tell your story.

i'm not really sure if this is allowed, but i guess we'll see.

so, tell your story! tell us why you started self harming, when you started, how you are today, and everything in between.

I started out of depression to make the pain go away and sometimes it's a punishment to myself. I have very low self esteem so I blame myself for everything.

It seems like it's been forever but it's only been a little over 2 months since I started. Somewhere around 75 total cuts and scratches (they heal quickly though)

I'm doing okay today... talked to my best friend last night (who also cuts) and I said some things that seemed suicidal I guess... and she really showed that she cared. Which I needed. Although, stressed at the same time. An argument happened between some people I care about (people like family) and it seems to be falling apart. Closest thing to family and it's falling apart. We'll see how this goes...

Long story short gf cheated and then left me aftr 8 months through txt
Spiraled out of controlled. Started to cut did it for 3-4 months and then stopped parents found out. Went to a therapist and still go today every once in a while to bitch about stupid things. It actualy just passed my one year cutting free. Still have a few scars. Cutting comes on my mind every once in a while and i think about the memories

I have bad autism so I don't adapt well to change so moving caused a downward spiral. I became depressed and started to cut. After a while I became suicidal. I was Baker Acted by my psychiatrist. When I came out of the hospital I had a different outlook on life, but it wasn't a good one. I was mad at the world and thought life was unfair. I had seen sad things and gone through hell. I got depressed and started cutting again. I spend my summers camping and I didn't have my razor so I discovered scratching myself with rocks and sticking thorns in my arms. People found out because I wore a bikini one day. I was able to stop for most of last year, but then I started sh again. The worst thing is when I play volleyball, because even though I'm good people judge me for the scars all over me.

Well I have depression and I will be fine one mement and break out crying at the most random times no matter what has happen around me. The cutting helps control this random out burst of crying. I also have anxiety problems. This helps me with that. I'm also under so much stress at school. I put on a fake smile on bad days . My mother has no idea about my problems at all. Yeah I'm a messed up person. I try my best to keep positive but it's hard to do it alone.....

I have several reasons. Three family members dying, two divorces for my mum, constant bullying, presure on grades, stress.

When I was nine, my mother's alcoholism took a turn for the worse. That was also the year that I was first raped, but the immediate issue when I first consciously hurt myself was my mother. I locked myself in my bathroom and grabbed a razor. Since I knew I would be caught if I cut my arms, I used my knees instead. I managed to keep the habit very well under control until about a year and a half ago, when I began taking blades with me when I traveled: to summer camp, on study trips, you name it. Even then, I rarely used them because my main trigger was my family.

However, in January when I was raped again everything went downhill. I started cutting more often, deeper and branching out into other forms of SH. In the past seven months I may have had about seven days clean in total, and that includes time I spent on airplanes, time I spent in the psych ward and everything else.

The worst part is... I don't know if I want to stop.

I started about 4 years ago....my first boyfriend broke up with me (stupid reason) and I needed an instant relief so I just grabbed a knife and cut. At that time I didn't think it was a big deal...after that I didn't cut for a year then I did it again. Then after that every once in while I would cut, more and more after each time.

This summer I wanted to kill myself, so I bought a blade and I actually tried but I guess it was harder than I thought...my religion stopped me at the very last moment and also the love for my family...I realized I could never do sth like that to them. So I didn't, though I still have deep cuts on my arms from that night..It was then when I told my sister because she came home soon after I cut and I told her about my issue but then I realized she was again talking how hard it was for her and she didn't offer any help or understanding. I guess it is hard to understand self harmer ... in the morning when my mom came home she told her (I asked her to do that) and my mother didn't understood it was more than just one time which I made clear few nights later when I promised her I wouldn't do it again but lately I'm feeling an urge to cut again...It was all I could think of so I did it again about 5 days ago and now the urge is even bigger. I didn't cut my arms because it is hard to hide and I don't plan to tell my family that I cut again.
I find some distractions useful but I really need to do it right now.....

Originally Posted by Mortal Coil

The worst part is... I don't know if I want to stop.

I know the feeling..I do feel bad because im not sure if I want to stop...somewhere in my mind I know I should but it does help sometimes to cut. I'm just afraid it will have control over me if I start doing it more often.


Please don't double post, just edit the first one. -StoppingTime.

i'll try to keep mine a little short.

so i started back in january of last year. well, i mean purposely doing it. i always used to play with fire and candle wax and drip it and whatever and used to pull hair, hit my head, etc. this was before last year, of course. then i tried knowingly doing it with razors and things. i wasn't much of a fan. but of course self harm isn't limited to razors. i started using different techniques.i never quite counted until about a day or two after self harm awareness day (when i did it once again) and then i started getting people ask about me. they wanted me to finish it. i got to about 140 and i did it again when i was playing with fireworks. then i got to about 80... and i did it again. then 30.. i just kept getting lower and people stopped believing in me. but then this boy.... i met this boy at band camp and he and i hit it off right away. he and i were great friends and he and i helped each other and built each other up. he and i even were slightly intimate.. but the night after i finally gave in and gave him all my trust and.. well.. anyways.. he told me that he was asexual. i cut, i carved, i hurt all day. there was nothing that would stop me. i went from cloud nine to rock fucking bottom. remember i said rock bottom because that's something that i'll come back to. i, who many self harmers looked up to was not even making to day one. i mean, what a loser. it was a conundrum, because the more i did it, the more embarrassed i was because i made it through my dads cancer without self harm. i made it through break ups. i made it through all this BULLSHIT but when i turn someone asexual... anyways then i made it to about day 12 or something pathetic. then once again for a whole week and a half i never made it to day one. i know, i know, some people go months without a day one. but this is not normal me. this is not student council, grade making, band choir speech acting FUCKING EVERYTHING eric. people started leaving me. my life got worse. i swear that the more people left, the more subtle hints i gave. i never did it where it was noticeable.. but then once i did. i still have that really noticeable battle scar that people always ask about. it was on my arm, and it was a "cat scratch" and sometimes it was a "dog bite"

i was not careful at all anymore. i didn't care. i'd fill a bathtub and go to town. once i wrote love on my four left knuckles. people have talked to me about it before. but this one particular person who had talked to me about god had talked to me. he had me believe that i'm worth it. this was about three weeks ago. i'm now 24 days free and i just want everyone to know that it gets better. i've gotten help from self ham anonymous meetings. and back to that rock bottom thing. listen to this beautiful quote i heard, "i had to hit rock bottom and use it as a foundation to build my new life."

stay beautiful everyone, sorry for the long message, it gets better.

i started in grade 8 my second year of high school, because i had spent my whole life being bullied and made fun of and then at the start of grade 8 my dad was in a really bad car accident and we didnt know if he would make it out alive but he did and now suffers from a number of different health issues.. anyway that was y i started to help cope with everything... i have just finished grade 11 and still cutting to this day, not so much because of bulling as i have moved to a different school and state, but because of family problems (me and my mum dont really get on) and the fact that i bearly have any friends at this school.. i also have really bad depression and mild aniexty which do not help with any of this..
but yes this is my story of y i started and how now i cant stop..

Started some six years ago.. Started cutting me... Jumping from high places... And more like that... And those felt really hard so i gave them up before four years.. Now the max i do is punch my punch bag or my towel.. Thats all!!

During childhood I was mostly homeless. Moving from my moms friends to my moms friends. She would leave me there for a 1 day or 3 months. She did a lot of drugs, trying to get away from the fact she was 16 with a child and a husband who didn't love her. As time went on she took me from my dad and kept me locked away from him.

When I got older, around 9 I developed an eating disorder. Or I was very, very under weight. I wouldn't eat what my moms current boyfriend made because he couldn't make me. I didn't sleep because all of the constant fighting and him hitting my mom.

Eventually I went back to my dad, around 5th grade. I loved this show called degrassi. They have an episode on cutting, and out of curiostiy I started. Little tiny cuts.

But here I am now with cuts on my thighs and wrists deep enough to probably need medical attention asap.

It seems such a long time ago now that I started self- harming. Well, it was 3 years ago now. I'd dabbled in self-harm. I'd used scissors to scratch myself before in an attempt to make myself feel something when I felt like I couldn't feel anything, but I wouldn't really count that as starting to self harm. I started drinking to get drunk that summer too and just generally mildly self-destructive things. That was 3 and a half years ago now.

