Tattered&ShatteredMinds[May trigger].

La.

La la la la. Die die die. Cutcutcut. Od.od.od.
Neverending cycle.
Never going to leave me be,peace.
Bad day,too.
Life sucks,ha.

Suicidal?

How to Self Harm.

List 5 characteristics that you like about yourself.

List 5 characteristics that you like about yourself.

Let’s try and love ourselves some more, try and think of something you love about yourself, your personality, your looks, anything.

Just to remind yourself of the things you LIKE/LOVE, not HATE.

1. My eyes.

2. How I love to help others.

3. My hair - when it’s all nice and done up.

4. How I seem to be really creative, which is always a plus!

5. How stubborn I am - which can be used for positive things like fighting back against my mind and being determined to keep fighting back, rather than negative things.

Go for it, guys.

Love yourselves.

Think of anything about yourself that you like, if only a little bit. It can be anything!

Spread the love for ourselves, not the hate. :)

xxxxx

10 things not to say to someone who is Depressed.

1. It’s all in your head. You need to think positive.

While optimism is certainly important in training the brain, it doesn’t take away the fact that they have an illness and they are still struggling and hurting. Sometimes all people need is support, and comfort, and love. Not to be told it’s all in your head and to just think happy thoughts! Not as simple nor as easy as that. If it were, it would be amazing and there wouldn’t be anyone who suffers with mental health problems.

2. You need to get out of yourself and give back to the community.

This is one that certainly made bad things worse. Because now, in addition to feeling severely depressed, a person also feels guilty and self-absorbed. Yes, giving back is important, but only when a person is healthy enough to hold a ladle at a soup kitchen.


3. Why don’t you try and exercise?

This is good advice. Exercise has strong antidepressant effects. However telling someone that they need to exercise is a little like telling someone their butt looks fat in those jeans. You need to hint at it, but not put it directly on the table, or else the person may very well take up kick-boxing and practice with you.

4. Shop at Whole Foods and you will feel better.

I resent you telling me that my Frosted Flakes is what’s causing power outage in the left frontal lobe of my brain.

5. Meditation and yoga are all you need.

Correction: meditation and yoga may be all that people experiencing mild and moderate depression need. Both are important tools to reduce depression. However, acute anxiety and severe depression are different animals altogether.

6. Get a new job.

Maybe the job is making your loved one depressed. Stress is never a good thing for our health, and especially our emotional health. It pours toxins into our bloodstream. But don’t encourage a major decision while the person is depressed. A balanced perspective is needed.

7. Are you happy in your relationship?

Again, relationship problems might certainly be triggering the depression, but I’ve talked to too many people who almost left their husbands and wives when they were clinically depressed, thinking that something around them must be the problem. Since a spouse is the closest thing, he or she gets blamed when in reality, this isn’t the case at all.

8. You have everything you need to get better.

 This may make the person feel guilty and perhaps even ungrateful. But, Guess what? Some forms of modern medicine actually aid recovery! Seriously! Kind of like chemotherapy for cancer patients, and insulin for diabetes. Would you tell a woman with breast cancer she has everything she needs to get better? No. I didn’t think so.

9. Do you WANT to feel better?

This was my very favorite. Because it suggests that we can will ourselves to be as happy as we want. Want to be a little more giddy? Let me just adjust the optimism lever a tad. There we go … happy again! Again, I do think you need to watch your thoughts, retrain them and retrain them, applying tools for optimism. But I don’t think we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps without any help. Please don’t make the person feel like a failure in addition to depressed.

10. Everyone has problems.

Some people absolutely do have problems, and maybe even have it worse. But that doesn’t make this persons pain any less real or profound. Chances are if you do bring it up, they will also feel weak and pathetic … like they have no right to feel the way they are feeling, which will, of course, make them feel worse.

10 things not to say to someone with an Eating Disorder.

1. But you eat!

Of course they do. They have to or they would die, very quickly. It doesn’t matter if you saw your friend eating a chocolate bar two weeks ago, or they eat something at lunch every day: they can still have a serious problem. They might calorie count, purge, only eat ‘safe’ foods, restrict what they eat: but they will still eat something, sometimes.

2. But you have a great figure! (especially when said to an underweight person)

Society has managed to twist everybody’s eyes to the point where underweight or ill looks normal or desirable. If somebody ever says ‘I’m Xlbs underweight’ and you reply with this, that’s telling them ‘there’s nothing wrong with you’. We hear it as ‘if you gain anymore, you’ll lose that figure and be fat’.

3. But you aren’t thin?

Eating disordered patients are not always underweight. A diagnosis of anorexia has a weight requirement at the moment, yes- but being 5lbs underweight isn’t always obvious. Unless somebody is very underweight, it can be difficult to tell. That isn’t even the point- severity is not the same as weight. A person can be very ill with an eating disorder and be normal or overweight. Not to mention that actually telling a sufferer that they aren’t thin is often heard as ‘you’re fat’. Plain and simple.

4. Just eat [X] and avoid [Y] and you’ll be fine.

This tends to be the ‘just eat a healthy diet and you won’t get fat!’ type thing. It’s more than a diet. It’s not like a sufferer can just ‘snap out of it’. Advising a healthy eating routine is sweet, but it’s a little like showing a person with cleanliness based OCD a light cleaning routine. The second part gets its whole own entry-

5. Avoid [Y].

On stories about treatment, people are always asking ‘well why are they feeding them pizza and things? Can’t they have grilled fish and vegetables? It’s healthier!’ It’s healthier in that it has may have nutrients, sure. But you’re mixing up ‘good for weight loss’ with ‘healthy’, as many people do. Low calorie foods are hard to gain weight on- not to mention that learning to eat all foods is very important in recovery. If I somehow managed to gain weight on lean meat and salads but couldn’t consider chips without a breakdown, I wouldn’t be recovered or healthy.

6. Just snap out of it!

If we could do this, none of us would have a problem.

7. Let me tell you about my diet-

Not only is this boring (sorry, it’s true), it’s very triggering. If you enthuse about how you feel sooo much better and happier and you’ve lost 8lbs since you cut out bread, I’m going to think about the toast I ate this morning and feel like crying. You may be in a very different place from me- you might genuinely need to lose some weight. But I’m not in a place where I can make that distinction right now: if you talk about how you never eat carbs, I’ll think ‘clearly I don’t need to either’- which isn’t true.

8. Wow, you ate a lot at that meal! Well done!

I’ve heard this used to mean ‘you tried hard, well done’. It’s a sweet sentiment, but all I hear from that sentence is ‘wow, you ate a lot’. And I tend to hear ‘a lot’ as ‘too much’. It’s better to just say to someone that they did well, and you’re proud of them, and that it is okay to have eaten, and kind of giving them permission to eat could be helpful, too.

9. Why don’t you just go out for a run if you feel fat?

You can see the logic- anxious over being unhealthy/overeating could be answered with healthy activities like exercise. But exercising whenever you eat is unhealthy. It’s very unhealthy. Doing actions purely to burn off calories is purging, and that’s not a habit any of us need.

10. Oh, I had a friend with an eating disorder! Yeah, she got down to XXlbs and was in hospital for months, it was awful, she didn’t eat for days on end…

We’re competitive. We shouldn’t be; but we are. If you stand there and tell me about how thin your friend was, I think ‘well, she was really sick. I’m nothing like that, I can’t be sick!’ I feel ashamed and upset and- yes, jealous because she did “better” than me. If you’ve come to identify yourself purely as your your disorder, as many people do, hearing this is like hearing ‘you aren’t good enough’.

30 DO’s and DON’Ts of self harm.

01. Don’t ask them why. If they want you to know why, they will tell you. Most of the time they don’t even know why.

02. Sometimes they just need to tell someone, because they fucking need to.

03. Never talk about him/her behind their back. They will find out and they will be pissed. They prefer you to speak directly to them.

04. If you ask them to never self-harm again, and they say “okay”, they’re lying.

05. Never ask them to never self-harm again.

06. Don’t try and understand why they do it. You’re wasting your time.

07. If you don’t know what to do, just ask them “Are you [insert appropriate form of harm here]? Do you need to talk about it?”

08. Get over your own insecurities about worrying if they’ll hate you for asking.

09. Asking shows concern. Not asking shows negligence and an “I really couldn’t care less” attitude.

10. Telling a teacher/parent/counsellor/other friend before talking to the person in question shows “I can’t be fucked working up the courage to ask them myself”. But it’s better than #09.

11. Offering suggestions of other means of coping is pointless.

12. Tell them that you’re there for them. No matter what. And you never judge. And you will always listen. And you will always just be there. And sometimes you never have to say a word at all. Sometimes they don’t want you to say anything.

13. It does not mean they love or enjoy pain.

14. It gives them the right to make fun of themselves/other self harmers.

15. Depending on the situation, it does not give you the right to.

16. Classifying them as “emo” only reduces yourself to an illinformed bitch who believes you’re God’s gift.

17. It is not always a case of attention-seeking. A lot of the time it isn’t.

18. Self harm is a way of coping with emotions. While most people might cry and scream and rant and rage, self-harmers generally don’t express those sorts of emotions openly, and bottle them inside. The only way they know that works of releasing them is by inflicting pain on themselves. Hence the NOT ATTENTION SEEKING.

19. If they wanted attention they would go slit their wrists in the toilets at school and walk out with their clothes soaking in blood, collapse in the middle of the school grounds, and wail.

20. Other people self harm because they’re so emotionally numb on the inside, they need the pain to remind themselves that they’re alive.

21. Others hurt themselves because they believe they deserve it.

22. There are 39846324956234986487562387456238475123518746459865 other reasons for self harm.

23. There is not one direct cause. There is usually a trigger. A trigger may be a picture of a cut. That will get them thinking of cuts. That will get them into the mindset of cutting. And inevitably, they will want to cut.

24. Other triggers include any form of high negative emotion.

25. There is a difference between cutting for release and cutting for addiction.

26. Addiction-cutting is when you used to cut because you needed it, and now you cut because you can’t stop. You have no way of controlling the emotions without cutting. So you cut when you’re angry, sad, depressed, etc. It works. Temporarily. So when the same emotion comes up, they do it again. Only this time it doesn’t work as well. So they do it harder. And etc.

27. They know they shouldn’t do it, it’s no use telling them that.

28. Some of them like their scars, some of them hate them. Some are proud of them, some are ashamed. Just because one likes them and the other doesn’t, does not mean that the one who likes them is “okay” with what they do.

29. The need and want to self-harm rarely goes away.

30. Ask them questions about what they do. If they don’t want to talk about it – don’t push it. But if they do want to talk about it – keep asking questions. Don’t let them do all the talking. Ask questions. Questions are caring. Questions show them that you love them enough to want to know what they do, so you can understand and be there for them as best as you can.

Hospital.

Just went to hospital for my leg again.

They said it’s going to take a long time to heal.&from the looks of things, I’ll need weekly appts to keep an eye on it & redress it etc.

I need to leave it alone, or, well… you know what will happen.

It’s getting more and more difficult to leave it be.

I’ve left it alone since I went to the hospital last week, but… it feels near impossible to keep this up.

It feels inevitable that I’ll harm myself again.

It’s fucking suffocating.

Tired.

I’m tired. So tired of fighting.
I’m sorry.