Borderline Personality and Self Harm and Self Injury

[A.J. Mahari]

Self Mutilation is a Borderline Language of Pain
By A.J. Mahari

Borderline Personality Disorder is a breading ground for self harm. Self mutilation and all forms of self harm make up the borderline language of pain. Cutting, burning, impulsive sex, impuslive shopping, overeating or undereating are all examples of self harm that many with Borderline Personality Disorder engage in.

Self-mutilation, for many who have Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), is a learned language of profound pain. It is a primordial scream for help. It is the apex of needing to be heard, validated, and soothed. It is one of the most prolific and anguished expressions of borderline pain. It is self-defeating and holds you hostage to the pain of the false self -- to the pain that you can’t heal by further wounding your body and your precious soul.

It has been said by many, borderlines and professionals alike that those with BPD lack emotional skin and are for a myriad of reasons far more sensitive than the general population.

Many with BPD struggle with the intense and unrelenting agony of self-hatred. This self-hatred (false self which has emerged to protect true self) and accompanying pain is more repressed more often than not.

This pain of self-hatred on top of a stockpile of pain generally is way too much pain and is often felt with little to no conscious understanding or awareness of the origin of it. Reasons for the pain may widely vary but clearly most with BPD (until they get sufficient therapy)do not have the skills to apply to the soothing of that pain other than to self-mutilate, act out, or make a whole host of unhealthy choices that while protective are primitive and self-defeating. Choices that keep you stuck and cause people with BPD (and those who love them) more and more pain.

While not all who have BPD cut or burn themselves or harm themselves in other direct ways, most with BPD do engage in harmful behaviour that doesn’t always mean the immediate physical consequence of pain. For example, compulsive overeating, shopping, drinking, drugs and so forth. All of which can be about self-harm but is not self-mutilation though the impetus to engage in these behaviours is largely driven by the same impulses to be soothed and relieved of what hurts, to distract from what hurts, to avoid one’s feelings and are often the result of distorted black-and-white - all-or-nothing thinking.

Those Borderlines who do self-mutilate, however, in more cases than not, find that the need to hurt themselves is not only very impulsive but that it also continues to grow in frequency and severity. Self-mutilating is the way that your body cries in what are unhealthy and unproductive ways to relieve pain, anger and/or rage.

Self-mutilation is all about externalizing your pain. This externalization of pain likely goes back to a time in childhood when a source of great pain to you (from outside of yourself) left you feeling helpless - annihilated - totally shamed. The pain was so great that you couldn't process it inside or take it inside of yourself because to do so (even if you could have) would have surely meant death. What overwhelms a child in a painful and negative way can seem like a very real impending threat of death.

You can and do need to learn how to deal with it internally and age-appropriately. Your pain is not some monster that sits outside of you waiting to devour you. You pain is a part of you and you can learn to manage it in healthy productive ways.

If you self-mutilate you need to realize that you are doing the best you can. You are responding to what you know feels like an immediate need to rid yourself of any unpleasant to overwhelming or mortally distressful feelings that you do not have the personal skills to cope with or the ability (presently) to tolerate.

For many (as was the case in my experience years ago) it is important and helpful to figure out in therapy why you have not only the feelings that you do but the matching inability or lack of skills to cope with them. However, in some cases, the reasons why are evasive and not known for whatever reasons. If you self-mutilate and/or feel like you hate yourself and you don’t have any conscious idea why it is more important to find the help you need to intervene in your self-destructive behaviour than it is to figure out why. Why may come later. In the meantime though you need to learn how to tolerate the distress you often feel so that you will still be alive to acquire more understanding over time.

What feels so urgently horrific to you emotionally that it causes you such unresolved and repetitive pain or unrelenting pain and leaves you feeling so helpless in the face of your own often alienated feelings causing you to choose to mutilate yourself in the experience of most with BPD is not really about the things that you react to in the here and now’s of your life. While this is what you may tie your feelings, distortions, reactions and fears to with regard to your emotions you are likely carrying a stockpile of unresolved feelings from your childhood that get triggered in the here and now by daily things. Thus what you react to has such a profound intensity.

The first step in dealing with self-mutilating behaviour is to find professional help. This is often very difficult depending upon where you live and how much money you have and then also depending upon the degree to which your local mental health delivery system ostracizes and ascribes to the stigma that borderlines can’t be treated or don’t get better anyway and are more trouble than they are worth. This is not true and don’t let encountering that attitude shame you or keep you from continuing to reach out to get help. Borderlines can and do get better.

That attitude is out there and encountered way too frequently by people with BPD who really need help and who can and will benefit from that help when it is delivered justly, timely, with limits and boundaries, effectively, and non-judgmental way with an attitude of empathy and care and a belief that borderlines can and do get better – in other words professionally. There are many therapists out there who either specialize in Borderline Personality Disorder, or who know enough about it to be able to effectively treat it. Many work very hard. I personally was very lucky in my therapy travels years ago. I don’t want to lump all therapists together. So, keeping that in mind, search until you find someone and/or the information (books, self-help) that you need to learn the skills necessary to cope with your feelings and to tolerate the distress you will feel as you transition from cutting and burning (etc) to feeling and dealing with your emotions.

Self-mutilation is chosen behaviour. No matter how compelling it feels - you do choose it. You have chosen it to help you because you don’t feel competent to do anything else emotionally and/or you don’t have the developmental tools that others have that helps them to cope with life in age-appropriate and healthy non-destructive ways. Don’t be hard on yourself about that.

The catch-22 to stopping self-mutilating behaviour is that while you use this method of coping with your emotions, feelings, cognitively-distorted thoughts and stress you will initially encounter a new type of formidable stress in making new choices. I have done it. It has been done. Many have done it. Know that you too can do it.

