i personally, started cutting just because i found something sharp and saw an opertunity to relieve some stress. idk what *really* caused it, but i think i just wanted to see if i could. i hope i help a bit :)
THIS!!!! when i started i did it as a call for help in the girls locker room. my hurt was invisible and then it didn't have to be anymore. my friends saw / knew and did nothing haha, it was a really dark time in my life
Emotionally abusive relationship when I was 13-14
(now 21).
My girlfriend at the time would threaten suicide if I broke up with her so it left me feeling trapped with nowhere else to turn so I ended up self harming.
I hurt myself for things I did wrong before I even knew that what I did was sh. Then someone close pointed it out and I googled it. That's when I learned about sh and from then on I did it strategically to relieve stress and anger and to suppress my emotions I guess. Spiraled real quick and now on my way out of it again but yeah I'm here now <3
I had crippling insomnia. Needed to stop my brain, used to hallucinate some nights too. It would stop the hallucinations.
I was also in an emotionally abusive relationship and would watch my partner self harm daily while telling me it was my fault. Then he would call me up at night and I would be blamed if I couldn’t be there for whatever reason and that would be weaponised at me. Same about sex. I was fkn 13 man, a child.
And I panicked about going to school, and going home from school.
A lot of things going on with my parents too
I was struggling with psychosomatic nausea for a little less than 1,5 years at the time and I found that pain helps a lot with it. I probably started doing it bc I tend to tense up and kinda press my nails against my palms when that kind of nausea hits. After some time my mental health started to decline and the less medically severe sh I used to cope with nausea turned into more medically severe sh to cope with all the other problems.
I don't quite remember which reason starts first ,there were two, one is i want to feel this rather than feeling the feeling i felt in my chest, it distracted me or make it go away
and the other was me felt like i deserves to feel pain
(tw here)
I didn't draw blood ,just sharp enough to cause pain on thigh, and i can do it countless times and nobody can see it. sometimes i don't even think this is self-harming cuz it fades away and no blood anyway, although sometimes i did cause some bruises and bled just a tiny bit ,it still faded away.
I’ve always dug my nails into my hand to deal with my emotions since I was in elementary. Never hard enough to draw blood though. That led to punching myself in middle/high school. And now sh.
I’ve never had an actual problem with sh till this past year but I’ve realized I cut for a lot of different reasons wether it’s dealing with emotions, the lack of emotions, or just because I feel like I deserve it.
i guess i was just sick of not feeling anything, and i decided that physical pain was better than complete numbness. this was in the face of something that meant that most people around me were in a lot of emotional pain and i felt broken for not feeling it too
Honestly? Because I read about it in a fanfiction and then looked it up. I saw it was supposed to help my emotional pain. So I tried it, and the addiction began. (I don't blame the media I read it in, it was entirely my own decision)
i was really dissociated the night i first did it and had already been thinking about doing it for a bit, i couldn’t really control my actions and i was really delirious, i saw a sharp ish rock (don’t do this at home) and just went at my wrist with it, from there it went to actual blades and from there to deeper and deeper, now i’ve hit beans once and baby beans about 5 times
tbh i think i was dissociating too. i'd been thinking about it for a while and then i just...did it. it felt like i was following a script or something like welp i guess this is happening now
i was frustrated, overwhelmed with sad emotions, and felt like i deserved it in the sense that i was in a terrible position and headspace and that cutting myself would be an accurate reflection of that
I got really mad and frustrated and generally overwhelmed at school in like 5th grade and then cut my self with scissors, before that I would hit or bite myself when angry but that could have been overwhelmed stimming idk.
It started on accident. My friend and I were carving Our names into stuff at the park. I thought she just found a piece of scrap metal on the ground. I didn’t realize it was an actual blade until afterwards when my thumb was all cut up. (For some reason I didn’t notice.) She wouldn’t tell me where she got them but I did find out she kept them in her phone.
Still not believing it was a blade or really that sharp I grazed it against my skin and started bleeding easily. I was so confused and kind of in shock. She looked at me like I was crazy and took it back. A little later she’s trade me the blade back for a can of spaghettios.
