Self harm is used to describe a wide range of behaviours which someone carries out to cause pain to themselves, which is often a response to emotional pain of some kind.
As someone who self harms myself I can understand the difficulty of supporting someone who self harms, especially someone that you love and care about. Knowing what to say to someone who self harms is difficult, perhaps you don’t understand why, perhaps you want to help but don’t want to say the wrong thing, perhaps you just want to make your friend stop and their suffering disappear?
Here a few thing things that I believe you should or shouldn’t do when supporting someone who experiences self harm (in my opinion and experience, be aware that this might not be the case for everyone):
Mostly just let them know that you are there, be compassionate, be there to support them and hold their hand through their journey. Ultimately please understand that it is a long and hard journey to stop self harming and be aware that someone will only stop self harming when they feel ready and are able to do so and there will be a chance of relapse even after this.
I wrote this as a guest post for Rachel please check out here twitter here.
Do you have any advice on supporting someone who self harms, or if you have experience of it yourself what would you like to hear or your friends do? Please comment below.
