It's life-long for me. At five or six years old I was biting my arms, leaving marks that stayed for a couple of weeks and really embarassed my mother. I never really stopped, although I have changed methods and gotten pretty creative with some of them. The first time that I cut I was in college, but I didn't really get into it then. I was in my later 20s when I started scratching harder and deeper, and graduated to using scizzors or other tools.

Now I have been 29 for something like 8 years (I lose track), and I have been married for almost 17 years, and I have 3 kids (ages 9, 12, and 15), and I have a bachelor's degree in psychology and I work as a behavior specialist (some of my clients have self-injurious behaviors that I work on reducing). I am more than half finished with a master's degree in counseling (I'll start practicum and internship within 6 months).

It has been 3 or 4 months since I have cut, and I'm not wanting to do that as much as I used to now, but there are still about a million little self-destructive habits that I still have and some I don't even know that I do, and they don't particularly bother me. Sometimes it's scary, like this week I worked late too many days and didn't have time to sleep enough, and yesterday I barely made it into my driveway before I fell asleep in the car. I had been falling asleep at work and in class for two days.

The longer you maintain these habits, the harder it is to break them. No excuses, but it's not easy at this stage of the game.