It's funny; I was never frightened of my tendency to self-injure. Objectively, it's just superficial scratches and cuts, no worse than what you'd get during a hard-fought sports game. You clean yourself up, maybe stick on a band-aid, and you're okay.

Many people seem to be so frightened of it, though, as if it were something completely out of the ordinary, something that made you dangerously unwell. I was "taught" to think of it this way by a few therapists at one point, and that made everything worse, because I would scare myself with wondering if I was going to be able to stop, or thinking how very ill I must be if I were willing to hurt myself.

But I learned that that wasn't true. If you get rid of all the cultural baggage, it's just a bad habit, a bad coping strategy. You get upset and you tend to hurt yourself, kind of like the way some people get upset and drink too much, or get upset and eat junk food, or get upset and yell at their friends. It's something you do because you're trying to deal with some of the crap that's happening in your life, and you don't know quite how; so you have this bad habit that's kind of a stand-in. As far as bad habits go, it's not particularly dangerous. And if you can find something else that works too, to deal with the stuff that makes you want to hurt yourself, then you can replace it with a more effective habit, and not have to spend so much on band-aids.