Then three years ago i'd had an arguement with my friend and I was feeling genuinely down about myself and about everything that had happened in my life. I was straigtening my hair and accidentally burnt myself and ended up becoming curious as to how much burning myself would hurt and how much it would mark, thinking it would be nothing. Well I guess it helped me just a little too much, and it became a regular thing.

A few months later it turned into cutting. I remember the first time I cut myself. I was in the shower and it was absolutely nothing. But it was the start of everything.

Alot happened in between. Two hospitalised overdoses, an eating disorder, so many counselling sessions, and now i'm where I am :p I've not self harmed regularly for over a year now. I've not overdosed since the last time I was in hospital, almost a year ago. I've not had a full relapse into my eating disorder for a year either.

Now why I started self harming? I genuinely don't know. I really didn't like myself, I was miserable, I suppose I wanted someone to notice and help me because I wasn't coping. It wasn't purely that though, it helped too. It made me feel better. Genuinely it all feels so long ago now and I think i've forgotten a lot of it for my own good.

When I was younger I didn't have the worst childhood, it wasn't a walk through the park though. I've always been bullied, in year 3 (around 7), I had no friends left and the bullying got so bad I moved schools because my headteacher did jackshit about it. In my second junior school I made a bunch of friends that I thought were the best things in the world. They were the most popular girls in the year and I always wondered why they took me in. Looking back on that they left me out of things, hurt me when I was down, they were over dramatic stupid and actually somewhat bullied me as well. Comparing myself to them made me think about how I wasn't good enough and never would be. I guess that fired up the self hatred.

My parents didn't help the situation. I would move house every week from one to another, chucked around in a cardboard box. My dad didn't settle down until I was about 11, we'd live in a room at my grandmas. Me and dad sharing a bed my sister on a camp bed. The stability of the time means I had no where I felt safe and secure. My mother and I never got on. She emotionally abused me up until sometime this year. We would come home and just scream at each other, throw things, name calling. That was when I started to get so frustrated and had nothing I could do about it.

Throughout my life I can remember self harming in small ways. Banging my head against a wall, biting my tongue, kicking/punching myself and whatever else. When I got to 13, so last year, I started getting really stressed, angry and irritated so easily and I needed a better outlet than I had which was literally just to break down and cry. It made me feel useless and pathetic, so I really needed to stop.

I started cutting regularly in January, it helped with all my emotions and the stress of school, moving house every week and all the other bullshit life has to offer. I found it didn't really help my feelings when I couldn't self harm. I'm now more irritable, angry and have a fuck load of other feelings that get mixed up in my confused brain but I don't know what else I can do. The cuts have gotten a lot deeper than when I started where they were just small scratches but it's not like things have gotten bad enough that I need to be hospitalised, stitches might have been useful a couple of times. I overdosed in September but no one found out and apart from probable liver damage I don't think much harm came of that.

Today, things aren't great. Stress is getting to me. I can't even put into words how I feel. I'm tired all the time and I really don't know what I can do about my emotions. I just try and get by on my own with everything going round and round in my brain that if I could have one wish, it would be to make the thoughts stop. So yeah, to sum up, a load more problems have developed and I don't know what the hell I can do about it, yay. Sorry for this being so long, I don't know why I even wrote it.

I started when I was in seventh grade. I started because life got to be too much to handle. I had always heard about cutting, slitting, and marking the body and I thought that maybe it would help. I grabbed the first thing that I could, a thumbtack. I started marking and it hurt so bad, but the pain, for once in my life I could control the pain. So I just did two slits, two tiny little scars on my left forearm. Ever since then I've started using razors and even a knife once. I keep telling myself that I'll stop, but I just can't. The only people that know are my parents and they keep telling me to give it to God. I can't just give it to God, who I'm pretty sure is imaginary and was told to small children to keep them in line. If he's not? Then he's sure as Hell never helped me. Now I have so many marks...on my chest, hands, forearms, and ankles. The blood that drips out of them is like another worry that I don't have to deal with...

