***warning***contents include descriptions of SI***

People's reactions have varied. The first person I told was a therapist, and he didn't respond at all (I thought he didn't hear me or something), and then confronted me with it a few weeks later, like he really didn't believe me.

My husband saw me scratching my face (I didn't mean for him to see me) after he had been lecturing me for a couple of hours and I was pushed past my limit. That was the first that he knew of it, and he was very concerned - he probably would have involved some kind of emergency services except that we had two very young children in the house and it was the middle of the night. It always bothers him, and he tends to always assume that it is because of him (it usually isn't).

The next therapist whom I told about it didn't focus on SI unless I brought it up. I asked him if he was uncomfortable dealing with it and he said that he wasn't, but I'm not sure that I believe him. Another counselor (not a therapist) that I was working with at the same time was very uncomfortable about SI, considered it to be my main problem, and pushed me about working on that in therapy.

I never did tell my parents about it. They knew that I bit myself, banged my head, and sometimes didn't eat when I was a child and teenager. My mother was embarassed about the bite marks, but they ignored the rest. My father noticed the scabs running down my arm once when I was visiting (as an adult), and asked what happened, and I just said, "don't worry about it." He lives in his own little world anyway, and I'm pretty sure he didn't.

I told one of my sisters a year ago. I expected her to accuse me of just acting childish and being after attention, but she handled it very well. She is a psychiatrist now, and was pretty professional about it. I had never had a close relationship with her because we were always so competitive and she was always very critical of me, but she said she had been worried about me, remembered what I did in childhood, and wasn't really surprised. She has been pretty supportive, and sometimes suggests meds and diagnoses, but most of the time just acts normal and doesn't say anything about it.

Since then I have lost my inhibition and stopped caring about keeping it a secret. I told one of my psychology professors about it (issues like trauma in my background, depression, & stuff had already come up in my assignments for the class, so telling her about SI wasn't a huge jump). She wasn't surprised, and said that it was understandable, that other people use that coping method too (I already knew that, since I had found this site and other informational sites months earlier). She also said, "I just would prefer that people who have been hurt stop getting hurt."

Other people have just been curious, and have had lots of questions about why I do it, etc. Usually they are a little uncomfortable about it too.

I have been surprised how well people have generally accepted that I SI. Nobody has freaked out or rejected me or tried to put me in a hospital (well, except for the neighbors who saw the results and called 911 - I wound up in jail for a psych eval that time, but they let me go). Most people have been a lot more supportive than I expected.

<font color=orange>"If we are going to insist that people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, we must ensure that they have boots."</font color=orange>