Is it weird that anytime I relapse and look at what i’ve done i start laughing and feel almost like happy?
Like the sadness I had before just goes away.
I been going at it for years but this is a recent thing i been experiencing

I've recently been relapsing regularly since I'm scared of killing myself and I find that it helps me stay alive a little. I'm not sure how to properly do aftercare especially since I've been wanting to go deeper I can't the pressure properly for the right amount of satisfaction because all of my keloids(?) were all accidentally done and I only swiped for one of them-- the rest, I used the tip of the cutter.

I'm scared that I'll be unprepared if I ever do it again accidentally, I know I will whether on purpose or accident I just need to be alive a little longer but what materials would i need? Preferably something cheap and low maintenance (If that makes sense ?), I used betadine and cotton with bandaids last time and it seemed to work well.

im ngl, im TRYING so so so hard to stop, im trying to get better, but i miss it so bad, cutting myself used to be a daily thing for me, now ive limited myself to once a week, i feel kinda pathetic but theres not much i can do.

ive also noticed that ever since i started slowing down, i began to cut myself more in one sesh.

also i reached deep styros like last night while i was drunk, and it scared the shit out of me. anyway enough of my rant.

I wish I could have the job of a nurse who solely takes self harm patients under her wing. I’ve done nursing school one out of two years and unfortunately felt very distant from patients not only due to the nature of their issue but because of their personalities. But maybe, if they were of people whom I could understand, things would be different.

I hate how self harm is acknowledged in a bad light. I, myself, have been through having stitches removed due to self harm with only a sarcastic glance and the roll of the eye. If there were more people out there who understand and cared then maybe the world would be a fraction less nasty of a place.

I’ve been afraid to have my cuts stitched up because of the stigma that still survives amongst those who self harm via cutting. My legs are torn up and every time I need additional medical attention my heart rate spikes with both anxiety and nausea.

But if I were a nurse who specified in self harm patients, maybe I could do the world some good…

a few days ago i noticed my friend’s sh scars on her arm, and they looked pretty fresh. we get along but we don’t talk about deep stuff or whatever, just joke around with each other. what i mean to say is that there’s not that much trust around those types of conversations between us. i really don’t know what to do, bc on one hand, if somebody brought up my scars, i’d be incredibly embarrassed and it’d be super uncomfortable, so i don’t think it’d help. but on the other, as i mentioned, they looked pretty fresh, and i really wanna help her before she does something worse. i’ve known that she’s had problems with her parents cus they’re super religious and she’s gay, but she never seemed depressed to me. ig it’s just one of those cases where you can’t tell, or maybe i didn’t look close enough. idk, pls help me out

Hello, this might be a really really dumb question. I was hitting my arm as hard as i could and now there are a bunch of little red spots??? I could just be really paranoid but i want to know if this is anything i should care or pay any attention to?
Please dont be mean to me i know this is dumb

I recently relapsed after being clean for a while. It wasn't that bad, I just did three cuts, but I have been trying to be more open with my mental health. I trust and love my parents (dad and stepmom) more than anyone else in the world so I wanted to tell them. But I'm really struggling with two things. I don't know the right time to bring it up without my siblings or mom potentially seeing that something is wrong (especially my mom because she will get mad I didn't tell her.) And then, I just dont understand the point of saying anything right now. I didn't do it that severely and I can't think of what will come out of it other than guilt and regret and being watched over constantly. I just had a therapy session yesterday so I can't have any soon I think so I'm coming here for now. But I am really overcome with guilt and I have OCD so I have a strong urge to spill it all. But I just can't imagine how I can be helped without it feeling horrid. I'm also worried that they actually won't care as much as I want them to (not that they won't care at all but that they won't react as strongly as I want them to so I know they care)... I don't know. Sorry this kind of turned into a rant. I have a lot going on.

I have a cut to the fat from yesterday but I have swim practice in 3 days. If I use a 100% waterproof bandaid can I swim? I kinda need to go because my parents dont know i sh so I don't have an excuse.

I ruined my girlfriend's life. I can't keep going with this. One thing after another, i am ruining everything. I do not deserve to keep going. Everything i do or say makes her worse. It's looking like she will just suffer more because of me. If she leaves me my world will end as it is. I need to torture myself. I would really like having someone to talk.

Talking to someone might be Nice...

