138 Quotes About Self-harm

Punishments include such things as flashbacks, flooding of unbearable emotions, painful body memories, flooding of memories in which the survivor perpetrated against others, self-harm, and suicide attempts.

There’s no magical healing in this. I won’t wake up tomorrow fixed and joyful. I’ll still hurt and grieve. But moments like this, with Colton? They make it all bearable. He doesn't fix me, doesn't heal me. He just makes life worthwhile. He helps me remember to breathe, shows me how to smile again. He kisses me, and I can forget pain, forget the urges I still have to cut for the pain that erases the emotions.

The most inefficient and self-harming thing a person can do is go out looking for love. Let it find you when the time is right and you're out doing what you love to do. Only then will you find it in its truest form.

It wasn't that I gave up on her healing, but, as she continued to struggle to get in the door and actively needed her self-hatred to stay functional, I began to realize more deeply that her patterns had meaning and that it wasn't useful for me to predetermine what recovery might look like for her.

All of us develop the protections our implicit memories need to keep what are perceived to be worse dangers from us. ... Our initial work is ... about respectfully acknowledging that our people's system is acting wisely in this moment, no matter what it looks like on the outside. Holding this firmly in our own body, heart and mind is of inestimable benefit to those who come to us.

Your identity is not in who you can be. It is in who you always have been

No one can be YOU. Never accept the stories that observers speak about you, good or bad. If you accept the bad, you feel worthless. If you accept the good, you hold onto the past, which is a past that does not consider your wealth of knowledge and beauty. Only you can write your story.

I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did this; death hadn't been her goal.

Other times, I look at my scars and see something else: a girl who was trying to cope with something horrible that she should never have had to live through at all. My scars show pain and suffering, but they also show my will to survive. They're part of my history that'll always be there.