depression help: Cutting and self harm. - Help.com

If you are contemplating suicide, hurting yourself, or you are seriously depressed: please, seek professional help!

Call this hotline (1-800-273-8255) operated by our friends at the
Suicide Prevention Lifeline, anytime, for free, professional, and
confidential assistance. While other Help.com users are likely to reply
to your post, please make sure you understand that your use of Help.com
falls under our TOS.

Note: I’m a robot that the Help.com staff created. If this response is in error, I apologize, please ignore it.

This will sound like I’m being a jerk, and maybe I am, but you can’t stop without a lot of willpower. Once you start… in most cases, that’s the end. The longer you do it, the harder it is to stop. Just like any other addiction, only this one isn’t chemical, so the only one to blame for it is you.

yeah i know i’m the only one to stop it.
but i’m not sure if i want to stop?
is there something wrong with me because of that? I don’t know :(

I feel bad for you. Cutting can be very dangerous and you really need to stop. Also, Therapists do not tell anyone it is illegal and they will be caught. Belive me therapy will help.

If you don’t want to stop, then it doesn’t matter. Nothing on Earth will be able to stop you. Is there something wrong with you? Well, yeah. If there weren’t, you wouldn’t be cutting in the first place.

yes but the therapists will tell parents if the behaiviour is dangerous.
during the therapy i had told them i cut again and they said “your daughter has cut again” when we sat down together.

The thing is, I have this problem where I feel realy guilty when people help me. I want to be helped but I feel guilty like they could be doing something else or what they might be thinking of me.
I know its a therapists job to listen but I can’t help being like I’m such a bother..like they could be helping another person with way bigger problems during the time they are listening to me.

If you tell your therapist you don’t want them to talk to your parents, then legally, they cannot. if it’s a school therapist… well, they’re basically the people who flunked out of college, so that’s all they have left. Go to a real therapist. Maybe a psychiatrist.

yes i went to the school counsellor and they talked and suggested i go to my gp to get a referal to a centre..so they are therapists that specialise in dealing with children and teens.
I don’t know..some of me wants to tell someone but some of me don’t.
thanks for your help so far =]

http://help.com/post/291863-ok-to-the…

Wow, I’ve done everything you listed there (cut when bored, cut without really wanting to, cutting upper thighs instead of arms, bandaged cuts so people could notice and help me). I’ve also said that I’ve stopped cutting, but until this day I haven’t completely stopped… I just do it less and less every time… which is a good thing :)
As long as there’s a part of you, even a SMALL part of you, that wants to stop, you will be able to overcome this :) Google “things to do instead of cutting” and you’ll come across endless lists of things to do. You should give them all a try, they really helped. Try squeezing ice in your hand next time you feel upset (it hurts), or snap a rubber band against your wrist. You’ve probably heard these things, but give them a try, and if you’ve already tried them, then google more things to do instead of cutting and try those.
It’ll be over soon, you just have to try a little and wait :)

Therapy doesn’t work if you lie…as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Therapy seems repetitive when you’re in a bad place and don’t take the steps necessary to progress. You have to cover the same ground over and over again until you’re willing to move on.

Therapists are good about establishing and protecting trust, but you have to meet them half way. You have to say to your therapist exactly what you’ve said here. Since you’re sixteen, in most places that means you can expect absolute and legally protected confidentiality as long as you’re not threatening to hurt someone else or kill yourself. Even if you live someplace where you’re still considered a minor, or you parents insist on talking to your therapist, you just need to be up front and say “I really don’t want you to talk to my parent’s about this, can you agree to that?” and they will be honest with you.

I was bulemic for years when I was in my teens. It’s a similar behavior in a lot of respects…self-harming, purgative, unsettlingly casual and routine, easy to hide, and very hard to stop. Generally, both are a behavior intended to avoid acknowledging pain, shame, loneliness, abuse, or other feelings that are so pervasive and painful that your brain makes you numb to protect you from being aware of them. I did get better. I haven’t had any bulemic behaviors in over a decade. I still think of myself as a “recovering bulemic” because every once in a while I’ll have a down period and some of the old thoughts and insecurities and urges to hurt myself will creep up on me, but I know how to deal with them now and have things pretty well under control. The process of eradicating the behavior completely took about two years.

Therapy helped. Some other things helped too.
It sounds crazy, but try and find inside yourself as strong an irrational reason NOT to cut as your irrational impulse to cut is. For me, since I would purge when I thought my body was ugly and fat, I got in the habit of stopping myself by remembering that bulemic behaviors would rot my teeth, and they would fall out, and then I would be ugly. It wasn’t rational, but self-destructive behaviors don’t happen in rational moments, so it can help to fight fire with fire. If you can gain that first small toe-hold of power over the compulsive ritual, it’s a really really good start.

At those times when you fail and revert to the behavior, pay close attention to what you’re feeling. Sometimes I found it easier to acknowledge my feelings from a detached perspective. Be as thorough and precise as you can. What are you feeling that’s bad, and just as importantly what are you feeling that’s good. You’re obviously a bright kid. If you can observe your state in the moment, you can start finding new ways to resolve the bad feelings and replace the good feelings with non-self-harming means (that’s another step where therapists can be really helpful, but only if you are as honest as you can be.)

Question your assumptions. Question them like a five-year old. Be relentless. Answer one question and then question that answer. Self-abuse is a rut, it’s something that we do when we feel powerless to affect our situation any other way. You have power. You have the ability to do anything you want to do. There are a set of assumptions in your head that have convinced you that this is not so. YOu need to weed out those assumptions and attack them until they stop holding you down. Again, another place where a therapist can help.

XenoDragon is right…in the end it does boil down to “the only way to stop is to stop”, but hopefully these tools will help you a little.

It’s ok to think about not stoping, because quitting is hard, because cutting gives you relief, because cutting is (wild guess) a form of punishment to you; if you make yourself do it, you say you hate yourself..

And the bandaging thing, might just have been a cry for help - if your confused and stuff your mind makes you do dumb things just for some sign of life, for someone to care for just a second or think about you.

Maybe I’m completly wrong, maybe that doesn’t matter: you can stop cutting, or to be really rude “you need to stop” but you need new ways to express yourself; less harmful ones.

Recent post; has some great ideas to take your mind of cutting: http://help.com/post/295583-i-need-so…

i guess the point of you cutting is to get attention the way i see it, you seeking attention, nothing more nothing less… maybe being more friendly and stuff will do the work…

The cuts will leave permant scars. You will be limited with what u can wear in the future if u continue

I cut myself once, and my friend found out and made me promise never to again. After that, I found that I physically couldn’t cut myself, as I was bound by my promise. However, I realise that this is different, as I only cut myself once, and also that I value promises more highly than many people do.

Anonymous wrote:
The cuts will leave permant scars. You will be limited with what u can wear in the future if u continue

Yes that is true, because we let people judge and people do get scared, disgusted, sad when you show your scars - and at a workplace it’s a big no to show scars (it’s worse then having tattoos to most employers). So, welcome to a life of long sleeves and pants..

However, when I go on a holiday I sometimes think “it’s my life, it’s something form the past: accept it or look the other way, ask me if you’re interested”