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Self harm and you - your stories. Part 2 *posts may trigger*
Nightowl:
I am the youngest of four sisters, growing up we were not allowed to play out or brinmg friends home and just had each other. We never went anywhere as a family at weekends or holidays and I was lonely.
I had few friends throughout secondary school and just drifted from one group of people to another, and I don't think anybody even noticed if I was there or not.
At aged 15 I was sexually abused by a family member. My family found out when I was 17 but it was brushed under the carpet and not spoken about for many years.
I was happiest during sixth form, for the first time I had good friends, both at school and at my part time job and I had a good social life. I got a place at Uni but left after a couple of weeks.
I found a full time job and moved out of my family home but I was lonely again and used to dread the weekends. After a year I moved back in with my family and that was when the sh started. I would cut and od.
I met my now ex husband when I was 21 and we got married after 8 months. At first I still sh'd but during the marriage I stopped sh.
Looking back my husband was my escape route from my family but I was never in love with him and I hated the sexual side of out relationship and would avoid it wherever possible.
We split up after four years together and my sh returned. A few months after we split I had my first psych admission for two weeks observation.
For a while I went to support group and I think that was the worst thing I ever did as it was not well facilitated and I learnt how to harm more.
Now I am 35 and still sh and od on a regular basis.
In the next few months I am hoping to begin intensive residential therapy.
Le Loup:
Well i'll try to tell this best i can, but i have disjointed thoughts and so might ramble a bit.
:trig:
I guess i was a pretty happy kid..then i went to school. I guess i've always been "different" didnt like to dress like other kids, bit dependant on my mam, bit of a loser. I preferred animals to people lol. I started school at my usual age and i can never really remember being happy there.
From day one all i remember was intense bullying from other people in my school. Hey someone has to be the "Omega" right. At first i'd cry when i got teased and tell the teachers or my mam but evenually i realised that nothing was gunna change. That this was how it was gunna be for as long as i was around these people. So i stopped crying, i stopped whinging, i stopped reacting. It was like someone switched off my feelings.
I went to secondry school the same way. If someone hurt me too much i'd punch back. I lost my self confidence and i lost my voice. I harldly ever talked. I focused on just dissapearing into the background.
In about year 9 i'd say i picked a sharp object up and hurt myself.. not thinking about it. it was somehing people did to mark in "I heart somone" bit supid right? But i didnt write anything, i made lines.
From that day on i have Self Harmed, every time i do it, i do it deeper. I started because i hated myself so much, because i hated everyone around me so much and because it made me feel better. My few friends outside school tried to get me to stop but i wouldnt.. couldnt. I had thoughts of suicide and was uninterested in my surroundings. An aquaintance from my school who didn't bully me saw my arms one day by accident. He voluneered with the ambulance service and he made me tell someone what i was doing or he'd do it himself. I told a liason officer who was shocked at the injuries and she told my parents who then, stony faced, drove me to the doctors in silence. I hated every second of it. The face of the doctor when i told him why i was there, the roll of his eyes when he saw my arms. I hated him too. He refferred me to a councillor and that was that. months later i got one. But she never helped. she made me worse.
The month i left school i had stopped eating. I had been putting weight on from comfort eating and it scared me. I simply stopped and didn't eat anything for almost 6 weeks. Nobody did anything to help me. I went to college and struggled with food the whole way through but i made some friends and they got me to eat again. I still battled with bouts of hate and depression and self harmed frequently but it was better. I left college 2 years ago i think and met my Fiancee. She has helped, i dont SH as much but i can't say i'm happy. When i so SH i do it worse than i've ever done it. I dont believe that i will ever be normal or ever be happy and SH free ever again.
Hannah xx:
Ok, I dont really know where to begin....
:trig: Just in case
well I'm 13 (14 next month) and i've been self harming for 18 months. I found out last year that my uncle had cancer, but i wasn't allowed to tell anyone, I wasn't supposed to know. Keeping it a secret was really hard for my and it put alot of pressure on. I also feel like my lifes being lived for me. My mum keeps trying to make me do all these GCSEs that i dont even want to do early which is really hard work and it gets on top of me and I get really down alot. I know she wants the best for me but whenever i try and talk to her about it she'll just get angry and say i'm not trying. I was also anorexic for a while and I know how much strain that put on my family. Thankfully i'm over that now but I dont want to let them down again.
A few of my friends also self harm and i get really scared for them. I know i'm a hypocrite but i tell them to stop. And now i have GCSEs next week which is alot of work and not something that i want to do. My relationship with my parents isnt very strong and i feel like i'm a bad person (i guess i feel guilty) for S/H. Sorry its a bit long and not terribly interesting ::-\:
:1059: xXx
adriana:
I guess it's hard to say where it began. I was an outgoing child until I was about 6 when I withdrew from everyone quite suddenly. Not really sure why. I was moved into the juniors a year early, away from my best friend and my brother was misdiagnosed as having Asperger's which was probably pretty stressful, but I don't really remember.
From then on I was consistently pretty anxious. I was self-conscious and bad at social situations, which got worse when I went to secondary school. I put on a lot of weight due to comfort-eating. Also my parents' relationship had got so bad I found myself actually praying they'd get divorced. The friends I made were pretty awkward and messed up themselves and we took our fear and anger out on each other. I took to digging my nails into my skin to get through that.