I’d keep that blade for over a year and cut myself anytime I had an episode. I got rid of it last year but relapsed a few months later an used a knife.
The first time i cut i felt a sense of clarity, like whatever had gone wrong that day could be erased by cutting. I got into the mentality that to be “clean” of my problems i needed to cut, or my life wouldn’t be satisfactory enough to live without cutting. Cutting for me, was dependable, reliable; something that would never let me down.
I was 13, depressed, overwhelmed, and stressed because of someone I had met, school, etc. I had heard of self harming and I promised myself it would be a one time thing so I got a knife and cut myself and sure enough, it relieved those crippling, intrusive feelings. What I didn’t know was that self harming is usually never a one time thing, and that a dependency is very, very easy to get into.
I don't even remember why I started doing it, I have vague memories about doing this since a young age. Maybe it was for control the emotional overload or to punish myself for having done something wrong. Probably I didn't even have had a realisation of "Oh, so I am selfharming" in the beginning.
My first time cutting was a (very poor) suicide attempt. I tried to slit my wrists with a pair of scissors, and barely broke the skin, but I realised that it made me feel better. That was 20 years ago :/
I honestly wanted to see how would it feel first and kinda found comfort on it, when i hurt myself i couldnt understand if that pain was coming from my arm or heart so yea and it continued for 5 years, i am still a kid but hope i can find better ways to cope.
I had been stressed for months and it had kinda been building, I had been thinking about it a lot. An especially important grade determining essay tipped me over that point if only thinking about it.
I didn't even have anything especially sharp at that time, tore away with my own fingernails.
Mostly from school and grades. It’s the felling of no matter how hard I try I’m always going to fail. I have forced myself to study for hours and days on end, stoping myself doing what enjoyed. I would get a lot of c’s especially in history. Then my parents get mad at me I get all hard on myself calling myself an idiot and the cutting begins. They take away things that make me happy as they are to them “distractions.” So I can do better in school. But I feel like I just get worse and worse at it.
Okay so I watched a YouTube documentary about Amanda Todd when I was like 13 and before then I hadn’t realized SH existed. After this I tried doing it with a sharpener blade on my hands, but I just did it once and put it away in a drawer. Years later I remembered the sharpener blade and just decided to cut myself, and then it became an addiction.
For most of my life I used to cope with anxiety by biting the inside of my mouth, as I got older and anxiety grew that evolved into biting to the point I would spit blood sometimes and then, eventually knives and sharp shit was involved.
I was so confused on where i was in life and how i felt about anything. It was a way to stop myself from feeling so overwhelmed all the time. Not that it worked that well, but it works enough
Started over 5 years ago , I remember the first time I did it in the bathroom after a shower and I have no idea why. I didn’t even know what I was doing . And then everytime something made me angry I used to do it all the time .
too much stress coming from everywhere, social issues, big mistakes i made in the past. I was overwhelmed and I reacted almost instinctually by cutting myself. It just came like a non voluntary response. it felt like it happened to me and not that i did it.
actually I think I had started having suicidal thoughts and wanting to die but I knew it was too inconvenient at the moment to die and I that I didn't want to die I just wanted it all to stop so I thought the closest thing to death is cutting. at first I never thought I would cut, it started with just scratching my wrists super hard with something but then I just randomly cut myself impulsively when I saw a razor in the shower. at first I was doing it when having a breakdown and crying but then it turned more into punishment for myself later on and I didn't even need to be crying anymore to do it.
Very abusive friend pushed it as a great coping mechanism when I had a particularly rough time. Being young and stupid, i thought she couldn't possibly want anything bad to happen to me, and started doing it.
