Why do YOU self harm?
 

so i know people self harm for different reasons, whether it be because they want to feel something, or whether it be a way of release, etc.
so why is it that YOU self harm? what does it do that makes it so important ur unable to stop?
for me, its because i hate myself and in the pain i find comfort. it feels good to hurt myself. it takes away some of the emotional pain. is there anyone else who feels this way?
i am not saying SH is a good thing or in anyway glamourising or encouraging it, just wondering what the others out there are feeling becoz no one i know does it and i have no one to speak to. i feel very lonely :(

hey this site is here so you dont have to feel lonely.
I guess when I started it was because I was numb. I was so depressed I didnt feel real, but I new the pain was real, it made me real it made me know I existed. I felt like such a ghost in my own life.

But skip ahead a few years and over the last few years I say i did it because I hated myself, and recently it was because I hated myself for not respecting myself and because I feel lonely being stuck at home all day

It relieves anxiety. Blood helps me relax. I think i am a bad person so I feel like I deserve to punish myself. I hate how it calms me down so much...Such a bad road to go down...

:sad: :blush:

it calms me down, it gives me purpose.
guess that sounds strange
i punish myself with it i guess.

Hi hun , hopefully your arent feeling as lonely as there are alot of times when you think ' am the only one who does this' when really alot of people on this board could have done in the past / or present , so try not to feel as lonely.

As far as the reasons why i cut, i do it for a number of reasons normally emotions am finding hard to deal with eg, angry, sadness, hopeless, depression if am frustrated sometimes if am bored sometimes i use it as a punishment alot of the time it is for control. These are only a few though pretty much every emotion i have come across i have sh because of that emotion even when am happy.

Hope your okay, feel free to pm in you wanna.

serveral reasons...

1. It's something that I feel (or at least used to feel) that I could control
2. It's a form of self-punishment for things, and to punish aeras of the body that feel like have betrayed us
3. In an attempt to make the body disgusting and awful so that noone would ever want to be near it and so noone could hurt it/us
4. To feel that people care and that we matter - as we generally only feel loved or cared about when hurt/ill/injured
5. As a sort of grounding method for flashbacks and dissociation

How terrible is it that I can't give a straight reason why I self harm?

1. To control something
2. To punish myself
3. To justify the pain I'm feeling
4. To see the blood run
5. Endorphins?

Thats not terrible, i often think that. Everyone has a 'reason' you just may not know your yet.

I think it releases mental pain, its easier to feel physical pain than mental pain. But i often think i dont have a reason.

*hugs* to everyone.

Most of the time I SI to make myself a better person. It's like, if I punish myself when I do something bad, or even feel bad, I'll not do it again. But when I do it wrong again, I want to hurt myself worse. So it's not a good idea… it just never feel like anything will fix me besides hurting myself.

And sometimes I just hurt inside. Like an deep ache in the center of my chest and it lessens when I hurt myself. It moves to the surface. I think it might be like what you were saying about the emotional pain stuff.

o hunny dont feel lonely!! i feel the same way,,but ive come to a point where i just keep telling myself that i dont need it and dont like it, my heart says no but my mind says yes..its confusing as you probably know..but dont feel lonely kid!! you can definatley talk to me whenever you would like k?? (:

I know that there are a lot of reasons for my cutting, but I dont know them all.

relief of emotions, emotional pain, stress, self hatred, boredom, punishment, to feel...

to release whatever is built up inside of me or to justify my pain (I'm hurting because there's blood- see) or sometimes to punish myself.

Hope you're ok and not feeling to lonely *hugs*
xxx

You're not alone, hun - we're all here for you.
There are so many threads like these about why do 'you' self-harm. You could find other people's answers there too.
I self-harm to get rid of tension, stress, pressure, to feel something when I am 'numb' and 'empty', to see blood, to feel 'alive', to gain control. Lots of other reasons too, but those tend to be my main ones.

don't feel alone :) i agree with you about how its easier, so so so much easier, to feel physical pain rather than emotional pain.
i guess my reasons are:
1. it's something i have control over, entirely my decision.
2. i feel bad for the things i think/the situation i got into, i feel i deserve to be hurt.
3. it's become a habit.

I really struggle with my reason.

The closest I can get apart from that it's now become a habit I crave is that at the point of cutting it's cos I want to show people how much I'm hurting. I don't tell people, I cover it up but at that moment I'm sure I'm craving them to find out.

You're not alone. *Offers hugs* Just to say - I'm here if you ever want to talk or anything.

What I get out of self-harm has changed a bit over the years.. when I first started it was really just that I was very unhappy and self-harming took the focus off that.. it made me feel calmer and made it easier to sleep at night.

I stopped, and started again a year or so later - I was 16 - and then, it was mainly about validation. I didn't tell anyone, but I had a lot of stuff going on in my life and I was hurting a lot and seeing how much I could hurt myself on the outside.. it was confirming to myself that my emotional pain was real, what I had been through was 'a big deal'.

Then stopped for a good while and when I started again it was at a time when I was feeling worse than I ever have, and it was all very messed up and a case of "bargaining" with - myself, I suppose - "If I do X, I won't have to kill myself" and so on, which was again, a way to take the focus off all the negative stuff, the result of an incredible amount of hatred directed towards myself, and kind of seemed like something I "had" to do and something that everyone wanted me to do..

And now I'm trying to stop. And I can kind of see that it isn't actually going to help with any of those feelings in the long run.

