Coping with or dealing without Self-Harm

I live in an anxious/depressive personality, and under the kinds of pressures in my current life it means I have one or two classic symptoms, including persistent thoughts of self-harm.

Self harm can come from a number of mental places, and can manifest in different ways. In my case, it mostly comes from the emotional pain of loneliness and feelings of abandonment, coupled with persistent failure and self-consciousness. So far, lately, I have fully resisted the urge to self-harm. (Yay!)

This website includes a pretty comprehensive list of causes, for other people who also experience this pathology.

I went online to find some coping strategies, and they mostly involve phonecalls to hotlines and bootstrap mood levitation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hotlines are an essential resource for a certain range of emotional and mental difficulties. Mental health professionals also work really well for anyone who can manage to convince them that something is actually wrong. I have tried a handful of times to get professional mental help, but they inevitably conclude that my case is not severe enough to warrant the time or expense. I believe them. I am mostly functional professionally and socially. But either my controlled affect disguises how near the edge I am, or I am more normal than I think. *shrugs*

Bootstrap mood levitation is a common coping strategy suggested by anyone who simply cannot remember what it feels like to be in pain. Telling a depressed person to "cheer up" is unarguably on the "not helpful" side of possible responses. It's not as bad as telling her or him to "go to hell" but it's still further from a long, reassuring hug.

So I'm offering this to the silent internet. Within the last fifteen hours I managed not to cut myself through the following strategies:

1) Maintaining an awareness of where the pain really is. The urge to hurt physically as a manifestation of emotional pain can happen when the emotional pain is unidentified or not localized. I figure out what really hurts, and let the pain stay there, even if it means a list of twenty or more items against which I'm totally helpless.

2) Distraction. Thoughts of self harm are often persistent and obsessive, like an anxiety attack during which the same snippet of conversation replays and replays, causing more pain each time. It takes a lot of effort, and it can take an eternity to see results in the immediate moments, but I reach out my mind for something else that is not a knife, or a match - something genuinely comforting if I can find it, or something comical. Our minds tend to switch into mood modes, though, which means that when you feel a certain way you have little recollection of feeling any other way. It's best to have this strategy prepared, and to rotate distractions. (If you consistently use the same thought to distract yourself, it will become associated with the anxiety/depression/pain you use as a remedy, and can eventually become a trigger.).

3) Dissociate. I Imagine that the pain is a separate thing, even if it means imagining that I am not in my body. From somewhere else, I observe the pain objectively and try to see that it is beautiful. This is NOT EASY. It's not a switch I can flick to suddenly not feel. This kind of imagining takes years of practice, and I'm not very good at it yet, but however far I can get, it helps me that much.

4) Blog. ^this post is a coping strategy. It's not a hotline, and it won't offer validation or acceptance. It's the digital equivalent of screaming my pain into a hole. You remember that fairy tale of the three ravens whose sister was forbidden to speak for three years, three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours to bring her brothers back from their enchantment, but whole time the evil queen was stealing her babies and blaming her? She could not defend herself, or even cry, so she went into the gardens and dug a hole and screamed all her pain into it.
I feel silenced by my lifestyle, by my situation, by my own personality, by my body. So I scream into this hole. And then get back to reading.

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