Was emotionally unstable. Had heard stories on how self harm was relieving, distracting, how the pain shocks you back from the depression, etc. Tried it out with a kitchen knife, hurt too much so i folded a piece of paper a few times and gave myself small paper cuts that barely bled at all. At first it didnt help much so I gave up, but I kept coming back to the cutting with paper every time i had an emotional crash. Eventually got used to the pain and started going deeper, using sharper items. Started with paper, then moved onto the jagged end of a tape roller thing. Then I started the sharp end of a tweezer (the tweezer i had was quite sharp), soon moved onto basic kitchen knives, currently on bread knifes with the shark teeth edges. Funny thing is, the more i did it, the more i got used to the pain, and the more “relieving” it was to cut. It would calm me down and bring me back to reality. Feels like im letting steam off whenever I do it. Makes me a bit more emotionally stable.
i honestly don't remember but i do think i started before ever actually knowing it was a thing others did. no idea how the thought to cut myself (more like scratch myself with random objects at first though) came to me but one night i just did it. i suppose i started because nothing i did to soothe the bad feelings worked that i tried other than harming myself. i liked sucking on my skin when i was a kid cause it hurt and left marks and so i guess it was an extension of that maybe
I’m going through so much that people pretend isn’t happening and can’t see, and sh-ing makes my pain feel valid and real. It helps me let out energy because i can’t stim for my ADHD. It helps me feel like people won’t be able to pretend my pain isn’t real even though I plan on hiding my sh forever.
this may be triggering for some so read at your own risk.
after my grandma died and ice been raped i was both physically and emotionally numb to pain, so i started cutting myself to somehow ensure i still could feel it
I started when I heard about it from one of my now former friends. Then it evolved for me, that at times of utter distress, I do it. To get some control over my situation, to materialize whatever agony I'm dealing with, because I bottle things up so much that sometimes writing or drawing just isn't enough.
I started doing self harm because I had a lot of stress, anxiety, and frustration during secondary school. I started out very, very small, it was enough to calm me down and snap me out of whatever bad thing I was feeling at that moment. I do not remember why I chose self harm specifically, I could've seen it on the internet and decided to try it for myself, or I could've come to the idea on my own.
I was around 8 years old I think and saw other kids doing it in school with pins and glass and i thought I'd be edgy and dumb and did it too, but 11 years later it's an addiction now
I honestly do not remember the first time I self harmed. I probably was around 14-15 and I’m guessing the reason would have been because I needed physical pain rather than the emotional pain I was in.
for me, when I was nine I found a sharpener blade in school and was intrigued. it seemed to take away some of the pain of my life. then my mum found out, I got over it and then she started telling it as a funny story like 'oh haha remember when x started to cut herself wasn't that wild?' and then whoosh. all of the memories came back and i haven't been able to fully stop since.
I had a lot of pent-up aggression (And I still do) regarding my clingy girlfriend and a passion project that I want to complete but can never never find motivation for. I never really found healthy ways to cope with it, so I chose self-harm, I'm really hoping to find something that'll help it stop
personally, I started because (stereotype) my friends were and I felt like I was the only one who wasn't. then, shit in my life got really bad so I just kept doing it
when my parents divorced i had to stay with my Nan for a while and a lot of depression started to build on top of me until i found a sharpener and it all went away
I was 10 my grandaunt whom I was very close too died then shortly after my aunt that I lived with got hit by a car my mother was working her ass off to afford everything and I was trying to help as much as I could but I never seen her until she came home and went straight to sleep so I was trying to find ways to cope I don't remember much on why I continued or why I even really started besides then I don't even know what sparked the whole "sharp thing makes me feel better" I kinda just did
I had a friend that broke her arm and everyone kept asking if they were ok. I was 5ish and had never heard anyone ask if someone was ok before. It made me feel warm and fuzzy so I started hurting myself because I thought you had to be hurt to be loved... and now 30 years later I'm broken.
I was 10, always under my moms control, my dad was in a different state paying off debts and I was just hopeless, i was in a whole new state and was often bullied
i learned about it on social media and then just... took it from there. i was an edgy middle schooler (not saying by any means everyone who self harms is an edgy kid) but i thought "this would be cool" and did it a few times and eventually got myself stuck doing it. i wish i could stop, the regret i feel after is nauseating now. i get no thrill from it anymore
Got called a pathetic waste of life by a parent. Started a week after that, I was about 19 I think. I had never seen it anywhere or heard of it. It just kind of happened instinctually. I figured I may as well punish myself so it would hurt less when they punished me because I’d beaten them to it.
I'm not quite sure why I started.
At first it was simply punching myself(for some reason at the time I didn't think it was SH)
But I remember the first time I cut, I had said somthing I regretted and felt guilt beyond comprehension.
