Before

[sojourner_steph]

write down the shadow that's hiding behind the urge. look at it. ask yourself:
how will this situation or feeling change if i hurt myself?

It won't change. But it will go away for a little bit. It will stop hurting for a little bit. It will come back and it will be worse, but if I SI, it will make things feel better in the short term.


what will hurting myself bring to the situation? what will it take away from the situation?

It would help in the short term. It would make me feel better in the short term. In the long term it will make it worse and it will keep on making it harder to not give into SI in the future. It would take me further away from that goal. *REL* it would make it harder to pray.


how do i want to feel about this in the long run? is hurting myself likely to get me closer to or farther from feeling that way?

I want to learn to deal with emotions in a better way than using SI. SIing now is going to take me further away from that. I also want to not struggle with emotions to this extent. I want to not feel like this. I don't know if I know how to change that, but I do know that SI makes it worse and not better.



if hurting myself seems like my best option right now, how long will the relief it brings last? what will i do then?

It's not the best option. It doesn't last long and it would lead me into a spiral of SIing a lot for a while.



what is something i could do now instead of hurting myself? how will it change the situation i'm in? how long will that change last, and what will i do then?

I have done other things. I've emailed a friend and said that I am struggling. I've distracted myself by reading a book all day. I don't know what I could do to change things - the things I know to do are only distractions, nothing that really changes anything or makes things better. . . *REL* I could pray, but I don't really want to right now. . .


how will i feel tomorrow if i hurt myself? how will i feel tomorrow if i do the other thing i came up with?

If I SI I will feel not good. It would suck to give in after having gone for a while without it. It sucks to be in that spiral and I would just want to SI even more. *REL* it sucks how SI makes it hard to pray. . . I'm still going to feel not good anyway with the stuff I have been doing. I'm still going to want to SI - it won't go away. And I'm going to hate myself for being unproductive the last 2 days.



what do i really want to do right now? how can i best honor the self-protective instinct that has me wanting to self-injure right now?

I don't know. Part of me wants people. Someone to talk to. Someone to care. But that's part of what hurts at the moment - how I interact with people - how I don't understand it - how I want to not have friends because I'm like this - how being alone hurts. . . I already emailed my friend though. So I did talk to someone and I hate me for that . . .



More Before Questions To Answer
Why do I feel I need to hurt myself? What has brought me to this point?

I've felt like this for the past couple of months most of the time - it doesn't go away. It doesn't necessarily have a cause. I just feel like it - stuff hurts - and I want to SI. Some things which may have contributed to it atm is stuff I've been thinking about about friendships and how I've been overwhelmed by everything which I need to do to sort out this semester (a lot of which involves admitting that I have problems and can't do normal stuff) and how I just can't do it, but feeling pressure because I know I've got to do it (I should have a few weeks ago, but I've kept on putting it off).



Have I been here before? What did I do to deal with it? How did I feel then?

As I said above - most things I do are just distractions, they don't seem to actually help or change anything, just stop me from giving in to SI.



What I have done to ease this discomfort so far? What else can I do that won't hurt me?

Emailed my friend, distracted myself by reading, distracted myself and tried to work stuff out a bit by writing here. I don't know what else I can do.




How do I feel right now?

Bad. Stuff hurts. I can't do it.





How will I feel when I am hurting myself?

Hopefully, I would feel nothing. Which is why I want it - to make me not feel stuff. Or at least to satisfy the constant feeling of wanting to SI. It's hard to fight it all the time.




How will I feel after hurting myself? How will I feel tomorrow morning?

Short-term it might help. Long term it will make things worse.




Can I avoid this stressor, or deal with it better in the future?

No. Because a lot of it is just a feeling which I don't know what it is or why I feel it. The stuff about situations which may have contributed a bit to it - I don't know.



Do I need to hurt myself?

No. I never need to. But I want to.