.

[milliontoone]

I have used various forms of coping in the past including dropping vast amounts of money I could not afford on things I did not need or even really want in thevague belief that somehow theywould/could make me happy.  I have used and still do to some point alcohol to medicate and didn't inhabit my body for years, preferring instead to live internally in mymind where I could be the person I wanted so desperately to be.

A large part of this came from undereducation on the subject, just not knowing or being exposed to the possibility that I could actually be how I imagined myself to be inside my head.

I had heard of course about MTF transexualism but had not really been exposed or educated to the facts of FTM transexualism and ->-bleeped-<- so I suppose you could say what I suffered from for many years (almost as long as I can remember in fact) was a sort of gender dsyphoria,a malingering sense that something just wasn't intrinsically right about me but with no idea how to even begin putting that thing
(which I didn't even fully realise was wrong in the first place) right, if that makes sense at all.

The internet was a kind of lifesaver for me, I remember when I discovered it sometime around the millenium, online I could be as male as I wanted without having to even justify to myself the reasons why I was inhabiting male personnae so frequently (after all it's only online right it's not real).

It was only after I read an article on the subject of what it meant to be a genderqueer and actually read the story of someone who had been biologically born as a female and then gone on to fully transition in to a man that I realised this could be an actual reality for me rather than a fantasy that I could only indulge in from time to time inside my mind.

The dam broke and shortly after I came out as a genderqueer and subsequently a transman, since then I have never looked back in terms of coping mechanisms they just don't have the same effect on me anymore, maybe because I don't feel the constant need to escape that I used to.

Like I said I do still use alcohol to medicate but usually only when I am stressed out about something else now ie: personal issues with my partner and am not using due to my gender issues, since they don't seem half as bad any more after coming out, except I wish desperately to commence testosterone therapy which I see as corrective therapy for the incorrect dose of hormones I was given pre-natally (ie when I grew the biologically sexual organs of a female in my mothers womb).

In short if I had known about the very real possibility of transitioning fully when I was younger, I would have done it years ago in a heartbeat of that I have no doubt.

But all in all, I am a man, I feel like a man, I live in a man it is really only my genitalia that do not match at present and even there I already feel like I have a penis.

I want/need surgery to complete me but it's not that which will make me a man.  I'm already a man totally simply because I am. You cannot help who you are.

[trapthavok]

All my life I've had a particular coping strategy for dealing with my gender dysphoria and my sexuality. I'm not comfortable being explicit here, but let's just say that I lived in my head a lot.

That particular strategy has...well, it has no longer become possible. A few days ago, I found out that it's gone. Again, I'm not too comfortable talking about it here. I told my therapist last Thursday, so he knows now.

This is tearing me up inside, and it hurts hurts hurts. I feel like an abandoned child.

Right now, I feel as if toxins are building up in my brain and making me less and less able to get through the day. I don't know whether this process is cumulative from day to day. I'll probably wake up fresh tomorrow and then start going downhill again. That's what happened today, only I'm feeling worse tonight than I did last night. I'm having one of those zombie nights, only the numbness isn't fully blotting out the pain anymore. I used to be able to go completely numb for short periods and just ride it, but that strategy seems to be slipping, too.

All I can think about at the moment is surviving till my therapy appointment on Tuesday. My therapist is hoping that working with him will replace what I've lost, at least to some extent. I would like that, too, but then I have the unhappy task of trying to survive from appointment to appointment. In fact, I feel as if that's what my life consists of--getting through to the next session, spending fifty minutes with someone who really gets me, and then facing another long dry spell.

Funny thing is, I've been going in twice a week, and I still get to feeling desperate when I have to wait just a few days for the next session.

This is why I suppressed for so many years, so I wouldn't have to deal with the feelings. But now my main coping strategy is broken. I guess I'll have to find new ways of getting through each day, but I don't know how. I'm in brand new territory, and it doesn't feel good. I can't pass. I can't go back inside my head. And I can't tell my partner, at least not yet.

I feel dead inside right now, only not dead enough.

Sorry to hear it, Arch.

I feel like I'm probably the worst person to ask about coping methods given my last vlog...But you know... Funny as it sounds, coloring is a good relaxing activity. I had to color a banner to help advertise my GLBTQ club's next event, and it was so relaxing.... Your brain completely shuts off.

Also, going to the gym is also a great mechanism for me because I love it so much and because it's all I think about while I'm there. I never completely forget that I'm not a bio male, especially in a place like the gym, but focusing on my own workout is a nice distractor. I do 20-28 minute powerwalk/run combos on the treadmill to try and ease myself into running since I don't have the stamina for it, and 50 counts of each different weightlifting set. Biceps, triceps, back, thighs/calves, abs. Maybe do more than biking? Or mix it up?

Feel better Arch