My Support Forums - View Single Post - How do your Ts handle self-injury?

LabRat27 · Feb 02, 2019, 12:46 PM

Well, he terminated over it once.

At first we just talked about it. He wanted me to work on quitting.
But when I was getting worse to the point that it freaked him out, he terminated in a well-intentioned but poorly executed plan to get me to go do DBT.

Possible trigger:

that was after I ended up in the ER for stitches again. I'd told him about previous times, but this time I'd signed an information release form so that the social worker from the ER could talk to him, and think whatever she told him really freaked him out.
That was also when I'd purchased the tools and materials for suturing myself, which I'd told him, because I was hoping it would dissuade me from cutting that much, but I hadn't actually started suturing myself at that point

I abstained from SH for a while once I started working with him again because it was a requirement for the IOP I was in. Then there were a few instances of moderate SH, nothing as severe as it used to be, and eventually I got rid of my suturing tools and supplies.
He's made it a very "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it" kind of thing with my questions about whether he'd terminate if it got worse again, but he's promised he wouldn't do it that way again.

For quite a while I wasn't mentioning episodes of SH because it felt manipulative or attention seeking. Then it came up because of an insurance thing and I told him that I hadn't really been mentioning it but it still happened occasionally. He wanted me to tell him, and I said it was hard for me to tell him if he didn't ask. So he started asking.
It's all quite minor these days though. He still takes it seriously because it's reinforcing my negative beliefs about myself, etc, but it's not medically serious.

He has made the request that if I want to SH because of something that happened in session or something related to him that I wait and at least bring it up and give him a chance to talk to me about it first (because often it's very distorted)

He's seen my upper arms where my scars are most numerous but not the deepest, just because there have been days when I needed to do laundry and my clean shirts had very short sleeves.