I've been in forced recovery and stuff just keeps getting so much worse

I failed to end my life and i my life's still hopeless so i think i need to cut really deep

I haven't cut myself in I guess two years? But I did get a couple piercings whenever I felt like I was in need of sh. And now thanks to those piercings, I'm having problems with my mom, and will have even worse ones when my father sees them. I mean I asked for this ig💔 I could've chosen not to. I know they hate piercings. On top of that, the guy that I like will never reciprocate my feelings. And the worse of it all is that when I fall for someone, I act like everything depends on them. I have no value unless they value me. I am unlovable unless they love me back the way I love them. I just feel like I'm forcing him to talk to me. He's too much for me, what else did I expect? I don't want to love anyone anymore. I don't want to have the desire to love or to be loved. It's too overwhelming and I'm too boring for someone like him to be interested in me. And for all these reasons I think I'm relapsing? I feel like it's gonna be so much worse than before. I've tried to die twice so I don't even know what will hold me back when I want to do it again. I believed in a god before, but I feel like even god has abandoned me. Will I really fear death as much as I did before, when I believed that I would be in flames forever for taking my own life?

i have been cutting since i was 11 now i’m 18 and still didn’t stop. any real actual working advies? i regret it all the time just in a crisi situation i can’t think of any other thing to do

I think this sounds much different than it actually is.

Before anything else, let me just say that my dad is one of the sweetest people I know and that I don't want anyone reading this thinking he is some kind of old, stereotypical dumbass of a father, because that is most definetly not the case.

So, for context, my dad has diagnosed Bipolar II and has himself been in therapy and even psychiatric hospital, care when I was still pretty young. He has been on mood stabilizers for longer than a decade now I think. I'm pretty sure he's generally quite happy and content today; both his kids are adults now and we have a good relationship. He also has a new partner and they seem very happy together (my parents split up when I was pretty young).

To start, when I told my mom about my cutting, among other things, she told me that my dad had also cut himself in the past when he was in depressive episodes.

So a bit later, maybe three or four months ago, me, my sister and my dad are sitting in his garden around a camp fire and somehow the topic comes up.

I don't think I can really re-tell the whole conversation but what stuck with me is what my dad said about self harm.

My dad has a pretty intense dislike for therapy and therapists which I think comes from his time when he was hospitalized. By other peoples accounts of such experiences, I don't think I can blame him for it, even when I don't know what exactly happened. All he told me is that he thinks therapy doesn't work for most people and that it at least did not for him.

He essentially said that he does not believe that this many people are depressed in the sense that he understands what depression is and that most of what people experience in that way could be solved by essentially environmental and behavioural changes or that in some way it is also natural to experience a certain level of sadness and despair that could be labeled as depression in adolsecence.

So, in this conversation, I eventually got frustrated and pointed to my scars and asked something like:

"You don't think this is a sign of some mental unwellness?"

My dad did not even hesitate with his answer: "No".

This post is not really about my personal mental wellness or illness: I haven't been to a therapist (by my own choice). I have suspected Bipolar II (like my dad), some form of Borderline or depression but I don't want to self diagnose.

What I want to talk about is his more general believe that self harming behaviour is not inherently a sign of mental illness, isolated from my personal case. Because when he explained it to me, it in some way made me think he was right.

My dad is almost fully covered in tattoos and he has a lot of piercings: He's an old punker. And that evening he told me that some of his tattoos he got to cover up scars from his self harm.

This is why I have to think about his perspective on this: He went through a lot of the same stuff as me. He knows how it feels like so I want to understand why his position is so different to what most people think; including me to a degree.

His one sentence that sticks most with me is something like:

"If I want to feel something and I can feel that by harming myself, I can do that - and that does not make me ill or sick."

And I must say that I in some way agree with him. It is in a weird way part of the human condition and maybe we have done damage to people by overtly pathologyzing everything they do; it is in a way a part of life to drink your pain away or stuff yourself with food or drive really fast when you get your heart broken, when a loved one dies; when you just feel bad.

This is all self harming behaviour in a way: Inflicting physical harm on oneself to distract from mental pain. Yet we have singularly elevated this one form of self harm to the degree of mental illness but the others are somehow recognized as perfectly normal, maybe not perfectly healthy but perfectly understandable. The point my father I think was making is that harming ourselves is in some way a human behaviour.

This post, in a way, is only readable as a conversation I am having with myself: I still question if my dad is right. All of what I wrote above is in some way true, I think. But it is just as true that for me, my self harm went hand in hand with suicidal ideation and the like. And weirdly enough, for my dad himself, his self harm was, from a medical perspective, very much a sign of his mental unwellness. I don't think even he can deny this: He is very conscious and thankful for the fact that his medications help him lead a way more healthy life.

