Coping with self-harm #1 – Understanding your feelings

Emotions and feelings can be hard to handle and even just identify. It also feels easier sometimes to ignore them, to push them away or to bottle them up instead of accepting them, facing them and challenging them. However when being in the process of recovery (and also just when dealing with our everyday lives) it can be helpful and interesting to take some time to understand them. So today Id like us to work on feelings awareness, so we can identify them better and find coping alternatives according to these feelings. Ill add examples every now and then to make sure that what Im saying is understandable!

I also want to say that even if this is to provide alternatives to self-harm, this can be used in any situation, whether you're dealing with self-harm, in the process of recovering, recovered or even not dealing with self-harm, as we all experience feelings anyway!

Emotions vs. feelings –

First of all, Id like to take a second to explain the difference between feelings and emotions. We use both words sometimes to talk about the same thing but they actually have different meanings. Emotions are instinctive responses of your body to a certain situation – for example experiencing surprise because of seeing a spider. Whereas feelings are the reactions to these emotions based on your personal experiences and beliefs. Over the time, certain feelings are often associated with a specific situation and a specific emotion. With the same example, I am surprised because of seeing that spider plus I know spiders can be dangerous so I associate this situation with fear. This means that even if emotions cant be changed as they are instinctive, it could be possible to work on the feelings associated with these emotions.

Self-harm and feelings –

Now that this is out of the way, Id like to move on to how feelings and self-harm are often connected as both are linked in more ways than one. We all have our reasons for self-harming – and more generally speaking, hurting ourselves in sometimes less obvious ways. Id like to mention a few – feel free to add more!

- Expressing the internal pain we feel

- Coping with sadness, anger, stress, hate, guilt…

- Feeling the need to punish ourselves for something

- Distracting ourselves from a situation or a feeling

- Needing to feel something

However, these reasons do not only have self-harm for an answer. There are other ways to cope with them. And I would like to focus on these other ways. Awareness and being able to understand yourself, your feelings, your triggers, your strengths, your weaknesses, your mechanisms, is the first step of the process. We are all different and thus every recovery is different. This is why it is so important to understand the way you work so as to find what works for you.

Identify your feelings –

A good way to start is by being able to pinpoint the way youre feeling. This wheel of feelings can be a helpful tool for that. It enables us to dig deeper into our feelings thanks to broadening your vocabulary, which gives you more accurate labels for your feelings. For example when feeling angry, theres often more to it than just pure anger. Feelings can also be mixed which make them harder to identify - for example my friend let me down big time, I am both sad and angry, more specifically disappointed and a mix of betrayed, resentful, disrespected. This list isnt exhaustive of course so feel free to add or search for more terms to identify and qualify your feelings.

(click on the wheel if you want a bigger version - and if my link works)

Quantify your feelings –

Qualification is good, but quantification is also really important after having qualified the way youre feeling. Even if different words exist to qualify anger for example – exasperated, mad, furious, infuriated, and so on – these words might not be enough to quantify your feelings. By quantification, I mean being able to rate your feelings. It can be good to think about it as a 1-10 scale, with 1 being a feeling that youre not experiencing a lot and 10 being a feeling that youre experiencing strongly. Of course it doesnt have to be 100% accurate, its just to have an idea if its closer to 1 or to 10 so as to know how important this feeling is. If you think you are feeling angry level 10 and disappointed level 1, it could be best to focus on the feeling youre feeling the most first before coping with the one youre feeling the least.

When having understood these feelings, and maybe noticed a kind of pattern – for example (examples again!) I noticed I seem to self-harm mostly when Im angry because this feeling overwhelms me – it becomes easier to find a more appropriate coping alternative that could answer to this feeling instead of directly turning to self-harm.

I would like to make an important disclaimer before moving on to some ideas of coping alternatives according to your feelings. First, it may take some time to figure out what works for you, as not every suggestion will work for you and it is okay. Plus it also may take several tries: the coping alternative might not help the first time, or even the second or the third, but it could become a habit that delays or prevents you from self-harming in the long run. Also, combining several alternatives could be helpful. It is possible that nothing from this list can be helpful for you, but please give a few of these ideas a try if you're feeling like it, we never know, even if it just delays or decreases your urge, it's always something x

If youre feeling sad –

- Watch a movie or TV show

- Draw, paint, write, sing, read a book, listen to music, play music

- Go on a nice walk

- Give yourself a treat: favourite food, hot cocoa or tea, sweets, bath, massage

- Hug yourself, a friend, a pillow or a teddy bear

- Make yourself a comfort place with blankets, pillows, scented candle

- Have a warm shower

- Bake or cook something you like

- Play a game

- Call a friend or family

- Cry it out

- Pet an animal

- Take a nap

- Try journaling

- Replay happy moments in your head or look at old pictures

- Say positive things to yourself

- Make a wishlist, a bucketlist, a playlist, any find of list!

