This post is only six months old, but ahead of Self-Injury Awareness Day on 1 March, it felt appropriate to share it again. This is a poem I wrote on the subject of self-harm:

https://lifeinabind.com/2015/08/05/it-feels-like-only-blood/

In addition, the feelings described in the poem are very present at the moment, and they are one reason why it’s so hard to write about anything else right now. Over the last few days every area of my life has felt like a battleground at one point or another – therapy, my marriage, my relationship with my children. But most of all the battleground is in my head, and until that arena is better understood, a little quieter, and more in control,  I know that all my other conflicts don’t stand a chance.

I don’t want to have stand-offs with my children where no one is a winner, and no one is an adult, either. I don’t want to feel resentful every time I ‘give ground’ to my husband or ignore comments I’m unhappy with, just because it’s too reminiscent of not having some of my own needs met by my parents. And I don’t want to miss out on some of what therapy has to offer (including things I desperately crave, like unconditional acceptance), just because it always feels as though I ‘want more’ – words, emails, caring, attention – and because I find it so hard both to accept the boundaries and the things I cannot have in therapy, and also the unchanging and unfaltering nature of the things I do have.

I really want to work with my therapist, not against her. I don’t want to fight her – even if a part of me does, and tries to, often, and very successfully. The same issues, the same battles, are coming up again and again but in slightly different forms. I try to take comfort from the fact that this just means that there are clearly things we need to resolve – and it is becoming both more urgent and also easier for matters to make their way to the surface. And if all this is ultimately about me changing, I also take comfort in this wonderful quote about change by therapist Alison Crosthwait (from The Good Therapists): “In order to change you need repeated exposure to your own coming apart, to the border between conscious and unconscious, and to the parts of yourself that you resist being with“.

For the nth time this day, week, month, year, it feels as though I am fighting my own resistance and trying to prevent even the tiniest of victories from unraveling, and myself from coming apart. That fight is so exhausting; and the urge to try and find some peace from it by hurting myself is so tempting, it just feels like just another thing to fight against. But ultimately I know that self-harm is my attempt to avoid sitting with the parts of myself that I resist being with, and what I really need to do is not avoid, but to surrender. Surrender to the process of therapy and to the process of change, which inevitably, as described in my poem, will bring a great deal of grief, before it can bring a long-lasting  – rather than temporary – relief.