P.S. I hope this doesn't violate any rules or anything. I don't want to get in trouble...

Well for me I guess it all started when my mom got sick about two years ago and I started to get really down about it and just as she was getting better my relationship with my dad got really bad and we always had huge arguments. Then I started feeling more and more alone, especially at home and I just can't talk to people about my shit so I started cutting. Its becoming harder and harder to deal with so I do it more and more. It started off like it wouldn't last but now it's almost every day. I just know that someday I'll find the permanent end

I guess I started around 6th grade, picking at my skin, and stratching. Things between my parents weren't good for years and just kept getting worse. All this stress from them and school, and stress keeps accumalating. So then I started cutting. For two years I never really cut a lot, just here and there. In 8th I started cutting more, and so on into 9th. Starting to always wear bracelets on my right arm, saying cus I just like wearing them,never been caught but I'm just tired of having to hide my cuts and scars. I'm in 10th now and the stress keeps agumenting and the only thing that helps is selfinjury. Now its like I don't notice how much I do it. Cutting, biting, friction burns, using any sharp thing I can find. I've tried many times to stop but can't.

Quite a lot of stuff has happened in my life. My mum left when I was 3 months old, my dad has mental health problems. He didn’t work for a long time. We never had any money. One of his friends abused me from age 10 to 12. My uncle was a violent psycho. Got bullied when i was 11 for really dumb stuff too, like because we didn’t have a tv. Yeah, crime of the century… Not a big deal really but because the abusive stuff was going on at the same time it totally magnified it. I tried to kill myself then but my cousin walked in and stopped me.

After that I made myself into this really tough person who had no feelings or emotions at all so nothing could hurt me. I would make people hate me before they had the chance to decide they hated me. The only way I could really make myself feel something was by hurting myself. Back then I used to bang my head off stuff, punch things or deliberately provoke someone to fight me. I never really counted that as self harm though. I admit, i was one of those people that thought self harm was just an attention seeking thing and not something i'd ever do.

March this year i stabbed myself with a piece of glass. It was almost like an instinctive thing. After that I started burning myself with a lighter, then with cigarettes. Then I moved on to cutting.

There’s not one single reason I self harm, there’s tons of them. Like pulling myself back from dissociation or self punishment. I don’t really like to admit it but a lot of it is connected to what happened with my dad’s friend, like there is so much, hurt I guess with that and there is nothing to show for it. Having scars gives me something to show for it. Not that I want anyone to see, its just for my own self to see.

Right now things are kind of bad. Since mid September i've had to have a lot of stitches put in. I don't want to do this forever though, so i'll stop sometime, but not right now.

I think ive always been kinda depressed ever since i left school, months after i left i became suicidal and withdrawn form everyone. Then made homeless by my father who was even aware of my cuts, which were new still kicked me out for literally no reason. Looking back they were dark days, but this summer (long story) he (my father) kicked me out even called the police on me, making me homeless again every single scar i have on my body is because of him, which he even told me that if anything happened to you id blame you id blame your mum.
Since this summer i havent cut, but i am on the verge of either cutting again or committing suicide thats how i found this site today, i thought the pain had gone for good but im never going to be happy 3 years on and im back in the same position and no one seems to care, literally

Its been almost three years since I first started cutting, I'd been feeling what I now recognise as depression for a few months prior to my first cut. To start with I didn't really understand what I was doing and I don't know where I got the idea from it wasn't until eight months later when I was found out that I really identified it as self harm. My uncle had just died, my friends had seen cuts on my arms for a while but kept quiet until this point when they were worried his death might push me into getting worse. From that point I convinced the adults in my life that I'd stop but I didn't, I hid it for another six months until my mum saw the damage. At this point I went to the doctor who gave me a referral to counselling. After minor suicide attempts, talk of meds and hospitalization and a short police visit I got myself back on track this year.

I'm feeling better than I ever have even before. I'm finally happy. I go out with my friends, I party, I keep up with school and I enjoy life. I'm not going to lie i'm not completely rid of my problems I had to go back and see someone in October and I do still cut now and again but i'm getting there, it isn't easy no but its worth it.