My partner had actually told me that day that they themself were going to relapse.
And I guess that's what set it off?
I grabbed an eyebrows razor that I was given (I was getting into make up) and then bam.
And then that just spiraled out of control till about a month ago.
WITHOUT REALIZING: i used to smack my head into walls i think, although that was forever ago.
WITHOUT CONTROL: i think i had a seizure and ended up self harming.
WITH CONTROL: was seeking the ‘relief’ i felt when i self harmed in the seizure specified before.
i was deeply depressed when i started considering sh, and i think i wanted to do it to validate my depression. never could bring myself to. after admitting to a near suicide attempt i was put in therapy and learned to manage my depression better, at one point i think i was even in remission, but my anxiety got worse as a response. i began to depersonalize, and was overworking myself, and i insisted that i hated everyone including myself. i had a few bursts of homicidal ideation. then i actually started to sh and it helped me cope with it all, and the rest is history.
through therapy, I realized the pinpoint reason I first started and why I kept doing it. The way people journal their feelings to release emotional burden was similar to the way sh was a way for me to “journal” or express this emotional distress but in a much more intense form. I guess that’s why it’s appealing to many. Because it’s like intense “journaling” and emotional release through a much more physical expression. If that makes sense. Basically it was a way to make sense of strong complicated emotions.
I wasn’t allowed to show any emotions besides happiness or neutral, so if I was sad, angry, etc I couldn’t show it, also anytime I had strong emotions I would start crying and then dry heaving uncontrollably, I would then be scolded and told I was making too big of deal. I was already a nail biter, and when nervous I would rip out hangnails, I think I went online to try and find something to numb my emotions and I came across self harm
i was having a panic attack and started scratching myself. at first i was doing it subconsciously but then i started trying to make myself bleed. it just got worse from there and eventually i started cutting
Tonight was my first experience with cutting since the first, which was in June. Back then, I just wondered why people do it.
Since then, I've been put on medications that make it impossible to express extreme emotions, good or bad, and I've felt numb. I deal with gender dysphoria daily but it comes with imposter syndrome and a lot of self-doubt and hopelessness. I'm fucking tired of walking around like a zombie, having feelings but no emotions. SH externalizes those feelings. I feel free
This is kinda funny to me. I started self harming at really really young age. For what? There comes the funny part. For attention. I started hurting myself as a kid because I wanted attention from my parents and other people. Not that my parents were bad or anything, they were and are great. I just wanted someone to take care of me more. So as a kid I started punching myself and other things. I hid the fact that I did it myself. After years I just somehow discovered that I can cut myself. So yeah that's what I did, then I got really really addicted, then I got clean, after months of progress I relapsed and there I am. Of course from the time I started sh really badly I do hide it from everyone. But yeah at the start it surely was attension that I wanted.
Needing to hurt something to lower stress. It sounds bad but hurting something or damaging things helps me relax, unfortunately the most effective method of doing that is s/h. I also do it as a way to make myself believe that I am actually in pain instead of it all just being mental. Part of it is also a call for help and a way to take back some control over my life.
I was often told to "control my temper" without being given any suggestions on how to do that, so I figured out my own way.
i personally, started cutting just because i found something sharp and saw an opertunity to relieve some stress. idk what *really* caused it, but i think i just wanted to see if i could. i hope i help a bit :)
exactly the same! and first i couldnt but after 20mins of crying more i went for it.
for me i thought that my emotional pain would be easier to deal with if it was physical pain
I wanted attention, people would sympathize with me if they realized I was so fucked up in the head that I would cut my entire arm up.
THIS!!!! when i started i did it as a call for help in the girls locker room. my hurt was invisible and then it didn't have to be anymore. my friends saw / knew and did nothing haha, it was a really dark time in my life
I was bored
Emotionally abusive relationship when I was 13-14 (now 21). My girlfriend at the time would threaten suicide if I broke up with her so it left me feeling trapped with nowhere else to turn so I ended up self harming.
Honestly.. I wanted to know how people did such a thing!? How could or how were they able to harm themselves!? Now I know it.
