 Hello, and welcome back. You've got me and Buddy today. He's decided to join me Okay, so today we're looking at how to develop a healthier coping plan And this is something that is useful for anyone who is struggling with self-harm and you're trying to break that cycle Now this won't necessarily instantly change your life But hopefully it'll give you a really really easy framework that you can use to begin to try and make a change Whether you are the person who is self-harming or whether you're supporting someone who is now It's a four-step plan and the four steps are recognize replace reduce and reflect And I'm going to walk you through each of the four steps in turn Now you might find that some of these are more helpful than others You just adapt it to suit your needs and again you might do this really formally or you might just take brief notes Or just think about it. It's up to you. Whatever works for you is the best way of doing this Okay, so step one is recognize now what we mean here is recognizing first that there's a problem Recognizing that you are indeed self-harming because sometimes we don't recognize our behaviors as harmful to ourselves And so recognizing that there's a problem and something you want to change but also recognizing Why are you self-harming and here we're thinking about what's the motivation? What is keeping you self-harming basically? What are you getting out of it in what ways it kind of helping to ease your pain in some way now for different people This is completely different. Sometimes it's about feeling calm Sometimes it's about letting out an extreme emotion Sometimes it's about self-punishment. Sometimes it's about control. There's no right or wrong answer here It's just about why you self-harming and beginning to understand those motivations because unless we understand them It's very difficult for us to replace the self-harming behavior with something more healthy now You might already have a good understanding of this but if you don't then a really helpful first step here is to keep a journal for a few days and to take note of the times when you self-harm and to think about what how that made you feel what you got out of it And to begin to understand a little bit more about why you're harming yourself Okay, so then you're going to step two step two is replace now in order to stop self-harming We need to think about how can we replace the self-harming behavior with a healthier way of coping So here we're going to go back to the recognized exercise and we're going to think What will we try and elicit when we were self-harming and how else can we elicit a similar feeling? So if for example you self-harm because you find it is the best way to help you feel calm Then you would be stopping and thinking about what other things help me to feel calm How else can I calm and soothe myself other than by hurting myself? Think back over the last day the last week the last month think of times when you felt calm think about where you were Who you were with what you were doing what helped now? You need to do this not at a time when you're distressed by a time of relative calm And you might find it really helpful to have someone brainstorm it out with you, too It might be that you don't have good ideas about how to elicit that feeling whether it's of calm or control or punishment Or whatever it might be and if you don't have good ideas here, that's fine That might be why you've ended up turning to self-harm in which case It's really helpful if you can speak to a trusted adult and ask them to think about this with you Think about brainstorming it out together and thinking of some ideas you might try and then it'll be a little bit kind of trial and error as You try to replace the behavior some things will work and some things won't and that's okay Next we go on to reduce so step three is reduce and that's about Recognizing how much we're harming ourselves at the moment and how much harm that's kind of causing to us Maybe how much it's impacting on our day-to-day life as well And thinking about what is a realistic goal in terms of reducing our self-harm in the first instance now Don't try and run before you can walk if you are someone who is self-harming regularly And this has been your way of coping for a long time Don't set yourself the goal of stopping instantly instead think about what steps you need to take towards stopping and of course You can increase these steps over time if things are going well But what you want here is to set yourself an achievable goal so that you've got something to celebrate when you come back and Reflect so think about what would be realistic in terms of reducing your harm The other thing you can do is you might think about not only reducing the frequency of your harm But also thinking about things like managing yourself harm better So things like looking after your wounds really carefully It's also a really important part of beginning to break this cycle beginning to Actually improve your self-care and making things a little bit safer is also really important Finally step four is reflect and this is when we're going to take a step back and have a look back on how things are going So this would be after a few days or a week or two and you'll have a think about has this worked has your Replacement helped you to reduce the frequency of yourself harm. What's gone? Well, what can you celebrate and remember even little successes deserve celebration here and when have things gone? Less well and why so think about when things have gone? Well, when did you manage not to self harm or when did you manage to control that somewhat so that you hurt yourself less badly? What went well then why did that work? Where were you? What were you doing? What helped you to calm and then think of times when you weren't able to overcome the urge and think about a Do we need to go back to the recognized step and with a different feelings that you weren't able to replace here? And do we need to think more carefully about different ways of replacing or could you try something different next time? And this is a cycle you can keep going round as often as you need to and just remember that it's a process It's not a kind of instant fix the other thing to just remember here is that each time you do not Manage to overcome the urge to self-harm to think of that as a point of learning So don't beat yourself up about it But instead take time when you're calmer later to reflect back on that and think about what you can learn from that Circumstance why did you self-harm? How did it make you feel? How can you replace the self-harm with something that will help you to feel similarly? I hope that that helps good luck with it and Remember that it's a process. It's a journey You won't get there instantly and the other thing to remember here is that if you are in the process of trying to Stop self-harming that if you do manage to stop for a while And then you self-harm wants to remember you're not going back to the beginning of your cycle of change there This is a little blip and it's a moment to pause and reflect Rather than a moment to beat yourself up and think you've gone back to square one Sometimes when we slip up those are the moments that help us to put in place more secure strategies for a sustainable recovery So it might be part of your learning process Good luck. I hope it helps do leave a comment if you've got any suggestions about how you use this What you found helpful whether you're someone who's self-harming or whether you're supporting someone who is good luck with it Bye