Your turtle is pretty cool!

Maybe this will help answer your question. It's from <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.palace.net/~llama/psych/injury.html>http://www.palace.net/~llama/psych/injury.html</A>.

Do you deliberately cause physical harm to yourself to the extent of causing tissue damage (breaking the skin, bruising, leaving marks that last for more than an hour)?
Do you cause this harm to yourself as a way of dealing with unpleasant or overwhelming emotions, thoughts, or situations (including dissociation)?
If your self-harm is not compulsive, do you often think about SI even when you're relatively calm and not doing it at the moment?
If you answer #1 and #2 yes, you are a self-injurer. If you answer #3 yes, you are most likely a repetitive self-injurer. The way you choose to hurt yourself could be cutting, hitting, burning, scratching, skin-picking, banging your head, breaking bones, not letting wounds heal, among others. You might do several of these. How you injure yourself isn't as important as recognizing that you do and what it means in your life.

I think that what it means to you has a lot to do with it. I also think that we shouldn't have to be ashamed that we do these things. Besides being a sign that we have feelings or problems in our lives that we haven't learned a better way of dealing with, it is in itself a way of coping with these things. I don't think it's all that different from coping mechanisms that other people use like eating problems, addictions, etc. Maybe these coping mechanisms aren't constructive and don't actually make anything better, and we could learn better solutions, but self-injurers aren't fundamentally different from other people whom the general public tends to have less difficulty understanding.

I hope you're doing okay, or at least as okay as possible.

<font color=red>"Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing." -Harriet Braiker</font color=red>