Self-harm Can Be An Addiction
And mental health professionals need to recognize it as such if they’re going to help
For years I mentally berated myself for still having thoughts of self-harm, long after I’d ‘given it up’. It was a conversation with a recovering alcoholic who described her ongoing struggle that helped me to reframe it.
“I’ll always live with the thoughts, but I don’t act on them”
Self-harm is something that has been in my life on and off for decades, first as a teen, then in my early twenties, and again in my late twenties. During those in-between periods, when I had thoughts of self-harming, even though I didn’t have a ‘need’ for it, I would become increasingly frustrated with myself.
I didn’t understand why I still thought about it, why the intrusive thoughts would persist. Even while I studied and trained as a Counselor, I found my mind often full of ideas about hurting myself. Then one day, two other students on my course had a major disagreement. One (A) was the type of person who had had struggles with their mental health and chose to make it their entire identity, the other (B) had kept hers to herself.
Their argument was about the word ‘recovered’ vs. ‘in recovery’. A argued that recovered was the correct terminology while B argued that…
