It will happen if you want it enough...

In my experience, in order to recover from mental illness you have to really want to…

I have suffered from anorexia, depression and emotionally unstable personality disorder, and self-injury and other forms of self-harm has been a product of these conditions. I have had hours and hours of therapy, and as a teenager I spent over a year of my life in and out of an inpatient specialized eating disorders unit where at times I had to be supervised 24 hours a day. My admission to this particular unit saved my life, and was a crucial part of my recovery from anorexia; however, the real recovery happened when I made a firm decision that I wanted my life back and I wanted to get better. After being discharged from the unit I would be back every time my weight dropped below my target weight and I ended up being re-admitted twice. After being discharged for the third time it wasn’t long until my weight dropped quite significantly but, surprisingly, my local mental health services decided not to have me admitted again. I was shocked. Not that I wanted to go back to the unit, but after so long that was what I knew, and that is what I had expected would happen. When it didn’t I was thrown in at the deep end and was forced to take control of my anorexia. I could either let it destroy me or I could try my best to fight it. This was, without a doubt, one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do, but I did it. I believe that I was successful because I developed my own ways of coping and living with my illness. I had to be in control of my actions. I was no longer in a hospital where the control was completely taken away from me and this proved to be beneficial. I am not suggesting that spending time in a specialized hospital in unhelpful because it can be extremely helpful and sometimes it is absolutely necessary…as I said, it saved my life. There have certainly been times over the past year when I have been struggling so much with depression and self-harm (both drinking and cutting) that I have desperately wanted somebody to say to me ‘Right, that’s it, we’re going to have to take you away and take control now’. That has not happened and I don’t believe that it will happen (adult mental health services are VERY different to child and adolescent services) so again, it has been down to me to keep myself safe. That is not to say I have been suffering alone or without support, but at the end of the day it is down to ME to keep myself safe and it is down to ME to make the necessary changes in order to get better. 

Unfortunately, I know how difficult it can be, when your mood is low and you are suffering from depression, to find the energy and enough of a reason to want to get better, but don't give up, recovery IS possible if you want it enough.

I'm not bleeding...

[Nail varnish]

But I'm still hurting....

Ask Yourself Why?

When I started writing this blog I truly felt like I had finally identified the reason(s) why self-harm had reared its ugly head in my life again, and I understood how self-harm was functioning as a coping mechanism for me. This identification is, in my mind, the first step to recovery. I have always been a very self-aware individual and I have always wanted to understand why I think the way I think and behave in the ways in which I behave.  To begin with, using the blog to channel my urges to cut myself into something creative was an extremely successful way of relieving the anxiety and intense emotion that goes hand in hand with self-harm and also significantly reduced how frequently I was cutting, and how severe the cuts were. Some of my more realistic images, where I used red nail varnish to resemble blood, almost achieved the same sense of satisfaction (for want of a better word) and relief that are reached when you cut yourself.

Unfortunately, over the past 5 months, despite having kept up work on the blog, I have been less successful at preventing myself from self-harming and there have been numerous occasions where I have been unable to fight off the voices inside my head that encourage me to hurt myself. Having said that, I am not suggesting that the blog has not been a source of comfort, because it has, in many ways, but I think that I have come to understand that the reasons why people self-harm are very changeable,  from person to person, and even within individuals. I still believe that at the end of last year self-harm was functioning as a way of me visually representing the distress that I was feeling inside, which is why the blog was so helpful.  However, I believe that over time it is inevitable that self-harm will become a habitual behaviour, an addiction, making it so much more difficult to fight. For self-harm to be considered an addiction, like any other addiction, there needs to be an element of satisfaction or gain that is achieved when you engage in the behaviour whether that is a physiological gain or psychological gain.

When asked the question ‘What do I get from self-harming?’ I have not known the answer, and I have really struggled to think of any gain that I have acquired from cutting myself. The association I make with cutting myself is a strong sense of shame, guilt, embarrassment and anger, and certainly no sense of gain. Or so I thought…

Seeing as I was making very little progress on the self-harm front; my cuts were getting deeper and much more serious, my trips to A & E much more regular, I was forced to think really truthfully about why this was happening.  Recently I have known that if I do cut myself it will be serious enough to require medical attention, and if it hasn’t been severe enough to require stitches I have felt as though I have failed. I am aware of how warped and unhealthy this mind-set is which is precisely why I have tried so desperately hard to challenge it.  

When explaining these feelings to a mental health professional, whom I see on a regular basis, they made a connection that had never even crossed my mind, that self-harm was my way of reaching out for help from those around me, my way of saying ‘please look after me!’. By hurting myself to the point of needing immediate medical attention I was guaranteeing the delivery of care that I was so desperately longing for.

At first this suggestion made me feel uncomfortable, as I interpreted this suggestion to mean that I was cutting myself deliberately, conscious of its function, and that I could stop at any point if I wanted to. I was reassured that this was not the case, and the more we talked about it, the more it made sense. I have never really felt looked after, by anyone. That is not because I have been treated badly, just because there have been times in my life when I have needed to be taken care of, and it hasn't happened. As a result of this I just stopped expecting to be taken care of. I have never been particularly good at telling people when I need help; I guess I have always just wished that those close to me would just know when I am feeling vulnerable. Disappointingly, people are not mind readers, and it is our responsibility to assert when we need help.  I have invested a lot of effort into learning how to be better at this but I frequently get told that I need to be more transparent. Perhaps I have become trapped in this cycle of self-harm because, actually, cutting myself has proven to be an ‘easier’ way for me to establish that I need looking after. 

So, this has been yet another revelation for me on my journey to recovery and from this point onwards I am going to try my very hardest not to take the ‘easy’ way out and tell people when I need their help, and accept it when it is offered to me. 

A Picture of Self-destruction

[Eyeliner]