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Before You Self-Harm
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?
  I might feel better, at least for a bit, I might be able to get a break from obsessive thoughts of si/su
  
  I will have to hide fresh cuts from my family and at my daughter's birthday party.
• what will hurting myself bring to the situation? what will it take away from the situation?
  possibly some relief, may take away some stress.
• 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 do what's best for my family. I'm not sure if it will get me closer to that feeling or further from it. I guess in order to know that I would need to know what the outcome of not hurting myself would be at this point and assess which is worse.
• if hurting myself seems like my best option right now, how long will the relief it brings last? what will i do then?
  I don't know, it's been a while since I cut and I don't know exactly how long it will help anymore. Or if it will help.
• 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?
• how will i feel tomorrow if i hurt myself? how will i feel tomorrow if i do the other thing i came up with?
  Tomorrow in particular I will probably be somewhat annoyed with myself. It's my daughter's 17th birthday and we are having family over for a BBQ so I would have to be careful to keep any fresh injuries covered and it will likely be very uncomfortable.
• 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. Besides self destructing I'm not sure what I want to do right now.

I guess I want to hide from everything and not have to deal with it.


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?
  
  It's been stressful lately. I'm getting the kids into a new school district which is always heaps of fun. I have to get my daughter into a decent special ed program which isn't always easy because I have to fight the school district's stupid ideas of where they want to send her (usually with brilliant reasons like "This program is nearest to your house" Great, so glad to save you a couple of miles worth of bussing by putting my daughter into a program for kids who are much lower functioning than her.
  
  And my son is going back to school (part time) after being out of public school for the last seven years and being home schooled for the last five. I worry about sending him to middle school.
  
  And we have a bunch of bills from me- dentist, MRI, doctors.
  
  Plus I got a new nuero and I think a small part of me was hoping the new guy would say that I don't have MS or at the very least that I don't need to be on meds, but he wants me on meds (luckily the new one isn't supposed to make me ill like the last one did.) And I just don't like thinking about the future- my future and what it will mean and what it will be like. I was feeling hopeful because my disease is progressing so slowly but the nuero kind of took that hope away chalking it up to my relative youth which obviously won't last forever. It's a two edged sword- I'm youngish so I'm in good shape now but I became symptomatic at 18 which doesn't bode well in the long term. My mom chose to die rather than become more disabled by Spinal Muscular atrophy. My aunt killed herself when she was diagnosed with MS. My uncle killed himself and his wife rather than have her become more and more ill and eventually die from diabetes. So perhaps I don't have a lot of good examples of how to handle long term illness with grace.
• Have I been here before? What did I do to deal with it? How did I feel then?
  yep. cut/didn't cut meh/meh Nothing helps for long, nothing changes anything.
• What I have done to ease this discomfort so far? What else can I do that won't hurt me?
  listened to music, typed in my place thread, cleaned I could do things that need done before school starts so that I feel better prepared. I could read more about the drug I'm supposed to start and make a decision about that so that I stop having that nagging at my brain and then start it or not.
• How do I feel right now?
  
  tired, numb, a little like crying
• How will I feel when I am hurting myself?
  
  relieved, nervous (About getting caught)
• How will I feel after hurting myself? How will I feel tomorrow morning?
  
  I don't know at this point. Sometimes it snaps me out of a mood, sometimes it helps shut the thoughts up a bit.
• Can I avoid this stressor, or deal with it better in the future?
  
  Kill myself or perhaps get counseling/go on anti-ds.
• Do I need to hurt myself?

I need something.

(note, changed the title later)

Questions to Answer After A Slip
slips are chances to learn. you figure out what stresses are still too hard for you and you can work on how you'll deal with them next time you run into them. so instead of beating yourself up, take action.

• have you taken care of your physical wounds? if not, go do that now. we'll wait.
  
  Yeah.
• what had happened just before?
  
