 Hi, this is Boogie and Buddy and we are here to talk a little bit more about self-harm today So a question I get asked really commonly is why do people continue self-harming once they've started? And what is it that makes it so difficult to stop? So if you watched my first video about self-harm you'll have noted that I said one of the things We shouldn't say to someone if they disclose to us that their self-harming is stop It's difficult to stop and sometimes if we ask someone to stop and they try to do it It can mean that those behaviors escalate essentially we can't stop until we're ready and until we're able to replace the unhealthy coping behaviors with healthy coping behaviors now to understand this a little bit more and to think about how we might be able To help someone to stop in time. I'm going to talk to you about the self-harm cycle It's relatively simple and I hope that with a little bit of video magicry I'm trying to learn and I'll be able to add this as some sort of split screen or maybe it'll be something up here I don't know we start off with big feelings and they might be to do with an event They might be to do with an experience They might just be difficult thoughts and feelings that we don't quite know how to manage now They vary massively and will change from person to person But what these big difficult feelings have in common this person doesn't know how to cope with them So they've got big feelings and they can't cope and so because they can't cope they look for a way of managing and and For whatever reason they turn to self-harm The first instance can happen for a variety of reasons sometimes it can be an accident and actually that person just finds actually That made me feel a lot better Sometimes it might be that they have learned from friends or the media that this is a potential method of making them feel better It might be that they've just kind of run out of ideas It might be they just stumble across it There's lots and lots of different reasons why people might do it for the first time But importantly for those who continue they feel that after this instance or during this instance of self-harm just for a little while They have some relief things feel a little bit better That can be for a variety of reasons now It might be that the emotional turmoil that they're in the really difficult things that they're managing in their head that they are Not thinking about those just for a moment because all they can think about is the pain So like when you stub your toe all you can think about is your stubbed toe and that's horrible But if the alternative is that you're thinking about the abuse you're experiencing otherwise Maybe the stubbed toe option feels like quite a nice change Someone once described it to me as kind of like the ultimate form of painful mindfulness You're literally just thinking about that pain in that moment Are the reasons why it might bring relief some people talk to themselves talk about themselves as being like a big balloon Kind of bursting with these feelings and the self-harm is almost like a valve allowing some of those feelings to let go other people find that It makes them feel better because they have feelings of self-loathing and hatred and they feel they deserve to be punished And the self-harm brings that and there are lots and lots of different reasons why people find self-harm to be Kind of helpful in the moment And the important thing to note is that this is always transient But we will look at the specific reasons in another video and how we would work with those specific reasons But we need to understand them when we're trying to help a young person stop because if we don't understand why They're self-harming what they get from it. It's very difficult for us to help them look for alternative healthy coping mechanisms anyhow, so they have they have harmed themselves and Briefly however, briefly they have felt some sense of relief And things have felt just a little bit better However, our difficult feelings that then go with that feelings of guilt feelings of shame feelings of high emotion Why have I done this to myself? What would other people think if they knew why can't I manage everyone else seems to be able to? I'm so stupid and the the thing with this is that the sorts of young people or sorts of people who tend to self-harm Often have really low self-esteem in the first instance They may well be struggling with things like anxiety or depression as well And so these feelings then also feed in so we've got more big feelings to add to the original big feelings And we've not dealt with whatever the problem was in the first instance We just did something momentary to take it away So we're back at the beginning of our cycle, but perhaps in a slightly worse position So what do we do? Well, we don't have any other ways of coping and we can't cope So we return to the self-harm because even though only momentarily it did make us feel better So we find ourselves going round and round this cycle now how we help break the cycle the first way is To get involved really early on so the sooner that a young person discloses that they're self-harming So if you're a young person in your self-harming, please try and find the words to tell someone The sooner we try and break the cycle the better because what happens Remember these feelings of guilt and shame? They begin to go away after a while the more and more and more you go around this cycle The more normal it feels and the more that you can justify that behavior in your mind The soon as you start talking to someone about it Then you start to realize actually these behaviors aren't okay And if we can try and use that kind of the guilt the shame the difficult feelings that come after the self-harm as a Leverage to try and break the cycle then that's really really helpful The other thing that we can do is to have a look in our cycle at the unhealthy coping So we're using self-harm of many different types. What healthy coping strategies could we replace there? We'd be thinking really carefully about that and that will depend on what relief that's bringing So we need to also think why what's the motivation for the self-harm? What's the relief that it's bringing but hopefully just understanding the cycle a little bit will help you see Why people get stuck in this cycle and which bits of it we need to really attack if we're going to try and break it But the key thing number one thing is to try and break it as early as possible But if you are watching this and either you know someone who's been self-harming for a long time Or you are someone who's been self-harming for a long time It's never ever too late to try and start breaking that cycle And the other thing is if you do manage to stop for a while and then you have a slip or a blip It doesn't mean you have to go straight back down that cycle and spiral or self-harm We can break back out again, but it's much easier if you do it with people around you who you trust Good luck, and please leave a comment if you found this helpful and don't forget to subscribe subscribe Yeah, that's it. Please subscribe. Thank you