My Story

So, I have been a self-harmer for 10 years now, and I have never really understood why I engaged in such behaviour. My self-harm has taken a number of different forms. I have suffered from anorexia to the point of hospitalisation, I have abused alcohol and I cut myself with razor blades. Whilst I can say, I no longer feel the need to starve myself, the last two forms of self-harm I have mentioned are still very current in my life.

I have had a lot of ‘therapy’ over the years. Some good and some bad, but it really doesn’t matter how much therapy you have. Self-acceptance and acceptance of life experiences you have had that you may want to forget, comes from within. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter how much talking you do, and how much people try to help you because you have to want to help yourself. Don’t get me wrong, talking is great. I love to talk. Not so much about feelings, I am pretty rubbish at that, but talking is great. I have always struggled to open up and talk about my feelings in a ‘therapy’ type setting (and I put therapy in inverted commas because I don’t really like the word and the connotations it has) but I have been lucky enough to encounter some incredible individuals both in my school years and at University, who have given me their support and their time and their care when they really had no obligation to. I have trusted these people, and really opened up to them and I can safely say that they have saved my life. Without their generosity, kindness and patience I really think I would have given up on my life a long time ago. Over the years, and with the help of these lovely people, I have learnt to be better at letting my guard down, and being open and honest about my feelings in my meetings with mental health professionals, which is definitely paying off.

Yesterday I had a meeting with a woman I have been working with over the last 6 months, who has been helping me manage my problem with alcohol. We were talking about self-harm. Up until 9 months ago, I had not cut myself for 2 years.  That is not to say that I had not ever had the urge to in those 2 years, but I had managed to resist. I would not be able to pinpoint a single reason to explain why I started to cut again, because I think it was something that had been building up over a long period of time, but I do know that the second of those 2 years was a very tough one. It felt like one negative experience after the next. Everything became too much and I lost all sense of self-belief and self-worth, and there wasn’t even much of that there to begin with! I was no longer able to resist those urges to cut myself. During the last 6 months my self-harm has worsened. There have been periods of no cutting or drinking at all and I have made a lot of progress in a number of ways, but the cuts have got deeper and when I drink, I get drunker. Every time I cut now, I know that I am going to cut so deep that I will need medical attention and to be stuck back together somehow.  I also know that I cannot carry on like this. Acknowledging that things need to change is a big deal and a step in the right direction, but unfortunately breaking a 10 year old destructive, yet self-soothing, habit is easier said than done and until about 30 hours ago, I was not convinced I was going to be able to succeed.

So, this meeting I had yesterday turned out to be something of a revelation and marks a real turning point in my attitude towards self-harm and how to recover from it. Self-harm is an incredibly complex behaviour to engage in, and people do it for many different reasons. Even as somebody who self-harms, I think it is very difficult to understand why you do it. But, if you want to stop doing it, you really have to understand why it is you do it. This is why yesterday was such a revelation for me. I finally understood my reasons for cutting myself and something in my head shifted.