before..

[Butterfly.]

Before

• How will this situation or feeling change if I hurt myself?
  A combination of release, relief and a small some of what I deserve, it will be a punishment if I do it well enough.
• What will hurting myself bring to the situation? What will it take away from the situation?
  Bring - feeling, tangible real, feelings. Pain. Punishment. Relief and release.
  Take away - the Void.
• 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 don't know how I want to feel later.
• If hurting myself seems like my best option right now, how long will the relief it brings last? What will i do then?
  For once, I can't even guess. It might last a minute, an hour, a day, a week, who knows. Everything is too raw to know what I need to do to fight it.
• 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?
  Dinner will be soon. Once dinner is over, I could try going for a shower and doing some colouring in, and seeing if the urge passes. I can see myself being in the same predicament in an hour though.
• How will I feel tomorrow if I hurt myself? How will I feel tomorrow if I do the other thing I came up with?
  I don't know. For once nothing is predictable.
• What do I really want to do right now? How can I best honour the self-protective instinct that has me wanting to self-injure right now?
  I want to let everything out. I want to hurt (that isn't a big enough word, but I think I will be breaking rules if I say what I really want). I want to feel things.
  I think that instinct knows I can't handle this, I need an outlet. Everything is a mess. I've possibly done something and made everything worse. I've opened the bottle everything was in, and now I've got to let it out or I'll explode. Maybe I already am. I feel like my soul is dying.

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.

[treasure]

i'm sorry you are stuck with these strong shitty feelings Jem. it might help to remember they will pass, that strong feelings can't last, and you can get through them.

if i'm feeling things that are raw and painful, i often listen to music and skip songs until i find those that express what i feel and allow me to cry. sometimes crying in anger, or pain, or relief/release, it doesn't have to be sadness. when i don't know what the feelings are it can also help to do a cbt worksheet where you work out the event or thoughts that came before the feeling and the thoughts that it triggered. sometimes my thoughts that i identify might be things like "i hate myself" which is likely going to be accompanied by feelings of hate, anger, worthlessness etc. often i didn't realise i felt those things or didn't realise their intensity until going through that process (it doesn't even matter if you use cbt or not, although it can sometimes help, but usually when feelings aren't so strong).