How To Stop Self Harming

Here are some tips about how you might stop self injuring or self harming. It's very important you understand what it means for you to self harm. How is it useful? How does it help and what does it mean for you in the first place? Remember back to when you started and what age you were and think about what was going on for you at the time.

Was there an experience that people were behaving to you in a certain way that you didn't feel in control of the situation? People that feel huge amounts of rage or feel particularly negative towards themselves or hate themselves sometimes use self harm as a way of coping, managing or even expressing those feelings. Do you do that by cutting yourself or burning? Some people will scrape at their skin or rub at their skin with scouring pads and billows or take overdoses but not as a means of taking their life, but more as a means of changing the way they feel. There are a number of different ways people self harm.

Know the way you do and if that has changed recently, has it gotten more dangerous for you? Are there times when you cut that are too potentially damaging? What do you do with the injury? Do you look after the injury or let it get worse? But if you want to stop self harming, what is making you want to stop at this point? Has it been noticed by other people? Are you pressured by other people to stop? Or is it something that you really want to do for yourself? That you want to find another way of coping that isn't going to be harmful. And if is, then there are certainly some suggestions for how to go about that. It's very important that you understand it's very unlikely that you'll be able to stop self harming if it's something you've been doing to cope.

Self harm is just a symptom of a problem so get some help about self harming. Speak to a counsellor or a psychotherapist. You can do that through your GP or a youth counselling service.

And the counsellor will keep confidential what you talk about and you'll seem less at risk. You can call somewhere like Childline and you can call Childline up until the age of 18 and they don't need to know anything about you in terms of your name or your details and you can talk confidentially about what's going on with you. People tend to have a cycle of how they self harm.

People start to feel a certain way and there will be a trigger event, so trigger event will mean that a particular feeling is triggered off. And that might lead you to feeling the need to punish yourself or hurt yourself by self harming. Straight after harming yourself, you might feel a particular way and consider what that is.

Often people feel much calmer because the body releases natural endorphins and they calm the body. But straight after that, people often end up feeling ashamed of what they've done or angry about what they've done and they'll often end up feeling worse rather than better. Self harm is a coping mechanism but it's only a short term coping mechanism and so it won't help in the long term.

Other ways of helping you include what's called self harm techniques. Rather than cutting or burning or punching walls or whatever it was that you were doing to self harm, you could try holding ice in your hand and really holding it tight, because the experience of holding ice is painful but doesn't injure your body. One of the most useful techniques is trying to put off self harm.

Just think about putting off for five minutes when you feel the urge to self harm, and then try to extend that to quarter of an hour, half an hour, even a day. And when you put off self harm, you might want to really think about finding a way of expressing the feelings that have led you to self harm. Write them down or talk or phone up a friend or Childline and have a confidential talk with one of the counsellors.

Or speak to a family member who wants to support you. Or do some art. Or find a way of talking out, expressing what you're feeling, and that will