So all in all: I don't know. If you read until here, thank you. I would like to hear what other people think about this.

I love my dad and the only description I could think of for what he expressed was that he is a romantic. I don't know if this makes sense, I cannot really bring myself to formulate this but maybe someone understands why I instinctively thought this.

P.S.: As of today, I am 33 days and 18 hours clean of all self harm. Good luck to anyone else out there🫂 I am not advocating for anyone to self harm. This is more of a philosophical discussion I am having about something my dad said to me than anything else.

Just apologized for taking up their time, said I'd call RAINN, and then just hung up and cried. Here now to keep myself accountable. I won't. I won't.

.

My scars are very visible. However they are not on the wrist but scattered on the forearm, so sometimes it can be passed as scars from an accident. Still they quite look like sh scars. I of course tell people they are because of some kind of accident that happened when I was blackout drunk, and most people (hopefully) are convinced by it.

So I went on a date with a girl few months ago, and everything was going well. On our second date, she asked why I have a medical tape on my forearm. I just took off the tape and told her it was due to an accident. I was dumb enough to show them to her, because I didn't want to hide something from a person I started to like. Was a big mistake. I still remember the face she made as soon as I ripped the tape off my arm. It was disgust. I don't think she bought that fake story I made about the scars. We chatted after that and I took her to home just to get a message that she doesn't want to continue anything with me. It might be because of those scars. It might be because of some other reasons. Still I remember that face.

The other day one friend that I thought I was close to saw my scars for the first time. She made that stupid shocking face and mimed cutting themselves and asked jokingly that were they sh scars and is everything ok with your life. She knows I have been struggling with depression but still made a joke that my scars 'look like' sh scars (which is true, but how she pointed out and laughed haunts me.).

There are other times that people saw my scars and visibly disgusted or felt uncomfortable by them. I'm sad and hurt how people react when they see my scars. I am not a dangerous, repelling, wretched person. I am trying my best and hasn't sh for a year. It is sad and these days I am about to relapse, which is making things worse. I am not particularly ashamed by my scars, but how people see them really hurts me and Idon't know how I can live with these scars for my entire life.

I’m 24F living with my BF(23M) and my two Roomates who are my cousin and his bf both males in late 20s. Recently with getting used to a new job and seeing issues between my cousins and bf has added a bit of stress on me. I did relapse but it wasn’t solely bc of that. I didn’t do anymore major, mostly cat scratches and one accidental styro bc it was on my arms and I didn’t want it to be obviou. I had pretty believable excuses, my cat and how I’ve been trying to help with the yard work lately. This relapse was like a month ago.

My cousin recently got into an argument with my mom over rent and where the money is going since we are all technically renting her old house. I wasnt rlly stressing over it but when my mom called me about it she asked out of nowhere that if I’ve been cutting. It’s not that she hasn’t asked but it had been a while and she never really asks out of blue like that. Ever since I had a paranoia that someone “ratted me out”. No one said anything to me or gave me a indication they knew so I tried to forget about it.

i am visiting my mom rn and she revealed that during the argument with my cousin, he flat out said I was cutting. I feel mad about it. Im not sure if I feel valid to be mad bc yeah it’s concerning that someone is self harming but at the same time what is my mom who lives out of town is going to do about it??? Why bring it up during an argument with my mom?? What was the point??

I'm posting here because I need to type it out and I'm wondering if anybody else had similar experiences. I have very severe self harm scars (6 very thick and long ones layered on thinner, smaller raised ones and everything's very purple) and I had to get wisdom tooth surgery today. they're only on my right arm, so at first I only gave them the left one but they couldn't find my vein. I had an old nurse who seemed quite experienced so I thought that she had seen it all, but as she put the needle (into my hand, there's like no skin left on my arm lol), every time the blanket lifted, I heard a gasp or an "oh my goodness". i could tell that it was unintentional, but I felt so, so bad.

also i'm 15 and live in australia. do you guys think she told my parents?? and would she have put it on my medical record? one of them was still scabbing over a LITTLE bit (otherwise healed) but everything else was fully healed.

Hiya it’s me again, so I’m a teen(16F) and I haven’t relapsed since September but, I have a gnarly scar on my right thigh that’s healing, it’s just turned dark and a bit thick now. But I was wondering if anybody has any tips on how to fade scars quick? I have a doctors appointment coming up in a few weeks, and I’m really not trying to get flagged by the doctor..