Self-harm

 Hello Steemians:  

My last post was about Suicidal thoughts so I decided to talk this time about Self-harm.

If you asked most people nowadays what’s self-harm and why do people harm themselves? They’d say some masochists, crazy people and attention seekers harm themselves to gain the empathy of society. How true are these common thoughts?

Understanding Self-harm:

Self-harm also known as self-injury, and self-mutilation is the act of hurting and mutilating yourself as a way of dealing with emotional pain, intrusive thoughts and memories, or intense anger, anxiety and frustration.People tend to hurt themselves to silence the chaos in their head, to escape traumatic memories, express things they can’t put into words, or manifest their suicidal thoughts and feelings without taking their own life. The act of self-harming is sometimes a way of feeling that you are alive.

The way people harm themselves isn’t only by cutting. Over/under-eating, exercising excessively, burning, beating, picking and scratching your skin are also considered self-harm.

To sum it up, most of the people who self-mutilate themselves feel a strong emotional pain and so to relieve or reduce this pain they harm themselves physically. When your start feeling a greater pain you temporarily, and briefly forget about everything else and focus only on your injury.

How to stop self-harming:

Before starting self-harm, you have to know that once you start it there’s a huge possibility that you’d be addicted to it just like drugs, and it will go from a way of coping with pain to a pass time. You’ll only feel good if you hurt yourself even if you didn’t have any pain to relieve anymore. If you were already into self-harming, you still can manage to put an end to it. 

 Reduce the intensity of self-harm: As a first step you can decrease the harm you’re a doing to yourself, for example if you were into cutting start making the cuts shallower than the earlier ones and after a while stop cutting and go with slapping, until you can let go of this bad habit.

Find your triggers to reduce the risks:Try to know the situations that make you less stable and do your best to avoid them.

Find other outlets for your feelings: a good cry for example will help you get rid of built up stress.

Surround yourself with positive people: hanging out with positive people is an effective way to get rid of negative thoughts.

Once you feel that you need to harm yourself try as much as possible to stop these thoughts: go for a walk, take a bath or talk to someone. 

Try to always do something you like and enjoy: be it writing, reading, travelling, or playing some sport.

Remember your body is also important, take good care of it and bear in your mind that you can’t solve a problem with another one. You always need to do something positive to get rid of a negative one.

Love yourself, body and soul. Instead of leaving an unfavorable  scar on your body, draw a beautiful thing in it with a marker.

I hope you’ll be able to change self-harm with self-love in the upcoming year. Thank you for reading till the end.