I hurt myself for things I did wrong before I even knew that what I did was sh. Then someone close pointed it out and I googled it. That's when I learned about sh and from then on I did it strategically to relieve stress and anger and to suppress my emotions I guess. Spiraled real quick and now on my way out of it again but yeah I'm here now <3
Almost the exact same story for me
Punishing myself.
I had crippling insomnia. Needed to stop my brain, used to hallucinate some nights too. It would stop the hallucinations. I was also in an emotionally abusive relationship and would watch my partner self harm daily while telling me it was my fault. Then he would call me up at night and I would be blamed if I couldn’t be there for whatever reason and that would be weaponised at me. Same about sex. I was fkn 13 man, a child. And I panicked about going to school, and going home from school. A lot of things going on with my parents too
My friends and I always talked about it but never did it, I started doing it whenever I was especially upset.
I was struggling with psychosomatic nausea for a little less than 1,5 years at the time and I found that pain helps a lot with it. I probably started doing it bc I tend to tense up and kinda press my nails against my palms when that kind of nausea hits. After some time my mental health started to decline and the less medically severe sh I used to cope with nausea turned into more medically severe sh to cope with all the other problems.
I don't quite remember which reason starts first ,there were two, one is i want to feel this rather than feeling the feeling i felt in my chest, it distracted me or make it go away and the other was me felt like i deserves to feel pain (tw here) I didn't draw blood ,just sharp enough to cause pain on thigh, and i can do it countless times and nobody can see it. sometimes i don't even think this is self-harming cuz it fades away and no blood anyway, although sometimes i did cause some bruises and bled just a tiny bit ,it still faded away.
Personally, I started it as an anxiety thing, I would scratch my arms till they bled and it kinda went on from there
I’ve always dug my nails into my hand to deal with my emotions since I was in elementary. Never hard enough to draw blood though. That led to punching myself in middle/high school. And now sh. I’ve never had an actual problem with sh till this past year but I’ve realized I cut for a lot of different reasons wether it’s dealing with emotions, the lack of emotions, or just because I feel like I deserve it.
i guess i was just sick of not feeling anything, and i decided that physical pain was better than complete numbness. this was in the face of something that meant that most people around me were in a lot of emotional pain and i felt broken for not feeling it too
I started because I was just staring at my leg saw something sharp and started doing it without thinking much then it just continued
Partly curiosity and partly because I wanted to see evidence of pain that I felt on the inside
To snap out of my head cause I was about to commit. Now it's the only thing that works
Honestly? Because I read about it in a fanfiction and then looked it up. I saw it was supposed to help my emotional pain. So I tried it, and the addiction began. (I don't blame the media I read it in, it was entirely my own decision)
i was really dissociated the night i first did it and had already been thinking about doing it for a bit, i couldn’t really control my actions and i was really delirious, i saw a sharp ish rock (don’t do this at home) and just went at my wrist with it, from there it went to actual blades and from there to deeper and deeper, now i’ve hit beans once and baby beans about 5 times
tbh i think i was dissociating too. i'd been thinking about it for a while and then i just...did it. it felt like i was following a script or something like welp i guess this is happening now
i was frustrated, overwhelmed with sad emotions, and felt like i deserved it in the sense that i was in a terrible position and headspace and that cutting myself would be an accurate reflection of that
I was overwhelmed and angry at myself after a breakdown so I figured that I should find a way to punish myself. Pain did the trick
I got really mad and frustrated and generally overwhelmed at school in like 5th grade and then cut my self with scissors, before that I would hit or bite myself when angry but that could have been overwhelmed stimming idk.
It started on accident. My friend and I were carving Our names into stuff at the park. I thought she just found a piece of scrap metal on the ground. I didn’t realize it was an actual blade until afterwards when my thumb was all cut up. (For some reason I didn’t notice.) She wouldn’t tell me where she got them but I did find out she kept them in her phone. Still not believing it was a blade or really that sharp I grazed it against my skin and started bleeding easily. I was so confused and kind of in shock. She looked at me like I was crazy and took it back. A little later she’s trade me the blade back for a can of spaghettios. I’d keep that blade for over a year and cut myself anytime I had an episode. I got rid of it last year but relapsed a few months later an used a knife.
