Content warning – this report is about self-harm

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most important parts of my recovery was a support service I attended for people who self-harm. There were activities every day: the main support group, a woman-only art group, an art group for everyone, and occasionally there would be a raki practitioner or something similar.  

The art group invited me to the launch of an Arts Council funded project which also played a big part in my recovery, in a different way. 

The most valuable part was the main support group. Every week we would go through worksheets on different topics to do with self-harm. The topics were usually an emotion. One week it would be anger, the next sadness, then maybe frustration or happiness. The reason for this is a lot of self-harm happens when someone is failing to cope – the trigger is often an emotion.  

The Mental Health Foundation has a great diagram to explain this: 

 

To illustrate – I would feel overwhelmed in a social situation and begin mentally beating myself up (emotional suffering and overload); I’d become increasingly self-conscious about what people were thinking about me and rush to hide (panic); in private I would try to calm down but that frequently took too long and the only thing I knew that could defuse the emotional overload was to physically injure myself (self-harm); the valve would release, sometimes actually sagging with relief as the emotional pressure leaked out (temporary relief); but then would come the need to hide it and the weight of knowing I’d done it again (shame/grief); leading to the bitchy voice in my head reminding myself what I’d done and needing to punish myself for the act (emotional suffering)… And so on. 

This is a common example of why I’d do it but not the only one. 

At one point, I felt almost an addiction to the endorphin rush that follows the act of physical harm. It could be the only good feeling I’d experience in vast swaths of time, and I felt like I needed that pick me up. I was at university when I was harming with that level of frequency, and I’d hate that I was becoming a stereotypical teenage girl full of angst. This only served to fuel the emotions I was seeking a release from. 

By the time I was attending the support group, I wasn’t doing it for a boost, I was doing it to force a break from the emotional pressure, cloudiness and fear I was experiencing during my homelessness (becoming, during and immediately after). I found that harm gave me head space and clarity. It was a tool. A coping mechanism.  

And that is what self-harm is – a coping mechanism. It’s not about dying; it’s about wanting to live.  

For me, it also wasn’t “a cry for help” (a vile phrase). I didn’t want help. I wanted to be capable and self-reliant. Sometimes people would see marks from the harm and see that as evidence of a cry for help – it was more often that it was hot and being fully covered up creates its own set of problems, or the injury would be on a part of my body that wasn’t easy to cover, such as my face. Not much thought goes into how to deal with other people’s emotions when you are scrambling around trying to find a way to function, frequently out of fear of how people are viewing your disfunction. 

And therein lies another problem. 

Fear of other people causes some of the emotional suffering and some of the shame. Self-harm is bracketed by other people. I’ve never met someone who has experience of self-harm who hasn’t got a scar from the treatment of others directly relating to their self-harm. 

One of my scars is from a psychiatrist who told me I was too intelligent to be self-harming. 

Learning how to manage my emotions was a great step in reducing the frequency of my self-harm. The group I attended also made a point of never telling us to stop self-harming. We were taught how to do things safely – cleaning blades, wound/burn care, the impact of things like head/wrist banging, when to seek medical help… It was accepting and judgement free. We each listened and empathised. We weren’t afraid of the impact of our stories on people who were as vulnerable as we were – we knew that talking about it wasn’t contagious, it was healing.  

The group doesn’t exist anymore – the local CCG pulled the funding pre-COVID – and I’m not in touch with anyone from the group but I do think of them regularly. The person whose family kept some of my belongings safe when I was sofa surfing. The person who served in the Bosnian conflict. The older lady who had an extreme method of self-harm and really liked the shop Bon Marche. The person who ran the group and never got annoyed at me for bitching about the tree (I’d draw a hole in the ground most weeks). 

Understanding emotions and not being afraid of them has really helped me. I’m not afraid to feel, it’s only a shame that some other people are afraid of seeing emotions. At times I want to spell out what the alternative to crying or having a bit of a frustration tantrum is, and ask them what they think I should do. It seems everyone ought to have an education about emotions to better understand them when they feel them, and when they witness them in others. 

It seems that we all have ways of coping which are damaging – smoking, getting pissed, eating too much ice cream, gambling – but some are viewed as acceptable and others not. It’s difficult to understand how that distinction is made when coping behaviours such as smoking are harmful to more than the smoker, and those who self-injure are only causing damage to their own bodies.  

There are times I slip, when I need a more reliable and quick solution to controlling how I feel, and I will harm myself. But this is not something I do lightly – I fully understand the consequences but at times it simply is the best tool I have available to cope. And I’m not ashamed of that.