Welcome Terrics, I am glad you found us. I am 37 now and am trying to learn to live my life without self injury. It is difficult to use the coping skills that my therapists have so patiently taught me when SI has worked so well for so long. A big part of it is learning the I can survive the intense emotions. They won't crush me or kill me. Sigh. It still seems that way for me and I still succumb to the need to self injure. For me it is an escape from those emotions. Self injury is powerful enough to distract me from the thoughts and the emotional pain that over whelm me. It is odd. When I call my new Therapist in tears because something is too much, she doesn't tell me how I can make myself feel better. She doesn't tell me the things I should be doing to distract myself from the self injury. She tells me just how normal these emotions are and how it is ok for me to feel them. How it is ok to be overwhelmed and to cry and to make the world stop for a few minutes just to feel them. My inability to stand emotion comes from my birth family's denial of my feelings. I was not allowed to express them fully because that meant they would have to comfort me. This was carried on in my relationship with my husband. Now we are both learning how to allow me to express my feelings. Even with him on board trying to help me through this I still self injure.

I guess what I am trying to say is that to me the fact that you still self injure isn't at all unbelieveable and is actually quite understandable. Though I don't know you or your story, I do know what it is like to struggle with this and I hope that you will join our quest to break free from it. I feel that this little forum is an important piece in the puzzle to stopping this habit. It is the support and understanding of these people that make me feel less like a freak and more like a real person with understandable problems.
Carrie