iuventus said:

Sorry to crash the somber and serious atmosphere, but...BINGO!

After my previous post, that just brought a smile to my face...... :)

Cervus said:

My niece is going through a low patch she has had quite a few over the past few years and has now openly admitted that she self harms...we knew she did but it has taken a lot of strength for her to state it as fact....a massive step so fingers crossed all round. I just wish I could do more to help her but our hands are all tied and until she feels the time is right for her to seek help all we can do it be there when she needs us.

That's tough, cervus. But like you say, her sharing her pain with someone else is a big positive step.

The National Self Harm Network has a really good website and forum, which you (or she) might like to dip into for support. Here

The sine wave is flattening a bit so feeling a bit more able to think.

As I've mentioned before, please don;t take my lack of a comment to other posts in this thread as me not caring but sometimes I have to draw back a little & ride things out. To my mind I'd actually feel ruder half-reading comments rather than either giving them the time they deserve or not at all.

Sometimes focussing on the least sensible things is the only way make space for the important ones.

Cervus said:

The_Carpathian said:

Sometimes focussing on the least sensible things is the only way make space for the important ones.

That seems to be what gets me through most days, so I can relate entirely.

It's like never having to think about breathing out at the moment you're breathing in :)

Very sassy, HJ.

If the shoelace is too long, it's a conspiracy.

:x

It's a simple thing but write out the positives and negatives onto paper. Don't try to do it in your head, thoughts overlap one another and it ends up the negatives overruling the positives, but if you write it down you can see it all plainly in front of you, and even if there's more negatives than positives you can choose to only read the positive column and focus your attention purely on those if you wish. It can also be good to help you realise the magnitude of a negative, something that seems so big in your head can look tiny, even insignificant, when written down. You can also branch out the negatives and write down solutions to them, or what you're going to do to make them less of a problem. A game plan always helps ease things, for me anyway.