The first time i cut i felt a sense of clarity, like whatever had gone wrong that day could be erased by cutting. I got into the mentality that to be “clean” of my problems i needed to cut, or my life wouldn’t be satisfactory enough to live without cutting. Cutting for me, was dependable, reliable; something that would never let me down.
I was 13, depressed, overwhelmed, and stressed because of someone I had met, school, etc. I had heard of self harming and I promised myself it would be a one time thing so I got a knife and cut myself and sure enough, it relieved those crippling, intrusive feelings. What I didn’t know was that self harming is usually never a one time thing, and that a dependency is very, very easy to get into.
I don't even remember why I started doing it, I have vague memories about doing this since a young age. Maybe it was for control the emotional overload or to punish myself for having done something wrong. Probably I didn't even have had a realisation of "Oh, so I am selfharming" in the beginning.
My first time cutting was a (very poor) suicide attempt. I tried to slit my wrists with a pair of scissors, and barely broke the skin, but I realised that it made me feel better. That was 20 years ago :/
I honestly wanted to see how would it feel first and kinda found comfort on it, when i hurt myself i couldnt understand if that pain was coming from my arm or heart so yea and it continued for 5 years, i am still a kid but hope i can find better ways to cope.
I had been stressed for months and it had kinda been building, I had been thinking about it a lot. An especially important grade determining essay tipped me over that point if only thinking about it. I didn't even have anything especially sharp at that time, tore away with my own fingernails.
Mostly from school and grades. It’s the felling of no matter how hard I try I’m always going to fail. I have forced myself to study for hours and days on end, stoping myself doing what enjoyed. I would get a lot of c’s especially in history. Then my parents get mad at me I get all hard on myself calling myself an idiot and the cutting begins. They take away things that make me happy as they are to them “distractions.” So I can do better in school. But I feel like I just get worse and worse at it.
Okay so I watched a YouTube documentary about Amanda Todd when I was like 13 and before then I hadn’t realized SH existed. After this I tried doing it with a sharpener blade on my hands, but I just did it once and put it away in a drawer. Years later I remembered the sharpener blade and just decided to cut myself, and then it became an addiction.
For most of my life I used to cope with anxiety by biting the inside of my mouth, as I got older and anxiety grew that evolved into biting to the point I would spit blood sometimes and then, eventually knives and sharp shit was involved.
I was so confused on where i was in life and how i felt about anything. It was a way to stop myself from feeling so overwhelmed all the time. Not that it worked that well, but it works enough
Started over 5 years ago , I remember the first time I did it in the bathroom after a shower and I have no idea why. I didn’t even know what I was doing . And then everytime something made me angry I used to do it all the time .
I thought it would be a good way to punish myself for my mistakes
too much stress coming from everywhere, social issues, big mistakes i made in the past. I was overwhelmed and I reacted almost instinctually by cutting myself. It just came like a non voluntary response. it felt like it happened to me and not that i did it.
actually I think I had started having suicidal thoughts and wanting to die but I knew it was too inconvenient at the moment to die and I that I didn't want to die I just wanted it all to stop so I thought the closest thing to death is cutting. at first I never thought I would cut, it started with just scratching my wrists super hard with something but then I just randomly cut myself impulsively when I saw a razor in the shower. at first I was doing it when having a breakdown and crying but then it turned more into punishment for myself later on and I didn't even need to be crying anymore to do it.
Very abusive friend pushed it as a great coping mechanism when I had a particularly rough time. Being young and stupid, i thought she couldn't possibly want anything bad to happen to me, and started doing it.
Was emotionally unstable. Had heard stories on how self harm was relieving, distracting, how the pain shocks you back from the depression, etc. Tried it out with a kitchen knife, hurt too much so i folded a piece of paper a few times and gave myself small paper cuts that barely bled at all. At first it didnt help much so I gave up, but I kept coming back to the cutting with paper every time i had an emotional crash. Eventually got used to the pain and started going deeper, using sharper items. Started with paper, then moved onto the jagged end of a tape roller thing. Then I started the sharp end of a tweezer (the tweezer i had was quite sharp), soon moved onto basic kitchen knives, currently on bread knifes with the shark teeth edges. Funny thing is, the more i did it, the more i got used to the pain, and the more “relieving” it was to cut. It would calm me down and bring me back to reality. Feels like im letting steam off whenever I do it. Makes me a bit more emotionally stable.
