Couch 211: The Stoffle couch

An update regarding my situation since around the time I disappeared in the fall. This is a long story, not all that related to my therapy, but I promise if you like drama or plot twists it's worth reading. I swear on my cat's life that everything in this post is 100% true.

There is some discussion of self harm, not in any kind of graphic detail.


Some of you may remember I was getting into dealing with my "trauma," asking myself if it was really that bad, etc. Those are still questions I ask myself, and my T, repeatedly.


But about six months ago I was on a subreddit for self harm content, mostly jokes about self harm though there are some serious posts. It was 4am. I saw a post asking "does anyone else feel guilty if they go a while without self harming because they're such a terrible awful bad person who deserves to be punished?"

I replied with "yeah, turns out that's the childhood trauma." The original poster replied "ditto :c"

If I believed in greater forces in the universe I'd say that was some cosmic foreshadowing.


I recommended some cptsd resources to the original poster and talked a bit about the work I'd done in therapy on shame and guilt and not believing I deserved to be punished.

They responded saying their therapist had beat me to it, and talked a bit about their shame and guilt. The way they wrote about it felt like something I could have written.

I clicked on their profile and found a few older posts. On one they talked about being a terrible person but at least "having the decency" to hate and punish themselves. I replied to this post as well, and my comment began with "are you me?" and saying that I use literally the same phrase. There were a lot of eery similarities and it even occured to me that if I didn't know better it was almost like talking to myself.

Once again, foreshadowing.


Then silence.

We'd been going back and forth and just as things got interesting they stopped replying. Half an hour went by. It was like 5 or 6 am and I hadn't slept.


Half an hour later, their response to my paragraphs delving into trauma and guilt and shame and self harm as penance is "is your name [my name]?" It was first name last initial from before I'd changed my name a year prior, so it wasn't someone in my everyday life at least.

My mind started running through all the people who might have known me from my IOP or the recovery meetings I attend.


I message them, "do I know you?"

I see them typing. My heart is racing in my chest. I just spilled some of my deepest secrets to a stranger who then correctly guessed my real name.

"Well, the good news is I think I figured out why we have so much in common"

A second later

"It's almost like we're twins or something."

My jaw dropped. I responded "[twin's name?]" and got the reply "unfortunately yes."

the only thing I could think to say back was "Jesus ****ing Christ"


My fraternal twin and I had not spoken since 2012, when we were 17 and graduated high school.

She didn't know I'd been self harming in high school, and I didn't know she'd started in college.

She put things together from various autobiographical details in some earlier posts I'd made that were pretty uncommon, mention of a twin, mention of our parents' uncommon occupations, mentions of words our father had used a lot.


So that was fun. It happened when my therapist was gone for a month and when he came back I told him a lot had happened so I didn't have time to be upset, and to just pretend that I'd sulked for at least the first half of the session. Then I handed over printouts of my convo with my sister. My therapist's comments were "this sounds familiar. Wow, this sounds really familiar" and I was like yeah just keep reading. When he got to the big reveal he just put the papers down and stared at me and said "no. Really?" And I was like "yep."


So now my therapist kind of has a trump card whenever I say maybe my childhood wasn't really that bad and I'm just being melodramatic or I made everything up.

Because my twin uses the exact same words and concepts. Despite having grown up in a secular household we both independently compared our guilt to a feeling of having original sin, both independently used the word "penance," both independently decided that different things about us were so shameful and bad and wrong that we were irredeemably bad and deserved to be punished. Oh and we both have BPD and PTSD.

Because y'know our childhood was so great.


* If anyone has a scarily good memory, you may remember that I used different pronouns and gendered language for my sister before. My story isn't changing, she's just trans, which I didn't find out until we started speaking again.

You mean "All the single ladies, all the single ladies! Woo-hoo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo!"

They were probably wondering why you werent doing the dance I always do.

Tomorrow starts week 3 of my backache. Really getting tired of this mess. On threw upside, my neurologist gave me a new med to prevent migraines hopefully.

I love a good crossword, but clues in emoji is a deal breaker for me

i so do need to stop seeing her and get a t who is going to help.it is just so hard

Feeling fragile. Does this happen to anyone else? Whenever I start feeling a little better then I feel like people expect me to just do better and better and not have set-backs, and that feels like pressure that I can't cope with.

Semi regular massages helped a bit with mine.