FEELINGS IN MADNESS...a Journey In Song

Self injury

When a person decides that self injury is an option they have already come to there personal end. They have already thought about suicide. Nothing else has worked for them and they usually are in a hopeless, helpless, frustrated way. There are several things that you really should consider learning once you have decided that it's the only thing that you can do. One is learn proper wound care! This is very important. Another is learn how to stop a cut vein from bleeding. It will happen and the best thing you can do in that moment is know how to stop a bleeding vein. ( apply pressure, I would keep packing tape 2" wide handy, then I would wrap it over the cut vein with lots of pressure, then wait for the blood to coagulate and stop. Usually within ten minutes )

There are also considerations to be made. For one, how will people look at you after you have stopped cutting and you have visible scars from it? What will employers think? The chances of a guy dating someone with visible scars is an "at best" scenario. They will have already judged you and made up their minds that your damaged goods or a little mental. And how will you see those scars in a few years? They tell a story. One of heartbreak, sadness, pain to dealing with those things in the best way that you could, you likely prevented another suicide, To finally finding the solution that you needed so that you could stop self injury. The thing is..in a few years you will be out of high school, you will either be in College, have been excepted to a university, joined the military, gotten your first job and thinking of moving out and starting your life. Bullies will be a thing of the past. College doesn't play those cowardly games. It seems to be a high school thing. Your boss isn't going to care how mean your parents were to you or that your sister stole your boyfriend or that you were bullied everyday or that you had a hard childhood. The only thing your going to be judged on is your character and moral value, your abilities as a person, your kind of ethics. Things like that,stuff that really matters in your life. Not what your wearing or how many days a week you hang out at the mall or if you're a lesbian or gay, what kind of car you drive, if your rich or your poor, live in a one story house or two story one or an apartment, if your dating someone or not, how many friends you have on facebook, none of the social norms that you are so important in high school will matter. You will be judged 100% on you. Things that you think matter so much in your life now, they won't even be relevantin 3-4 years. That's just something to consider.

With that said I have one more thing that I would like to point out about self injury. There are just as many reasons that someone turns to self injury as there are days of the year. The reason you self injure won't be the same reason that your friends that do. It will be the overwhelming internal pain that part of it will be the same. What caused that pain will be different. For them it might be parental dysfunction and family bickering, Abuse, There boyfriend is physically abusive, what ever the reason. The affects of it are still the same. It calms, makes everything seem ok for a little while, its put you into a trance like dissociated state that is like a shield from the world and for that little while you can't hear your parents yelling at you, you don't think about the bully that told you to kill yourself today, the monsters yelling at you in your head have finally stopped, your calm and you feel relaxed and the pressures of the day have finally melted away. But it doesn't last. A feeling of guilt will begin to settle in, you will start to blame yourself again for not being so strong, for not able to quit, for being such a failure. The tears will start again, you will cry yourself to sleep and the monsters now have another thing they can scream and blame you with. It's a cyclical thing. It's only a stop gap not the solution. It's a temporary solution to a temporary event. If you really want to stop the internal pain then Google "alternatives to self injury", learn about "thinking errors" and how you can best change those. Chances are, if you have a really low self esteem and don't like yourself very much then you are using several of them. There are eleven of them to include "black and white thinking" , "discounting" , " all or nothing thinking" , "filtering out thepositive" ,"mind reading" , "catastrophizing" , "personalization" these are basically the main ones. Here is a link that will help: 10 thinking errors that will crush your mental strength https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/what-mentally-strong-people-dont-do/201501/10-thinking-errors-will-crush-your-mental-strength .
The premise is 'change the way that you think...you change your whole outlook on yourself and your surroundings. You will begin to appreciate yourself more, you will view situations differently and you will start to see that your changing the way that you interact with others, how you problem solve, your confidence will go way up and the best part of all..it didn't cost you anything but it had a return on that investment that will be a positive in your life for your whole life. The best way to solve the self injuryissue is to learn other ways to cope. Your coping skills right now are probably none. You can Google coping skills and learn about alternative ways to handling things. Again, change your way of thinking and you will change every aspect of the way you think about things right now. It really is better then self- injury.