Self-Injury

[MagicalGhoul]

I've been having a few problems with this...
Actually, I've had these problems off an on since I was eleven, but they recently resurfaced.

I guess I kind of harm myself with my words/thoughts. I have a habit of calling myself out as ugly/fat/stupid/boring/etc. in everyday conversations. I've been yelled at for it by my friends, but I can't help it There have been many times where I've glanced at myself in the mirror and stood, glaring at my reflection, muttering every mean name I can think of.
There's a lot of people in my school who call everyone an their mother a whore/slut. Naturally, I'm one of the victims of this name calling. I've started calling myself a whore/slut, even though I'm constantly being reassured by others that I'm not. I feel like one, and I beat myself up over it.
There was one time that I counted how many negative comments I made about myself just while I was at school. I got to, I think, 140...

There's also the starving myself, which I guess is harmful. I rarely eat breakfast, even when I'm eating normally. Recently I've stopped eating lunch most days, and stopped eating dinner when I can. I say most days because there are some days where my hunger overtakes me and I have to eat; I don't want to, but I can't stand it.
It's just that every time I step on the scale and every time I look in the mirror, I see that I'm no where near thin, and I want to be so badly. Thin is attractive. I don't have control over my face, but I do have control over my weight. Quickest way to get to that is to eat very little and exercise when I can.

And then there would be the physical harm. I've done this for as long as I can remember. I chew on my lip until it bleeds and scratch at the skin around my fingernails without a second thought. There have been times where I ripped of my pinkie toe nail for no reason other than I was mad. When I get mad at myself, I have the habit of digging my fingernails into my skin. When I wear jewelry, especially the kind of little plastic gems on it or necklaces with sharp points, I press it into my skin until it leaves a mark. It makes me feel peaceful. Also, if something cuts me, I scratch open the scab until it scars.

I've tried to stop this, I really have. I want to change my ways of thinking an my ways of dealing with things, but I can't seem to... It drives me mad.

[SabjeBammie]

I did this for almost 3 years. It's a long story... I might tell it later.

I started this when I was completely broken. I couldn't express my feelings and didn't know how to talk about my problems. So I turned my psycological pain in fysical pain. It felt good, it was a relief to cut in my arm (not deep, I never meant to kill myself) this pain was easy. Wrap a bandage around it and done. But how should I fight pain that is inside me? An asperine doesn't work for that.
So, I cutted in my arms.
I did it a lot and 2 years later I started smoking. It calmed me down, but when I couldn't handle it anymore, I pressed them on my arms.
It's been a year since I cutted myself the last time, but I still want to cut myself. But I control myself now.
I tried to stop many times, and everytime I felt bad I cutted again. I was disapointed about the failed quitting-attemped, and cutted again for that reason. It was a horrible circle.
It is an addiction. Those who do it know what I mean, others try to understand, others find this for freaks.

It's been a year now, and I stopped. But I will always carry the scars on my arm along with me. For the rest of my life...
So it's best to never start it. It hurts, and you will always see the scars. The pain feels good, but there are other ways too.

[Bosch]

I never really did self harm but I seen it in high school. What was sad is that some turned it into some sort of fad by carving images or initials into their arms and thinking it was cool. It isn't.

Ignoring those who turn it into a hobby, I think that people do that to relieve stresses they have since they have no real outlet for their pains. Maybe some feel that by hurting themselves their chances of hurting others will be diminished.
If society continues to look down, with derision, on those who do self harm then nothing will ever be done. We can never know the full extent of the pains these people are in.

To AAliceE...words hurt and it is sad that people don't understand or care how those words affect others. I am sorry that their hurtful words are now becoming your own. It's like an echo that won't go away. Don't let that happen because they will follow you all through life, I am trying to rid myself of all the critical remarks I received in life and the older I get the harder it becomes.
I hope you find the peace you need to go on with your life (in other words stop doing stuff to yourself, ok? ;))

[SabjeBammie]

People who do it don't see it as a hobby. It is a way to express yourself, to handle things you can't handle other ways. It is an addiction, not a hobby.

[Bosch]

People who do it don't see it as a hobby. It is a way to express yourself, to handle things you can't handle other ways. It is an addiction, not a hobby.

Maybe there is a misunderstanding here; I know it is not a hobby and I never said it was. I simply said that I ran across those who seem to turn it into some sort of fad and think it is cool to carve stuff into their arms.

Quite frankly I wonder why this wasn't addressed back then?

[kateybear]

I faced self-harm during my depressive state, which has occured twice in the last three and a half years. It's not something I'm going to go in to detail about, but in grade nine it was my way of relieving stress. It calmed me down, it felt good. I'm slightly on the masochistic side. Anyways, I would often feel beyond guilty afterwards, and the one time I showed someone, in hopes that they would try and find a way to help me that I couldn't bring myself to do, they basically ridiculed me. This occured from March until May, and then started up again after I had a miscarriage.

I'm known as the whore of senior year basically right now despite that fact that I haven't been with anyone in a year now because of mistakes that I made in my nine/ten years. It's been this way since then, and honestly that still hurts, and it was one of the many factors that contributed to my second bout of depression, which was during April to July of this year. That brought along the second bout of self harm, this time cuts to my thighs rather than my visible wrists. No one would find out. No one would hate me. I felt... vulnerable, though. It didn't give me the same sense of control as it did the first time. When my friends wanted to go out swimming, I felt disgusting because I was sure they would see my healing cuts and mock me for it. Luckily, this time I had a better support group.

I'm over it again now, but I'm a person of habit, so I can only hope that next time I'll be able to fight it enough.

