My gossiping relatives are another reason why I have not caught CTB

[FireFox]

If I successfully killed myself today I know for a fact my gossiping relatives on my mums side of the family will be gossiping and talking about how I always was the crazy one in the family.

One of the reasons I was deeply miserable as a teenager because of my relatives making fun of my mental health issues. As a teenager I used to self harm and I used to talk to myself something which my mother never got me tested for by a doctor to find out why I do it. I only grew out of talking to myself in my mid20s. I know its so embrassing.

I am British of African descent. My teenage years were spent travelling overseas to my parents home country( Africa) to see relatives for funerals and family gatherings. On these visits while I thought my relatives were being nice me they were just laughing at me the entire me for being the weriodo of the family. I had to find all this out from my grandmother when I came back to the UK

●My grandmother explained the relatives wanted me to see a witch spirtual doctor because of the fact I talk to myself and I needed to be "fixed" to be more normal. In my parents country witch doctors are not medically qualified and use herbal medical medicine and talk to spirits normally evil spirts. The medicine the witch doctors offer depends on who you see. Some witch doctors will take you to a nature place like the woods and make you bath in a river, others might give you herbal solution they made for you to drink or a homemade spiritual oil. The treatments are mixed with anything rvery session witch doctor says some special prayer or spell in their language. The "treatments" witch doctors offer are known to be humiliating and people and psychologically damaging. Majority who use the services end up psychologically damaged which is my grandmother refused.

As a teenager my mum once snapped at me and said " will you stop talking to yourself everything at home ( her home country) thinks you are crazy"

At an early age i had to learn my relatives think I am crazy while my grandmother and mother cared more about the gossip than getting me the help I needed to have as a teenager.

I know for a fact if I killed myself successfully my mum and grandmother will never cope with all the family gossip. My relatives gossip relentlessly and actually enjoy seeing other family members fail.

 

[idelttoilfsadness21]

I got away from my parents and my culture in this world for the exact very reason… I am so sorry you have struggled and delt with this for me, I can only just say it doesn't get easier until you leave them or rest for yourself and not caring it is such a double edged sword that shouldn't exist.

 

[Forever Sleep]

I wonder how uncommon it actually is. I definitely talked to myself as a child. Not quite sure when I stopped. Really though, it was just voicing out loud maladaptive daydreaming in a way. I think a lot of people spend time maladaptive daydreaming. We just learn not to vocalise it I suppose.

Are you an only child- may I ask? I think that in part is why I did it. To keep myself company. Lol. Maybe that's why I'm ok on my own now in a way. I had a lot of practice.

Your family don't sound at all helpful though. I'm sorry. Mine can be kind of judgemental but, I'm barely in touch with them now.

 

[EvisceratedJester]

I used to talk to myself

That's pretty normal behaviour and is even considered to be a common aspect of child development. For example, children usually engage in private speech when performing more difficult tasks as a form of self-regulation. Once they become more familiar with the task they stop engaging in it. Talking to yourself is a normal and common behaviour and is generally beneficial for both children and adults. Hell, to go beyond this, in programming, they commonly use this technique known as the "rubber ducky method", which is basically where you explain your code line by line to an inanimate object, such as a rubber duck. This is commonly used when you need to debug your code.

At the end of the day, people will call others crazy for literally anything that doesn't fall within societal norms. I know that people would think that I'm crazy for plenty of things, such as still having imaginary friends as an adult, but that doesn't mean shit. People will call others "weird" and "crazy" for shit like not falling into cis-heteronormative bullshit, for engaging in their culture, and even for things as small as liking things that don't fall within arbitrary gender expectations, like a little boy loving the colour pink. People are generally very bad at telling when something is the result of actual psychological issues versus when it is just the result of people not falling into societal norms. There isn't much of a point in giving a shit about anything that the average person has to say about this type of stuff for this very reason.

You shouldn't let what might happen to your grandmother and mom get in the way of this decision. They cared more about the gossip than about getting you the help you needed. If you ctb then it's partly on them. Any consequences that stem from it are partly because of their own actions. Whether or not you should ctb comes down fully to you and what you believe is the right option. Focus on yourself and what you think is the right choice for you.