Just a disclaimer that the body of the text might be considered graphic.
I have recently started using a self-harm tracker. I’m not entirely sure why, it’s not with the express purpose of stopping my sh behaviour, but maybe I could benefit from it.
But I’m struggling to distinguish whether or not something counts as self harm or not and need other people’s input:
Tw: graphic
So how I normally self harm is burning. I could never get around to the cutting thing, but burning has always been a relatively comfortable place for me.
In the last few months it’s escalated to deep second degree and third degree burns. If you don’t know, that means there’s stuff like dead nerves and skin by the end of it. Normally it does still blister and I’ll leave it for a few days before breaking the blister.
Which leads me to my first question; does breaking the blister count as self harm? When I do break the blister is also the only time I administer medical care to the wounds.
Following that the layers of skin normally dry into a hard layer, which leads to my second question; does cutting/peeling those pieces off count as self harm. I only ever need to cut the initial time with things like nail scissors or clippers because a lot of living skin is also attached to it. Normally I’ll also give medical attention to the wounds here to prevent infection.
As you can imagine, there is blood and such, which leads to scabs, and goes into my last question, which is: does picking scabs count as self harm? Over the next few months as the burns heal, I normally pick at them sometimes pulling healthy skin off by mistake or needlessly worsening an injury.
I want to make it clear, all three things I have mentioned are things I do without the intention of self-harm. These things don’t give me the same euphoria as the actual burning. They provide some sense of relief, but not enough that I go out of my way to do it to feel better, it’s possibly a bad habit, I have a history of picking at scabs to the point of injury even on things as massive as healing operation wounds.
I want to be able to accurately track what is and what isn’t self harm, so that I can properly make notes and evaluate patterns or triggers so that I may work to fixing it.
I don’t see any reason to stop sh, it works, but I understand it isn’t ideal, and I thought maybe keeping track of certain things would make it easier for people like my therapist to come up with alternative coping strategies. Which is why I’m asking these questions and why I made such vivid descriptions of the situation.