Quotes About Self-injury

I used self-injury as a coping mechanism to help me overcome the emotional stress that I was incapable of dealing with in any other way. Self-injury was a means of escape, a way to relieve the numbness, and an expression of the pain within me. Something that the police wouldn't care about.

The nerves of the skin send pain signals to the brain to warn us of the danger from and impending injury. In the case of self-inflicted wounding, this pain acts as the body's own defense mechanism to stop one from proceeding in the effort at physical injury. If a person proceeds despite the pain, that means that he or she is motivated by something stronger than the pain, something that makes him or her capable of ignoring or enduring it.

Self-injury forces us to look pain in the face, to see physical evidence of conditions that are usually personal and private. Mental illness is a difficult, confounding subject, one many of us would rather ignore. Self-injury draws our attention to something we don't want to see, and perhaps this is why it makes so many people so uncomfortable.

Among self-injurers, at the root of dissociation and behind all of the symptoms of traumatic stress, from numbness to loss of control, is a range of painful childhood experiences, including emotional deprivation, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and childhood loss. Because the combination of pain, shame, and grief from these early experiences often remains unresolved, feelings of dread and emptiness can build up and quickly grow to unbearable proportions.

The study of self-injury makes clear that the mind and body are inextricably linked, each feedings from the other's nourishment or starving from the other's neglect. The body is, indeed, the temple of the soul. Cutters are living proof that when the body is ravaged, the soul cries out. And when the soul is trampled upon, the body bleeds.

You can't stop killing yourself, If you can't stop hating yourself.

Self-injury is a coping mechanism that BPs use to release or manage overwhelming emotional pain—usually feelings of shame, anger, sadness, and abandonment. Self-mutilation may release the body's own opiates, known as beta-endorphins. These chemicals lead to a general feeling of well-being.