Started with frustration and feeling depressed, nowadays it's to feel like i'm in control of something, something nobody can take away from me, ever, it's mine, but also to get rid of feelings of hopelessness and frustration, sometimes anger.

There are several reasons why I SI
1)Control
2)Relieves anxiety and stress
3)I feel I need to be punished and thats how I punish myself

I made a first cut when my dad abused me. He didnt beat me that hard or anything, but I got really scared. He used to do that more often when I was little, so I remembered everything and got so freaked out. Self harm made me feel calm, in control. After that there were a lot of reasons, most of them were stress, numbness, anger..

Hey,
my answer? - Because i can, it's my choice.

Beki
xx

Because I become obsessive with the idea of it and then to make the thoughts go away I carry out the act of doing it.
But also because I feel the need to punish myself, for whatever reason I can think of.
And sadly, because I like to see it ): but I don't purely do it for this reason, this is sort of an after effect of the other two reasons.

I started cause i didnt know what else to do..
I do it to get a release/relief from anxiety/sadness/overwhelming feelings.
And also its punishment if im mad at myself or feeling im a bad person and deserve it.
I think its also validating my feelings to myself and gaining some control over something.

For me its a habit I can't shake
I have suffered from a pain condition called fibromyalgia for my entire adolescence,
I can't control that constant pain so I use a method of pain I've illusioned myself into thinking I can control.
Other than that i use it to ease overwhelming feeling be them negative or positive

I originally started cutting to punish myself when I got a bad mark or I felt I didn't do something right.

I continued to cut because when I had panic attacks it would calm me down... and when I felt like I wanted to kill myself it also calmed me.

1 month free as of today...

It started as an accident. I was having a bad night (moody pre-teen with a stepfather, there were a lot of 'bad nights') and decided to take a bath. It was a good time to shave my legs. I simply caught the razor at the wrong angle along my ankle. What I felt wasn't pain, it was everything but. I took note about this feeling. The feeling of feeling things I had locked away, but being able to completely block out the actually physical pain of what I was doing...

Fast forward 10 years later (wow, it's amazing how time gets away from us,) I'm addicted to that feeling. I've been in therapy since Oct. 2006. I'm getting help, but I still do it. My therapist knows I still do it, but now it's for the old reason and different ones. For reasons previously mentioned and sometimes I just 'have' to. Not for the release, not for any reason other than because.

I self harmed in other ways but never cutting, when I first started cutting it was purely out of curiosity but the reasons for doing it were the same, to block out the emotions I was feeling at the time.

Now I self harm for many other reasons, it can vary from punishement to pure boredom, i've always liked the feeling and now i've grown to like the scars..really like them.

No idea.

Because I don't deserve to be happy.

It's pretty pathetic for me really: I began it to fit in *sighs*

Now? Well now I don't know how to live without it...a few months ago someone tried to get me to talk about what I genuinelly felt about things, not hiding behind a front just me speaking and I couldnt...because I express myself through my different SH whenever I'm scared or angry or pretty much any other emotion it is my release...and that's when I realised how dependant I am on it.

This is exactly the same for me.

I've reached the point of feeling like life is going nowhere. I feel like I have nothing to live for, no reason to live, because my life has been stuck in the same loop for the past five years and I don't see it changing in the future. I started to SI because it was something different; a new adventure I could look forward to. It took my mind off of the auto-pilot setting it's been on for a while now.

~To punish myself
~It calms me down

Most of the time I don't remember cutting, but when i do know i am doing it, it is usually through self hatred, to distract from bad thoughts and becoming addicted to it

I started SI because of guilt, I guess. I hurt so much all the time, and felt like I had no reason to hurt. (Who was I to hurt so much? So many people are worse off than I am.) So, I gave myself a reason to keep hurting. (That probably sounds increadably selfish... Sorry.)

I usually do it to calm myself down. It gives me a sense of control when stuff is going wrong.

i cut because i started not to feel anything and it felt good to be able to control how i felt and how much pain i put myself though and it wasnt up to the ppl that teased me at school

I SI because it makes me feel better. My kids get me upset. My husband gets mad. Or my past comes up and this is the only way I can let it go. Cutting, burning or slaming my head stops the pain I am feeling. There is no SI pain. That is the weird thing about all of this.

My reasons:
.SI calms me down when I am anxious
. It's something I can control
.Physical pain is easier to deal with than emotional pain, and blocks out emotional pain
. I cut/hit/bang my head to punish myself
. My emotional pain is valid when I SI.

To calm myself down I guess.

I self harm to "break" the cycle of panic. It calms me down when I can't get a grip.

Because I hate myself. Because I could never ever hate anyone else more than I hate me.
Because my mum openly expresses how she never wanted me...how she had an abortion booked but my nana stopped her.
Because an ex used to hit me.
Because I feel isolated.
Because I feel dead inside and the pain reminds me Im alive....for a breif moment in time Im alive.
Because what else do I have?

its a way to break a pattern.
break the panic, break the flashbacks, break the fear.
rip attention away from things i don't want to focus on.

It's a release for me when I'm feeling a really strong emotion that I don't know how to deal with. If I feel a panic attack coming on, I'll do it to prevent it. I especially do it when there's a situation that I can't control. I get so frustrated that I want to scream, run, punch stuff, basically I completely lose it. (I can't really run around my house screaming and punching stuff though, can I?) More and more often though I find myself doing it as a sort of punishment. If I'm feeling really low about myself I'll do it.

it's because i miss my best friend

after self harming for 12 years I dont know why i do it anymore, to cope i guess but without it i feel like i cant breathe like the whole sky is faling in on me.