SELF HARM
What is self harm? How do i deal with it?
Self-harm is when you hurt yourself as a way of dealing with very difficult feelings, old memories, or overwhelming situations and experiences. The ways you hurt yourself can be physical, such as cutting yourself. They can also be less obvious, such as putting yourself in risky situations, or not looking after your own physical or emotional needs.
A N G E R
After self-harming, you might feel better and more able to cope for a while. However, self-harm can bring up very difficult feelings and could make you feel worse.If you self-harm, you may feel embarrassed or ashamed about it. You might be worried that other people will judge you or pressurise you to stop if you tell them about it. This may mean that you keep your selfharming a secret. This is a very common reaction, although not everyone does this.
There are no fixed rules about why people self-harm. For some people, it can be linked to specific experiences, and be a way of dealing with something that is happening now, or that happened in the past. For others, it is less clear. If you don’t understand the reasons for your selfharm, it’s important to remind yourself that this is OK, and you don’t needt o know this in order to ask for help.
"I used to cut myself just so I could feel pain. [It] let me know I was real and I wasn't in a dream."
Ways of self-harming can include:
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Cutting yourself
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Poisoning yourself
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Over-eating
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Under-eating
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Burning your skin
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Inserting objects into your body
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Hitting yourself or walls Overdosing
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Exercising excessively
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Scratching and hair pulling
You are beautiful. And you're worth more than jarming yourself.
- Demi Lovato
Hey you. Yeah, you. The one with the broken smile and the scars upon your skin.
You're beautiful and you can do this.
- Unknown
Sometimes people talk about self-harm as attention-seeking. If people make comments like this, it can leave you feeling judged and alienated. In reality, most people keep their self-harm private, and it can feel very painful to have your behaviour misunderstood in this way.If you do self-harm as a way of bringing attention to yourself, remember that you deserve a respectful response from those around you, including from medical professionals.
Take a look at this video which discusses how to deal with your / or a person your are around self harm issues.
We hope this helped x