At the end of year 8 I started going to church and got some new friends and some confidence. The nails thing didn't stop but it was less frequent, I drew blood less often. My parents went to counselling and astonishingly actually learned to like each other again. But I still wasn't OK, no matter how good life was and I couldn't explain that.
In sixth form I made some great friends. Then one of them tried to kill herself. She was the first person who I had ever felt really understood me. I had a horrible 3 weeks while she was away where I stopped being able to focus on anything. My mother, whose father killed himself, was always trying to tell me about it which was more than I could handle, and one of my very fragile friends was looking to me for support I couldn't give. The nails thing (still not sure if it was sh) returned with a vengeance and I couldn't do any work at all.
The next year, she was back and everything was better... but I wasn't. I was working again but I still couldn't do art. I was too numb. I started falling out very badly with my dad. I was working on a project where I carved a wax figure using a tool. When I finished I kept it. Don't know why. And when the pressure got too much I started to use it. I stopped in the summer. Threw away the tools. But then I started uni, and my granny died and one of my friends got all suicidal and my social anxiety got worse again and the sh started again. And I don't really see it stopping soon.
Sorry, that was long and pointless. Nothing in my life really justifies the sh. But for some reason I still need it.
skipscop:
Hey everyone *wave* Firstly many many thanks to everyone for writing their stories - it's lovely to know I'm not alone and that you're all out there surviving too :hug2: Also to all those who find it hard to believe (myself included!) - remember that we are all perfect people deserving of love and respect, if someone doesn't/didn't give you that there is a problem with THEM...it is NOT YOUR FAULT.
:trig:
I started sh when I was 16 (22 now). Was feeling pretty sh*t at the time cos I'd left/been excluded from/felt like I'd been kicked out of the stables where I helped out. I was getting bullied there by some of the other girls and didn't feel like I could say anything cos we were all special to the woman in charge, and also by that point I felt like they were a lot more special than me...turns out that was just my stupid teenage perception but hey! Anyway yeah so she was my surrogate mother and it really really hurt not to be able to talk to her anymore cos I'd always told her all about getting bullied at school (which happened all through from primary til about 5th year when all the bullies in my year had left) and she was the only one who knew.
Anyway so it just started one night when I was watching TV with my Dad and just scratched my knee and then the next day had a scab. Then quickly moved onto using other tools. And soon I was doing it most days when I got home from school. I interfered with the wounds too so I could keep them going for longer, and often this gave me my fix at school. It was amazing how no one would notice - my friends knew, but I remember bleeding in PE cos I'd picked scabs and none of the teachers ever commented. But then there were a lot of us in my year who shed so... Anyway so that carried on until in fifth year when I was really stressed about exams my new surrogate mother (yeah, I know!) said to me 'you have to sort yourself out now or your going to get really depressed'. And that really scared me. And it kind of worked for ages because I would really try and stop myself thinking how sh*t I was all the time - and it was just really special that she'd noticed I wasn't ok and I knew that someone cared about me again. Also my physics teacher totally saved me, just by being there and telling me all the time that I wasn't stupid and I could do well :) - she's the bestest! I was still shing, and stopped sleeping while I had my exams but (somehow) managed to do well.
But then that xmas after exams I got raped by a friend of my new surrogate mother while I was house sitting for her. It was the first time I got kissed properly or anything so that totally ducked me up about any form of relationships with people. Also it brought back memories about being groped when I was 9 by a paedophile who lived in a nearby village, and 'playing have sexging' with a boy at primary school when we were both 5/6. So that was really hard too. At first I thought I might be pregnant and would have panic attacks when I was in the loo and didn't have my period yet. But I couldn't really think about it and didn't actually sh (or think about it/feel anything) for the rest of school.
But a year later I started uni and it was really stressful, esp cos I've never really been able to make friends well and the rest of the people in my corridor formed a clique pretty quickly. I wasn't sleeping, and if I did I was waking up with nose bleeds. Then one day I was just looking out of the window and it all came back and I just cried for hours. And since then I think about it every day. My shing came back. At first only around the anniversaries but then at random times too. And then last year I was on a placement as part of my course and living in a house share for the first time which was really hard for me as there were three of us and I constantly felt left out and as if they would be happier without me there. I think this was just how I saw it too but it hurt. A lot. So I was shing the worst I ever had. I took a packet of x from the stores at work, was really hard when I saw them I just immediately wanted to cut and I thought 'no, I'll just take them home and then I'll have them if I need them'. Bad decision. At one point I was cutting every night plus biting/hitting myself several times while I was at work. And I really really enjoyed work, I think it was just because of the stress of living with other people and going out and realising that a lot of stuff I think about guys sounds really wierd to other people and having to try and deal with that.
So anyway now I'm back at uni. Wish I was back at work!!! Even though it was really difficult there was good times too. But the rape was just more and more on my mind every year so I had decided to do something about it and am now having counselling. It was never something I thought I'd do cos I was sure there were loads of people who deserved their time more than me. But my counsellor is really lovely and I totally trust her - which is very surprising for me! So I think maybe we can get me sorted out together. Started shing again though cos of all the things coming up in counselling (after a couple months break). Hopefully I will stop again now but thats easy to say when I've still got 'a wound on the go'.
Wow, thats longer than I expected...thank you to everyone who hangs in til the end!!!
Skips :1059:
:icon_arrow: Edited out tool names
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