Another Survivor Helped Me Through My Healing Journey

This post contains triggering subjects like self-harm. Make sure you’re in a safe place while reading this. I’ll try not to tell unnecessary details but I will describe my journey to recovery from my self-harm.

As I was self-harming, I read about recovery a lot. Yet it didn’t feel like I was in recovery. I was postponing my self-harm but I never thought of quitting. I felt like it was "mission impossible." I didn’t talk a lot about my self-harm and I wasn’t open about it either. Occasionally my mom asked me about my self-harm, and often I told her I was doing okay, even if I wasn’t.

It felt like this should be my secret forever. And I knew it wasn’t right to do but it did feel right at the time. My healthy mind forced me to postpone my self-harm and that was that. I often harmed myself and then I made a deal with myself: I will not harm myself until the wound has “scarred.” I told myself I was only allowed to make three cuts at a time. If I felt like I wanted to self-harm, I had some little tricks to make the feeling settle down. I looked at my scars or I visualized making new wounds. This allowed me to stay self-harm-free for two more days.

Sometimes I felt so lonely and misunderstood, I searched for pro self-harm sites, groups, quotes, or pictures. This made me feel like it was okay what I was doing. It made me feel less disgusted about myself. Back then, I thought I did this because I wanted to. Now I realize I did this because I didn’t want this problem to make my self-hate even worse. I couldn’t have any compassion for myself so I searched on the internet for understanding.

What I found was definitely not what I actually needed. It made me feel understood yet it didn’t make me realize it was a bad habit.

I attempted to stop my self-harming behavior, so I deleted the sites, quotes and other pro self-harm things. Yet it never worked out the way I wanted to. I ended up searching for less obvious ways  to self-harm.

One day, I saw something on my Instagram called Strong Like A Fighter Army. The name was not really what caught my attention. It was the person on the picture. She had scars all over her arm and it made my destructive mind obsess with her. She also wrote about her struggles such as depression, self-harm, and C-PTSD. There were a lot of followers who shared their story or commented on the things she wrote. It felt like I was in the same place as I was looking for every time I relapsed. But this time it somehow was different.

The woman I’m talking about is Kenza, the founder of  the Strong Like A Fighter Army. The abridgment is SLAF – Strong Like A Fighter.

As I watched how Kenza told her story, I started to realize many things. I understood how struggling with self-harm didn’t have to be a secret. At least I could share it with the SLAF community. Kenza did as well so why shouldn’t I? SLAF gave me strength to keep fighting and stay positive.

I used to search for destructive things in order to find understanding, now I found understanding without getting badly triggered.

I understood how struggling with self-harm didn’t have to be a secret.

From the moment I bought a #stronglikeafighterarmy bracelet I decided to not give up the fight. Kenza and SLAF taught me a lot. It taught me I was allowed to feel bad sometimes, why I shouldn’t give up, and how I can talk/think about my self-harm without being destructive.

And most importantly, it showed me what recovery actually means: fighting for a healthy mind and choosing for a healthy life every single day. I'm allowed to slip up, and believe me, I did. But somehow it doesn’t mean I quit trying.

The one thing that helped me the most in my way to recovery is how I realized I can make a choice. Sometimes we feel like we have no choice but harming ourselves or doing anything unhealthy. But as a person you always have a choice, no matter how hard it can be.

The voices in my head tell me to do bad things but those voices aren’t mine. Those are the voices of my self-harm—the beliefs which were created when I needed them and when I didn’t know any different. Now I know better and I will not obey the voices. I’m not pushing them away either, because then they will feel misunderstood and they will scream even louder. I will listen to what they really want to tell me. They say “you should definitely harm yourself because you’re stupid, you deserve the pain” but they actually telling me to “love yourself more, be kind and give some attention to yourself."

I listen and do what they need; not what they ask……

I'm very grateful for SLAF and Kenza. Now a year and a half after discovering her Instagram, I'm in a much better place. I'm kinder to myself and I understand true recovery needs ups and downs. I still self-harm sometimes but those times are subordinate to the days I fought myself through the day. And I decided I’d better be proud of myself than punching myself. Even if I lose the fight, it doesn’t mean I can’t win the war.

~written by Namasté all day~