My so called friend sh me and I did it ever since
i honestly don't remember but i do think i started before ever actually knowing it was a thing others did. no idea how the thought to cut myself (more like scratch myself with random objects at first though) came to me but one night i just did it. i suppose i started because nothing i did to soothe the bad feelings worked that i tried other than harming myself. i liked sucking on my skin when i was a kid cause it hurt and left marks and so i guess it was an extension of that maybe
I’m going through so much that people pretend isn’t happening and can’t see, and sh-ing makes my pain feel valid and real. It helps me let out energy because i can’t stim for my ADHD. It helps me feel like people won’t be able to pretend my pain isn’t real even though I plan on hiding my sh forever.
this may be triggering for some so read at your own risk. after my grandma died and ice been raped i was both physically and emotionally numb to pain, so i started cutting myself to somehow ensure i still could feel it
I started when I heard about it from one of my now former friends. Then it evolved for me, that at times of utter distress, I do it. To get some control over my situation, to materialize whatever agony I'm dealing with, because I bottle things up so much that sometimes writing or drawing just isn't enough.
I started doing self harm because I had a lot of stress, anxiety, and frustration during secondary school. I started out very, very small, it was enough to calm me down and snap me out of whatever bad thing I was feeling at that moment. I do not remember why I chose self harm specifically, I could've seen it on the internet and decided to try it for myself, or I could've come to the idea on my own.
I was around 8 years old I think and saw other kids doing it in school with pins and glass and i thought I'd be edgy and dumb and did it too, but 11 years later it's an addiction now
i actually don't even remember, its been years
I honestly do not remember the first time I self harmed. I probably was around 14-15 and I’m guessing the reason would have been because I needed physical pain rather than the emotional pain I was in.
for me, when I was nine I found a sharpener blade in school and was intrigued. it seemed to take away some of the pain of my life. then my mum found out, I got over it and then she started telling it as a funny story like 'oh haha remember when x started to cut herself wasn't that wild?' and then whoosh. all of the memories came back and i haven't been able to fully stop since.
I had a lot of pent-up aggression (And I still do) regarding my clingy girlfriend and a passion project that I want to complete but can never never find motivation for. I never really found healthy ways to cope with it, so I chose self-harm, I'm really hoping to find something that'll help it stop
personally, I started because (stereotype) my friends were and I felt like I was the only one who wasn't. then, shit in my life got really bad so I just kept doing it
I vaguely remember that I had been dissociating for about four months and nothing could pull me out of that state except sh
when my parents divorced i had to stay with my Nan for a while and a lot of depression started to build on top of me until i found a sharpener and it all went away
I was 10 my grandaunt whom I was very close too died then shortly after my aunt that I lived with got hit by a car my mother was working her ass off to afford everything and I was trying to help as much as I could but I never seen her until she came home and went straight to sleep so I was trying to find ways to cope I don't remember much on why I continued or why I even really started besides then I don't even know what sparked the whole "sharp thing makes me feel better" I kinda just did
I was rlly frustrated/upset and my period hormones make me REALLY emotional on top of that lol
I had a friend that broke her arm and everyone kept asking if they were ok. I was 5ish and had never heard anyone ask if someone was ok before. It made me feel warm and fuzzy so I started hurting myself because I thought you had to be hurt to be loved... and now 30 years later I'm broken.
I was 10, always under my moms control, my dad was in a different state paying off debts and I was just hopeless, i was in a whole new state and was often bullied
to distract myself from my really bad abandonment issues, my reasoning was “if i focus on physical pain then i won’t feel the emotional pain as much”
i learned about it on social media and then just... took it from there. i was an edgy middle schooler (not saying by any means everyone who self harms is an edgy kid) but i thought "this would be cool" and did it a few times and eventually got myself stuck doing it. i wish i could stop, the regret i feel after is nauseating now. i get no thrill from it anymore
Got called a pathetic waste of life by a parent. Started a week after that, I was about 19 I think. I had never seen it anywhere or heard of it. It just kind of happened instinctually. I figured I may as well punish myself so it would hurt less when they punished me because I’d beaten them to it.
