 Hey what's up you guys, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, hi, hello I'm Lydia and if you are new here make sure you hit the subscribe button during the growing family, turn notifications on so you never miss an upload. Why don't you give me a big thumbs up because it really does help me out. Today we're going to be talking about how I stopped self harming. Before I did that though I wanted to make a point here. I've self harmed since the age of seven, up until last year where I was 26 but what I want to say is when you self harm you don't just hurt yourself, you hurt those around you that care about you. Even the self harm is a private thing, a lot of the time we have someone in our family that knows it's going on. For me my mom knew I self harmed but she never saw any fresh cuts on me. So the first thing I did to stop self harming because I learned what triggers me to self harm and find a healthy alternative. Now I'm autistic and I have a special interest of ducks. I've been obsessed with ducks for a long time so my special interest helped me. Then there's reading, playing on my switch, making YouTube videos. The next thing is distraction. Distraction techniques were one of the main things that I used to stop self harming. The biggest one would be I used my crisis slash self sue box. I call it a crisis box because for me if I'm going into crisis and I can tell that I get my box out, I do a face mask, I've got a lot of face masks in that box. Believe me. Some of the things I do is watch stuff whether that's on Disney, Netflix, Prime, BBCI player. Watching things is something that I do and if that doesn't work I have a nap. Now I have a nap most days because my medication and going to uni wears me out. But like I said distraction really is a big part of this for me. Getting tattoos to cover scars was my next step. Now I have a tattoo on this arm that covers a really big scar I used to have that runs. Then on this arm I have a love heart with a semi-colon and butterfly ears. I'm getting a rainbow done there next week which if you're watching this I've already done it. Stay tuned for the video. Now the reason I think that was my next step was because it covered up what was triggering me. I had my scar very triggering. I wanted to do better than I had. I sort of competing with myself which wasn't healthy, good or anything. There should be a thing. And the last thing I did which is the most important thing I did was I threw away all my tools that I used to sell for and then I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't replace them. Now these are some of the things that I've done to stop self-harming and I'm a year and a month self-harm-free. Here's how well I'm doing self-harm-free. So it's been I've done quite well. I don't think I'll ever self-harm again. So yeah I hope this video helps you a bit. I just want to say it's totally possible to recover from self-harm. You're not alone in this. It's not easy but you can get through it. I believe in you. Thank you for watching this video and if you are new subscribe. Peace.