- Play an interesting podcast

If youre feeling angry –

- Go on a run, dance, exercise

- Punch a pillow

- Practice air kicking/punching (or on a punching bag if you own one)

- Tear papers up

- Scream (in a pillow if you're worried about the noise)

- Take a quick and cold shower, or splash cold water on your face

- Listen to loud music

- Contract your muscles as much and as long as you can

- Squeeze a stress ball

- Be violent against play-doh (sorry play-doh!) or other clay-like material

- Scribble with lots of pressure on a paper

- Outside, break sticks or hit a trunk with sticks (be careful about the lose pieces)

- Try listening to guided meditation or soothing music (like sounds of waves or rain) if youre feeling receptive to it

- Write down your feelings and tear up the paper

If youre feeling numb –

- Take a warm/cold shower

- Hold ice cubes

- Draw on yourself with red ink or any other colour

- Eat something spicy/sour/cold (pepper, ginger, lemon, sour candies, mustard, ice cream…)

- Light up a candle and watch the flame (only if youre trusting yourself with it)

- Fill and empty (and repeat) a glass of water – try being mindful about it

- Contract your muscles one by one – try being mindful about it too

- Wax your legs or give yourself a body scrub (if you don't have any, you can make one either by mixing oil and salt, or honey and sugar)

- Put on loud music

- Meditate (alone or with a guided video/podcast)

- Massage an area of your skin with tiger balm (red if you want to feel a burn, blue if you want to feel a cold)

- Massage yourself (face, hands, arms, legs…) slowly or more vigorously/deeply

If youre feeling anxious –

- Try the 5-4-3-2-1 game to ground yourself: find 5 things you can see around you, 4 things you can feel, 3 sounds you can hear, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste – try being mindful about it

- Play a guided mediation video or listen to relaxing music

- Tidy your room

- Take care of yourself (face/hair mask, nail painting, body scrub)

- Light up a scented candle or use aromatherapy oils (lavender has relaxing effects for example)

- Do some colouring

- Prctice yoga or stretching

Last (but not least at all!), Im extremely proud of you for trying to find ways to cope with self-harm. Youre doing an amazing job! Its also important to remember that its okay if things that works for others dont work for us, and its okay to relapse. It doesnt define you at all and doesnt erase any of the effort youve made. Again, youre doing an amazing job. Another really important thing is to please be as gentle as you can with yourself as there is no need to add any extra pressure on yourself (easier said than done though, I know). If youre feeling overwhelmed and unsafe at any point, please call a help line or any professional help. Were here for you, each and every one of you, so if you ever need a listening ear or some support, please dont hesitate to reach out!

I hope this can help you understand how important being aware of our feelings is and provide you with more insight on how to identify better and cope with your feelings x If there's anything that wasn't clear enough don't hesitate to ask me for more details.

If youre feeling like it –

Are there some things (ideas, things I forgot, mistakes I've made, your exerience, other tools) you'd like to add?

Can you identify some feelings you find yourself usually struggling with (whether they lead you to self-harm or not)?

Are there some suggestions of alternatives youd like to pick and try out when facing these feelings? Are there others youd like to add to the list?

Tagging some people who could be interested -

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---- For those who are as curious as me, Id like to finish by sharing a few biology facts. Brain chemistry plays an important role in how emotions and self-harm work. There is still a lot to understand about how the brain works, but I think it is interesting to know that emotions are widely affected by neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals released in response to stimuli. There are many different neurotransmitters that all have different actions on our body. This is where self-harm kicks in: when self-harming, our body produces endorphins relieving the pain and dopamine linked with our reward system. So, Im guessing it comes in circles: everyday life happens, some specific neurotransmitters cause emotions leading to feelings, and we cope with them by self-harming which produces new neurotransmitters giving us a kind of rush and maybe replacing the emotion we were feeling in the first place. But we could break this cycle by doing something else than self-harm that would produce similar or even the same neurotransmitters and have the same effect on our body.----

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