  Talked to my SIL on the phone, felt guilty about having suicidal impulses when I have so many good people in my life who love me.
• what were you thinking and feeling?
  
  I was thinking..I don't know mostly just I was in a hurry to get it done before my son got up or my daughter stopped being occupied on the computer. I was also thinking that I hope it helped. I was also thinking about killing myself. And finally I was thinking about where I wouldn't mind scars.
• why did you end up hurting yourself then instead of some other time? was there an event that was the final straw? what was it?
  
  I don't know, I've had these times where I have gotten through without si, I've had them a lot and even worse than now (because right now while I do want to self destruct I am conflicted because I don't want to hurt my family and other times I have been convinced that it would be better for my family.)
• how did the situation get to the final straw stage? trace it back through the events that led up to the last event. look for some point at which you could have made a different decision and not arrived at the final straw.
  I'm not sure. I just got to where I felt like it would be the safest thing to do. But maybe I was wrong because the impulse while I was cutting was to do something worse and (obviously) I had put myself into a situation where it would have been easy to do more damage to myself than I first intended. To be blunt what started as an effort to avoid a suicide attempt had fleeting moments where I considered turning it into a suicide attempt. I did not because my kids are the only ones home with me. I would hope I would never be so out of it that I would kill myself with them home.
• were there outside factors like drugs, alsohol, being off your meds, lack of sleep, etc? can you address those in the future? how?
  No, I do not use alcohol or drugs and I don't have psych meds so nothing to be off of and I got an ok amount of sleep. I guess my MS is an outside factor but not one I have any control over.
• what other ways of coping did you try besides self-harm? how well did they work?
  Music- pretty well
  Talking with people I love- I don't know. It helped right that moment I was talking with them it helped a lot but that feeling didn't last and it added guilt to the mix
  doing other things that need doing-didn't help much
• in retrospect, are there coping methods that you now realize might have helped? what were they?
  I kind of wanted to call a helpline but I don't know of one around here and I didn't want to bother them and I felt self conscious about calling because I probably wasn't really a danger to myself
• name at least two things you will do to help yourself remember those coping methods if you end up in this situation again.
  
  I will need to come up with some coping mechs before I come up with ways to remember them.
• how do you feel about the situation that led to self-harm now? is it resolved? if not, what are some steps you might take toward resolution?
  
  I feel the same. This kind of sucks. The relief I had was staggering while I was cutting and it's already gone. I feel pretty much like I did before except a little ill too.
• are you likely to be in that emotional place again? how will you recognize it when you're in that situation?
  
  I am almost certain to be in it again. I always recognize it, it's hard to miss. I can't quit thinking about hurting/killing myself.
• what will you try before you resort to self-harm if you're in that situation again? list three specific things you will commit to trying.

I will try- going for a walk
- writing
-looking at pictures of my kids when they were babies
-remembering that this doesn't help as much as I remember it helping

About Opportunities to SI
Opportunity to Self-Harm seems to be a common theme. Think about why opportunities are important to slips and learn why opportunity is important to you.

• What made that opportunity more appealing than any other?
  My husband wasn't home, my son was still asleep, my daughter was busy at her computer.
• Did you make an opportunity or was it there for the taking?
  Both. I locked myself in the bathroom after ensuring that no one was around to wonder why I was taking so long.
• What would you have done if there was no opportunity, how would you have handled your urge?
  I would have just sucked it up and hoped for the chance to come about soon.
• If there had been no opportunity would your urge to self-harm have increased or decreased?
  Hard to say. In this case probably increased or the urge to su would have increased. Unless I could actually get my mind off of it and on a different track.
• What consitutes opportunity for you? Being alone? having new tools? waiting for the right feeling? Being alone, having the supplies (tools and first aide) that I need and having really strong urges or feeling like it is the safer or better option.
• If your opportunties were taken away, how would you feel?

In a way probably frustrated and helpless but in another way relieved because I would be forced to just plow through and deal without using s.i.