How I Taught Myself To Stop Cutting

[Livingmap]

Hopefully someone else could be able use this trick and stop cutting too. I use to cut myself. I had an razor blade set that came in a wooden box. I do not remember where I got it but I kept it under my mattress starting at the the ages of nine. I used it nightly. When I left home, I did not use it as often and I also changed the way I cut myself, from slow and precise to quick and long.

Looking back it changed from sadness to anger, me trying to mimic the emotions I had already packed away somewhere out of reach.

When I was about 25 I started writing about the problem I was currently having the issues with in red ink a calligraphy pen. I learned to let myself cry while I was writing, and slowly I did not need to cut myself so much.

The next thing i tried I was after I finished writing I took the pen and would just slash up the page with red streaks of ink, mimicking the razor and my skin.

I worked hard afterwards convincing myself that I already cut up those problems, and focused on doing something else. I found gardening was a favorite of mine. People use to ask me why I was out gardening so late. Some nights I would put extra lights outside so I did not have to stop. It took a lot of practice and hard work, but I have not cut myself in 10 years, except one time.

 

[Accalia]

This is fantastic news.
I am very proud of you :) 10 years is phenomenal!

Keep going strong hun. It dwarfs my 1.5 weeks.
I like your advice. Imma have to try

 

[Livingmap]

The weirdest thing happen today to my nineteen year old son. He stepped on an Exacto razor blade that was somehow standing straight up. It went right through the bottom of his shoe into the middle of his foot. He started to tell me how after his head started to get all tingly, and his heart started beating faster. I asked him what emotion it was he felt, and he said anxiety. He said that he did not like that feeling at all. The entire time he described how his body responded to the physical pain, my body starts remembering that feeling. Now that I look back, I used that feeling to make myself feel better all the time. It would make sense that of all the emotional responses in the body cannot be voluntary. I must of taken the feeling of anxiety and changed it into something else, because I like the feeling he described, or at least I use to. Only I have no idea what I changed that emotion into.