bus

Before You Self-Harm
write down the shadow that's hiding behind the urge. look at it. ask yourself:

I believe the shadow this time is my ED.

• how will this situation or feeling change if i hurt myself?
  
  The situation will not change. I will still have an ED if I hurt myself. But I might feel a little bit better.
  
  
• what will hurting myself bring to the situation? what will it take away from the situation?
  
  Hurting myself will bring relief to my situation, however briefly. It might let me cry. It will take away some of the hurt.
  
  
• 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 be able to look back and say that I beat my ED. Hurting myself will do nothing for that.
  
  
• if hurting myself seems like my best option right now, how long will the relief it brings last? what will i do then?
  
  It will not bring relief for very long. But it may offer enough relief so that afterwards I can cry. Or at least sleep.
  
  
• 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 could try to sleep. Sleeping, if I could, would shut my mind off for eight hours or so. After those eight hours, I will wake up, probably still feeling miserable, and go to work.
  
  
• 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 hurt myself I will feel angry at myself and guilty. But I will also feel relief. If I sleep, I will just put off how I am feeling now.
  
  
• 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?

What I really want to do is curl up and cry. I don't know what I can do because I can't cry right now.

urges aren't necessarily the enemy. they happen for reasons, and they're an expression of a desire to stay alive and stay sane and keep coping. remember that.

More Before Questions To Answer

• Why do I feel I need to hurt myself? What has brought me to this point?
  
  I feel worthless, like a failure, a waste of space. I feel like this because I am struggling with my ED. I want to get better but I can't make myself eat the smallest thing without making myself sick.
  
  
• Have I been here before? What did I do to deal with it? How did I feel then?
  
  No, I don't think I've quite been in this situation before. Some of my feelings recently are new to me and a reletive mystery.
  
  
• What I have done to ease this discomfort so far? What else can I do that won't hurt me?
  
  So far I have talked briefly to a few people, worked on my knitting, and folded five paper cranes. I did some laundry and watched some TV. I could try to sleep.
  
  
• How do I feel right now?
  
  I feel miserable, depressed, worthless. I feel like a failure, and slightly, vaguely SU.
  
  
• How will I feel when I am hurting myself?
  
  Relief, comfort
  
  
• How will I feel after hurting myself? How will I feel tomorrow morning?
  
  I will feel calmer, until tomorrow morning when I will feel guilty and angry.
  
  
• Can I avoid this stressor, or deal with it better in the future?
  
  No, I can't avoid it. I have an ED, I can't just walk away from it. When I fight, it hurts. But if I don't fight it, it will kill me.
  
  
• Do I need to hurt myself?

No. No, no, no. And maybe if I say it enough I will believe it.


Remember you don't have to answer all the questions if you don't feel up to it.

You mention a lot of negative things you're feeling right now. Can you make a list of positive things about yourself? Not "I am a failure for not beating this" but "I am courageous for trying" and so on. And then in other areas of your life.

Because it won't go away if you hurt yourself either.

You are absolutely right; hurting myself won't make anything go away.

I did end up hurting myself. Next time I will a.) take your suggestion and try making a list of positives, and b.) work on answering the questions before I get to a point where my mind is too muddled to really examine what is making me feel the way I am. It is what this is for, after all. I think tonight after work I am going to sit down with the "before" questions that I have answered already and really look at them, see if I can find a common thread. Perhaps there is a common thread I am not seeing clearly yet that I can work on.

Love,
Stevie

That sounds like a good plan. Sorry, I was a bit brief earlier and didn't explain the reason behind my suggestion.

EDs are hard. It's totally understandable to feel upset with yourself when you can't make the thoughts and behaviours go away. But that doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you someone who hasn't mastered all the skills they're going to need yet.

So I was thinking of ways you could put it in perspective and feel less bad about yourself. One is to try and reframe how you look at it: not "I failed" but "I tried". Another is to try and find other things about yourself that are good, and see how this is one behaviour, one habit, how it doesn't define you, how failure at this goal doesn't cancel out the other stuff. And then of course you can always practise saying those things to yourself. "this is not me", "everybody has things they can't do differently" "it's okay not to succeed all the time".

I don't know whether I pointed you to this post: http://buslist.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=94092? If so, sorry to repeat myself. But it might help explain what I mean about reframing. The other thread which came to mind was this: http://buslist.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=90953 . I found it a really useful exercise. Strip away the assumptions and the feelings and just describe myself. And you know what? I was human, just like everybody else in that thread. Maybe doing something like that would ehlp you when you're feeling like a failure.