Besides cutting, I've been harming since I was... 12? I didn't even realize what I was doing to myself then. Pulling my own hair out (for a good period of time I had a bald spot on my head), snapping elastic bands/hair bands against my wrist, biting my lips until they bled, biting my fingernails down until they bled... I've always been the type to hurt myself, and it's reached the point where it's such little things, so often, that I don't even realize it half the time. I scratch off scabs time after time after time. I have scars from that.

But yeah, it's an addiction. I can't just stop - they're habits hardwired in to my body now. I've tried to stop, of course, but I dunno, I just never seem to make it happen.

[LightningDragon]

To me, when someone self-injures themself, they're doing it because they have no other outlet to release grief and/or anger.

I came to this conclusion about a year ago, when I was in a deep depression. I cut and starved myself. Right now, I'm not cutting anymore, but I'm still starving myself. I almost never feel good about myself; I don't think there's anything about me to be proud of. It's like I'm not good enough. I know I shouldn't feel like this, but I do.

And there's the fact that when someone says something about me, I have to examine every minute detail about myself, and, most of the time, I agree with them. I've been called fat; I agree with that. I've been called ugly; I agree with that. I've been called a whire. Guess what? I feel like I am. My brain knows that I'm not any of these things, but I just feel so miserable and so...inadequate.

[SleepyThunder]

I've had experiences in self-injury. I was diagnosed with Severe Anxiety, Depression, and O.C.D. Because I'm not on meds for any of them (long story), it often gets really, really, bad. I have cut before. Not badly, though. I still do.

[Intempestivity]

Self harm is a topic I feel very, very strongly about, because I've been dealing with it for over half of my life.

It never hurt when I did it. It didn't hurt until after, but it was still a way to externalise my feelings. I was told I'm an impulsive harmer as opposed to a ritualistic one, which meant it was much harder for me to take that step back before hurting myself. Ritualistic harmers tend to have a ritual--they have a bad day at school/work, they plan on going home and hurting themselves. They have a specific way of doing it. Impulsive harmers have a bad moment, and their immediate reaction is to cause damage, in any way possible.

When going through recovery, I often felt that there was literally two sides of me battling inside of my self. I visualised them as these amorphous beings inside of my body, one black, one white, and they were right up next to each other. There was an odd, physical pressure when I was fighting the urge to harm myself, which was why I was doing it in the first place--the pressure of holding in my feelings would build up until I couldn't take it any more, and cutting open my flesh would let it spill out. There were times when I would cry until there was nothing left, until I gagged and had a migraine, and there was still that damned pressure.

There are lots of different coping mechanisms, and not every coping mechanism works for every person. It depends on what type of a harmer you are (I'm talking about physical self harm such as banging, cutting and burning; other types of self harm such as disordered eating and negative self-talk have different therapies all together) and what you are feeling at the time. A great resource for alternative coping mechanisms is https://www.healthyplace.com/abuse/self ... lf-injury/. It offers several different coping strategies depending on your current state of mind, as well as links to some ideas for distractions and how to get through a crisis.

I still have some issues with picking and hair pulling when I'm stressed out. It's difficult, because I catch myself doing it only when it hurts--I still have that problem of not feeling it initially, and I now don't even make a conscious decision to pick or pull; I just end up doing it. Around my nailbeds is often a bit scabbed and sore, because that's my usual picking spot, and my eyebrows sometimes go a bit patchy if I've pulled at them too much. I'm lucky that my hair is pretty thickly distributed across my scalp, so I don't have a bald spot even though I pull in the same areas. It's a lot better than when I used to cut and burn on a regular basis, and it's been several years since I last did either of those things.

I saw self harm starting to become faddy when I was at school, and it seems to have become even more so in the last fifteen years. I will never understand people who show off their cuts or who think being a self-harmer is some sort of fashion accessory. It's not something to be proud of and show off. It was something that I hid, and something that caused extreme embarrassment and distress when people found out. It's something that I have spent over half of my life trying to overcome, and I've come a very long way, but I still do get the occasional urge to really damage myself. It was only with a lot of very hard work and years of setbacks that I was able to reach a point where I can fight that urge to consciously hurt myself. Obviously, I need to work on stopping my picking and pulling, but like I said, that's miles away from where I once was.

I will always have these scars on my arms. There will always be people who pick up on these scars when I wear a t-shirt on a warm day. For people who think self-harm is an "ok" or a "good" coping mechanism, I can tell you that it absolutely is not. Do not say that there is nothing wrong with self harm, because there is plenty wrong with it. I have spent over half of my life dealing with this. Over half of my life. It is a very difficult thing to overcome, and it eats away at everything. You constantly worry about how people will perceive you if you they see your scars. You constantly fight a battle with yourself. You not only hurt yourself, but you hurt your friends, your family and all loved ones. You will lose friends because of it. I did.

It's not pretty, it's not cool, it's not clever, it's not a fashion statement, it's not something that makes you deep or unique or introspective. It's ugly. It's painful. And it takes over every facet of your life.

I have nothing but respect for people who genuinely struggle with this, and I hope that you are working towards recovery. It's a long and difficult journey, but it is worth it. I do hope that anyone struggling with it checks out that link I posted, and I wish you the very best in your journey to recovery.

[VoodooChild]

I used to self-harm myself, mostly because as a child I was sexually abused and it caused me to hate myself. I used to cut and scratch a lot but now it's very rarely and only if I'm under a lot of emotional stress, my husband helped me with it. A lot of people didn't care cause they thought I was doing it for attention but a lot of times I will do it while I sleep, so no it's not for attention I used to think that it kept my emotions under control. Turned out it just helped me hide it from myself so I wouldn't have to deal with it and it just got worse, self-harm does NOT make it better but talking about your emotions with someone you love and trust DOES.