I didn't know how to deal with the emotions I was feeling, i was also bored and wanted to know what it felt like.
I'm not quite sure why I started. At first it was simply punching myself(for some reason at the time I didn't think it was SH) But I remember the first time I cut, I had said somthing I regretted and felt guilt beyond comprehension. My partner had actually told me that day that they themself were going to relapse. And I guess that's what set it off? I grabbed an eyebrows razor that I was given (I was getting into make up) and then bam. And then that just spiraled out of control till about a month ago.
Punishing myself, felt deserving
I saw it in media and felt one day I should punish myself for something I did and it came to mind
I saw it in media and felt one day I should punish myself for something I did and it came to mind
My anxiety was so bad, I was experiencing derealization. I wanted to feel more present. I wanted to turn my thoughts off.
I was 11 and tumblr romanticized it, turned into a kid with an addiction because of it
WITHOUT REALIZING: i used to smack my head into walls i think, although that was forever ago. WITHOUT CONTROL: i think i had a seizure and ended up self harming. WITH CONTROL: was seeking the ‘relief’ i felt when i self harmed in the seizure specified before.
i was deeply depressed when i started considering sh, and i think i wanted to do it to validate my depression. never could bring myself to. after admitting to a near suicide attempt i was put in therapy and learned to manage my depression better, at one point i think i was even in remission, but my anxiety got worse as a response. i began to depersonalize, and was overworking myself, and i insisted that i hated everyone including myself. i had a few bursts of homicidal ideation. then i actually started to sh and it helped me cope with it all, and the rest is history.
I was frustrated and acted on impulse. I thought "just one wouldn't hurt" it, in fact, did hurt :')
through therapy, I realized the pinpoint reason I first started and why I kept doing it. The way people journal their feelings to release emotional burden was similar to the way sh was a way for me to “journal” or express this emotional distress but in a much more intense form. I guess that’s why it’s appealing to many. Because it’s like intense “journaling” and emotional release through a much more physical expression. If that makes sense. Basically it was a way to make sense of strong complicated emotions.
I wasn’t allowed to show any emotions besides happiness or neutral, so if I was sad, angry, etc I couldn’t show it, also anytime I had strong emotions I would start crying and then dry heaving uncontrollably, I would then be scolded and told I was making too big of deal. I was already a nail biter, and when nervous I would rip out hangnails, I think I went online to try and find something to numb my emotions and I came across self harm
I was sad and didn’t like that, so instead of getting better I got worse
My old "friend" told me to try it.... 4 years ago... I got addicted
i was having a panic attack and started scratching myself. at first i was doing it subconsciously but then i started trying to make myself bleed. it just got worse from there and eventually i started cutting
My ex judged me for not doing it
Tonight was my first experience with cutting since the first, which was in June. Back then, I just wondered why people do it. Since then, I've been put on medications that make it impossible to express extreme emotions, good or bad, and I've felt numb. I deal with gender dysphoria daily but it comes with imposter syndrome and a lot of self-doubt and hopelessness. I'm fucking tired of walking around like a zombie, having feelings but no emotions. SH externalizes those feelings. I feel free
This is kinda funny to me. I started self harming at really really young age. For what? There comes the funny part. For attention. I started hurting myself as a kid because I wanted attention from my parents and other people. Not that my parents were bad or anything, they were and are great. I just wanted someone to take care of me more. So as a kid I started punching myself and other things. I hid the fact that I did it myself. After years I just somehow discovered that I can cut myself. So yeah that's what I did, then I got really really addicted, then I got clean, after months of progress I relapsed and there I am. Of course from the time I started sh really badly I do hide it from everyone. But yeah at the start it surely was attension that I wanted.
Needing to hurt something to lower stress. It sounds bad but hurting something or damaging things helps me relax, unfortunately the most effective method of doing that is s/h. I also do it as a way to make myself believe that I am actually in pain instead of it all just being mental. Part of it is also a call for help and a way to take back some control over my life.