If you’re struggling with self-injury or related issues, you may well feel powerless and out of control. However, there are actually a lot of things you can do to help yourself. These pages are for anyone who’d like to regain some control over their SI, whether you’ve made a commitment to never self-harming again, or you just want to try out a couple of alternatives and see if that helps.
Physically preventing self-harm – for example, by throwing your blades out, or being supervised in hospital – is perhaps the most obvious way of reducing the amount you hurt yourself, and can be a vital first step if your self-harm is putting your health or life at risk. However, it’s unlikely to solve the problem on its own. Most people who self-harm do so as a coping mechanism and will need to find other, healthier ways of coping before they can put self-harm behind them. You can find suggestions of alternative ways of coping on our Things to do instead page.
Understanding why follows on from this page. It looks at some of the most common reasons why people self-harm, what needs their self-harm may be meeting, and how those needs can be met in other ways.
Finally, you can make self-harm less likely to happen by overcoming the thoughts and feelings that lead up to it in the first place. For suggestions on ways to cope with or reduce unpleasant emotions, see our Tackling the causes page.
A few of the things you can do to help yourself don’t really fit into any of these categories. You can find these, along with inspiring stories, under Inspiration etc.
If you’ve managed to stop self-harming and would like some advice on preventing relapse, or if you’ve recently started harming again and are wondering where to go from here, take a look at our Surviving relapse page.
The following links provide general advice on how to stop self-harming.
Links
Self-Help, Organised and Otherwise
Excellent list of alternatives to SI, divided into categories according to how you’re feeling, and information on how to tell if you are ready to stop, dealing with intrusive thoughts after stopping, and more. Highly recommended.
Stopping Self-Injury
Includes information on when is a good time to stop, long-term approaches to stopping self-harm, and ways of distracting yourself.
Helping Yourself
Understanding why you do it, thinking about other things, and some suggestions for what to do if you still want to hurt yourself.
Things that helped me not to cut
One self-injurer’s account of how she managed to stop cutting.