Before

[Emma Wallace]

This week has been one long before.

how will this situation or feeling change if i hurt myself?

I will feel relieved, it will break the tension.

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

I will get in trouble with my boyfriend, I will feel guilty that I didn't have more will-power.

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'm not sure. I don't want to feel tense and shaky. SI doesn't help that much, but not SIing doesn't help much either.

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

The relief will last maybe a day, after that I will go back to using will-power.

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?

Right now I'm trying to get some work done. Later I plan to do yoga and I'll see if that helps.

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 guilty. If I don't I will still feel incredibly tense and wound up.

[balletomane]

Why do you SI?

I've found that thinking about this question helps me come up with alternatives that actually work for me.

For instance SI replaces painful emotions for me, but so can certain kinds of music.


So what function so si serve in your life right now?

[Emma Wallace]

There are two things. The first is that I think about it and think about until I actually do it. It doesn't seem to really serve a purpose in that scenario. The second is that when I get shakey and nervous and it just keeps going for hours, days, cutting relaxes/steadies/grounds me. I try doing other relaxing things and they help for a while but they never (rarely, I suppose) seem to be more than a distraction. After I finish my relaxing activity it's still there. Or if it goes away then it starts to build up again quickly.
-E

[balletomane]

do you think that if you do your relaxing activity when the urge is still weak, it will help more?

I see a few ways of minimizing SI:

preventing urges
distracting from urges
dealing with urges by replacing SI with comfort, relaxation, etc.
dealing with urges by resolving their causes

It sounds like distraction/replacement alone doesn't work all that well for you. How about preventing urges?

Do you know what kinds of things cause you to want to SI in the first place? (make sure you are in a safe place before you try to answer this--sometimes I find listing upsetting things difficult)

How can you avoid these things or minimize their effect on you?

[Emma Wallace]

So things I've tried:

Distractions like computer games. These sooth my hyped up adrenalin, but only for as long as I'm doing that.

Comfort or relaxation. I use reading, showers, anf sometimes I try to get into yoga. These work while I'm doing them, and sometimes even longer, but the urge starts to build again after ward.

Things I just don't know how to do:

Preventing the urges. I'm not sure what I can do to prevent them if I'm sitting at home on a Saturday and there's no clear source for my urge. I'm trying to start living healthier with exercise and nutition and such, but that's a slow hill to climb.

Dealing with the root cause. I can't find one. Well, except the depression and when I try to find a cause for that I can't. Everything was well and then my world tipped upside-down, slowly at first then faster and faster.

I'm coping alright. I managed to pick myself up a little recently and start betting work done again. I can usually avoid cutting by using will-power. I'm stubborn, so it often works. But I want to free up my energy so that I can focus on other things. I don't want to spend entire days just trying not to cut.
-E

[Smeagol]

I take it you've tried trying to figure out why you should suddenly feel shaky? I know you said there's no clear urge, but I've found that I don't necessarily have to be a really clear trigger like trying to fill in a form or making a phone call, but rather I can just start feeling uneasy and not really know why at first. There is usually something which has brought it on though, for example it can be I've been thinking about something which, with hindsight (from the fact that I'm getting stressed) I can recognise is stressing me out. So sorry if this sounds obvious, but have you tried really writing/talking out how you feel?

E.g. I feel edgy. It started at x time. I was doing y. I've tried doing z but it isn't helping because... I want to cut because in cutting my attention will focus [or insert whatever exactly it is].

I literally mean journalling here. Journalling to discover. I find that in trying to describe exactly how I feel and the sequence of events before and since the onset of the feeling I can then look back and make sense of it, even though it just feels like it's come on randomly. I'm crap at recognising something as upsetting; what tends to happen is that I get the feeling/thoughts and then figure out the emotion and then its cause. I really do have to work backwards from "Hmm, I observe that I have no appetite and I feel listless" to "maybe I'm feeling down" to "when did this start" and so on. It's like dot to dot but eventually it does lead to a trigger for the feeling, even if it just feels random.

Sorry if that's obvious or you've done all this already, but I thought I'd mention my experience. Yes, I know sometimes it just seem to be a brain misfiring thing, but since you said elsewhere that meds hadn't worked with you, I figure it's better to stick with the assumption that there is a trigger and you just haven't found it yet, at least until something better comes along.

[Emma Wallace]

I tried the journalling thing for a while, but like most of my good ideas (and another one was recording how much I slept, how long I exercised and dozens of details like that and plotting it against my mood on a 10 point likert scale) I just couldn't stick with it. Sometimes it is thoughts that trigger, I've noticed that before. Thinking about my current situation especially can make my heart race, but this tension that just builds and builds and doesn't go away, that I am having a hard time pinning down. I'll try to journal-thing, like you suggested.
-E