I have rarely thought of SI as punishing myself. There is only one form of it that has a punishing factor but I will not discuss that here. The other things I do from head banging to cutting is comforting. It releases tension and helps me cope.

Why stop self-injury? My reasons are simple. Self-injury never fixed anything for me. It allowed me to continue living in an intollerable situation. It let me "cope" with garbage that if I hadn't been hurting myself I would have had to take care of a lot sooner then I did. But instead of dealing with the problem I would hole up, hurt myself and then everything would be bearable for a little while longer.

Once I got into therapy and started dealing with the things that I couldn't before and started learning new skills I became frustrated because I was still hurting myself even though I knew how to take care of the situation productively. Then I couldn't understand why even though I was basically happy I would still go over the deep end about stuff that I had already learned how to cope with and change. That is when I started looking into the addictive aspect of self-injury. I needed to self-injure for self-injury's sake. But in order to get the affect I desired I had to work myself up. So I developed a cycle where once I went a certain amount of time without injury I would start creating a situation where I could get freaky and would "HAVE" to self injure to bring myself down. I would search things out or start arguments or make mistakes I wouldn't have made at work so I could get the cycle going so I could injure myself.

A perfect example of this is the fact that I have not self injured for the last 3 months. The first couple of months were horrible and the discomfort with fighting the cravings was painful enough to satisfy my craving. Odd isn't it? But this last month life has been good. I have hardly had any strong cravings, I have kept stable and content. But guess what! A couple of weeks ago I called my sister and told her I would come up and spend the night with her. I want to develop a "new relationship" with her. She is only one of my biggest childhood abusers. She made it her job to beat me when ever she had the chance and ridicule me and make me feel as useless and small as possible when I was a kid. She has out and out admitted to me that she hated me as long as we were growing up. Well, hmmmm, is this just another attempt to recreate the self-injury cycle? Probably.

So I believe that self-injury is a double edged sword. It releaves intense feelings and makes life livable but it also keeps life intollerable so that you can use it to make it liveable.
Carrie

<font color=green>But the implicit and usually unconscious bargain we make with ourselves is that, yes, we want to be healed, we want to be made whole, we're willing to go some distance, but we're not willing to question the fundamental assumptions upon which our way of life has been built, both personally and societally.--Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft