Self harming

I’ve been wanting to talk about self harming for a while now. It’s a problem, if that is the right word, that a lot of people who live with depression also have to live with.

When I first thought about writing about this, I was going to do some research into the subject. But then I thought again. If I did research, what I would write would be factually correct but I also thought that it could be boring and of course anyone can research the matter.

I thought that it might be more interesting if I just wrote about it from the heart, so to speak.

Let me from the start state that yes, I do self harm. Most people have heard of people self harming, there is enough in the media about it that it is almost not possible to have never heard of it. But when it is portrayed in the media, especially through the medium of television. The person self harming almost without exception, cuts themselves. So it would not be unusual for the majority of people to believe that that is the only way people self harm.

If this is a myth. Then I want to try and dispel it. I stated earlier that I self harm, but I want to also state that I have never deliberately cut myself. My self harm takes the form of visible and invisible harming.

People who know me will know that I have scars on my arms that may, understandably be misconstrued as being scars from cutting. In fact, and I say this with a certain amount of embarrassment, I pick my skin. Skin picking is a recognised disorder, unsurprisingly called skin picking disorder, or which is a bit more interesting Dermatillomania and is linked to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This does not meant that all people who pick their skin have OCD, just that the two conditions are linked or correlated. A lot of the time l am not even aware that I am picking. I do know that when I am in a stressful situation, then I pick. Interestingly and this is something that I have only very recently realised, if I am with people and feel the need to pick, I will wait until I am out of the situation and then I pick for England!! When I do pick, gosh, you know this is really hard for me to write, when I do pick, I have to make myself bleed and if I can’t make a spot bleed, then I move on to another spot, until I do bleed. It doesn’t have to gush, just bleed, it’s not until I bleed that I get any kind of relief.

So that takes care of the visible signs that I spoke about. So what about the invisible? With me and I have intimated this in previous posts, I stop taking my medications. I am heavily medicated, I take 18 different meds every day, some of them twice a day. I take medication to try and keep my heart beating to a regular rhythm, meds to make me pee, meds to stop me peeing! Meds for high blood pressure, meds for depression, and anxiety, strong pain killers for my fibromyalgia and of course I am supposed to stick a needle in myself up to 8 times a day!

When my mood is low, or when I am faced with something that I would rather not face, then I have a real fight on my hands to not take my meds. It’s such a faff I tell myself, I just can’t be bothered. Deep down though, I know that it is deeper than that. When I am really in a dark place, when everything that has happened becomes too much to bear I do deliberately stop taking them in the hope that ‘nature will takes its course’. Fortunately, this has never happened. It might sound strange, but I didn’t realise what I was doing until it was pointed out to me and when I described what I had been doing, to a medical professional, it was logged as a suicide attempt. That is something else I have never told anyone. I tell you, since I started this venture (the blog!), I have made more admissions than I have in the whole of my 58 years! Anyway, there it is, that’s the story of my self harming.

Except that it’s not! I thought it was until yesterday. A really good friend said something to me which really rang a bell so hard that it is still ringing in my ears. I was having a cup of tea with her and unloading a bit and she said this. “You’ve been abused once when are you going to stop abusing yourself” (my paraphrase). Wow! I knew exactly what she meant.

Guilt, blame, self loathing and a whole load of other crap that I keep piling on my shoulders. It happens all the time. People have often said to me that I should stop ‘beating myself up’. That is tantamount to abusing myself. I have a lot of work to do on myself, I know that it’s something I can’t do on my own. Therapy!

So there it is. This is my experience of self harm. I know that I am not the only one who invisibly self harms, so when you hear that someone is self harming, don’t just look for scars caused through cutting, think of all the hidden forms of self harm, I imagine, that there are very many more than I have talked about.

Self harming is real and it’s horrible.