Every time you cut or burn yourself you would be better served by crying. You need to cry. You need to feel. You need to tolerate what you feel. I get it that feeling for you feels more stressful and scary and overwhelming than cutting yourself and bleeding. However, the pain and the feelings that feel so huge to you and leave you feeling so small, so young, so out of control, so helpless, so intolerably vulnerable – feelings that feel like you will just DIE if you feel them – have their hold on you from your past and have that intensity based upon what you experienced as a child or young teen when you didn’t even have the myriad of choices available to you that are available to you now, as an adult.

If you were sexually abused, then it makes it clearer why you feel as you do. What we know about people who have been sexually abused as children is that it has very personality-changing effects. Trauma in the developmental years can and often does even change brain chemistry. The trauma of incest or being abused in other ways, of being neglected, of growing up without having your physical and psychosocial needs met and/or attempting to mature in an invalidating environment all cause us as children to stop developing emotionally. This is the case when you have BPD. You are stuck in some developmental stage. You have not fully matured emotionally. You can still mature emotionally. You really can.

For those who have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and who weren’t sexually abused, otherwise abused, neglected or invalidated, or who presently don’t remember any abuse, and who find themselves with no emotional skin and the need, urges, and impulses to cut, burn, or in any other way harm themselves, perception is everything.

Sometimes, for reasons that may or may not be understood, those with BPD, perceive things differently from how they actually are occurring in the shared collective reality of a family for example. This does not mean that what you perceived and experienced differently from say your siblings, for example, means that your experience is weird or nuts and that you are crazy -- NO! It means that you had a different experience were more sensitive and your perceptions and experience were very real to you. You need to validate yourself and your experience and have a therapist help you in that process and perhaps the process of being re-parented in a way that teaches you now how to re-parent yourself to meet the needs that you didn’t have met or didn’t experience as being met.

If you self-mutilate or harm yourself in any way to avoid your feelings ask yourself why you feel that you deserve to hurt even more by inflicting pain and wounds on your body. You don’t deserve this at all. You really don’t. You are trapped in a cycle of distorted thinking and fear of feeling and being exposed, a cycle of shame that can be stopped in its tracks when you choose to make new choices. Sounds simple and trite I’m sure. It’s not simple at all – I know – I’ve been there. I’ve done it though. I’ve stopped harming myself and made new choices. I’ve learned the skills that I didn’t have the opportunity to learn growing up. I’ve re-parented myself. I believe in myself and I trust myself. In fact, I love myself now. If I can do it so can you!

Self Mutilation is a Borderline language of pain. It is choosing to allow your body to cry for you. It may relieve stress and distress and momentarily feel like a high and/or give you the feeling of great relief but the very minute you hurt yourself to help yourself you set yourself back up to repeat the cycle again. Your abusing your body is taking on the role of your abuser if you were abused. It is becoming an abuser to yourself if you weren’t abused. It will only perpetuate any self-hatred that you feel. It is a self-defeating cycle that truly only adds to your pain in the long run. Momentary relief is not worth the damage that you continue to do to yourself, not only physically, but emotionally as well. You need to value yourself enough to learn how to tolerate what hurts long enough to heal it.

Self Mutilation is a Borderline language of pain. It is a learned language of pain. It is a vehicle of expression. It hurts you even more. You can learn to express your pain in a healthier and truly emotional language – tears and words spoken that do not have to hold you hostage to the language of Borderline fear and shame. Your true self does not require or aspire to the drama of the tortured and pathologically protective false self.

As long as you continue to hurt yourself in all your best efforts to help yourself you will hold yourself hostage to the very pain you are so desperately trying not to feel. This means that you are making sure, each time you self-harm, that you will feel this pain, again and again.

You cannot heal this addicting pain that you cut or burn or otherwise harm yourself in order to avoid as long as you are stuck in this self-abusing cycle. In fact, your self-abuse is just calling to yourself more and more pain each and every time you hurt yourself.

You cannot heal by further wounding your body, your psyche and your precious soul.


© Ms. A.J. Mahari, April 21, 2005

[A.J. Mahari]

Self-Harm (Self Mutilation) You can Heal It!By A.J. Mahari

If you hurt yourself you are hurting the wrong person. You are hurting a person, a being, an inner-child that has already hurt, and been hurt, ENOUGH.

If you hurt yourself you are hurting the wrong person. You are hurting a person, a being, an inner-child that has already hurt, and been hurt, ENOUGH.

You do not have to continue to cycle the patterns of your past. While hurting yourself may feel like a relief, or release for your feelings or a way to avoid your feelings, it is abusive. It is you, abusing you. If you were abused, sexually, physically and/or emotionally as you were growing up -- your hurting yourself is you taking on the role of your abuser and is you turning on yourself.

This is abandonment at its most profound. When you abandon and re-abandon your self you will be projecting this out on to anyone else with whom you come into contact or are in relationship with or to. You will then perceive that you are being abandoned by everyone else. This projection is the mirror in which borderlines live their lives, reflections of others and of a self sought after and longed for as they are.

In his book, Lost In The Mirror: An Inside Look At Borderline Personality (2nd Edition), Richard Moskovitz, M.D. writes: "Self-mutilation may be as simple as superficial scratches on the skin with fingernails or a blunt instrument, or as tragic and complicated as the surgical excision of a body part. Some injuries are visible to all while others are well hidden. Some are inflicted with elaborate ritual, while others convey special meaning that can be deciphered by the knowledgeable observer like the hieroglyphics in an ancient tomb. These injuries are often mistaken for suicide attempts."
"Whether burns or cuts or penetrating wounds, these self-inflicted injuries are the products of compulsion. Like other compulsions, a buildup of tension leads to an irresistible urge, and the tension is discharged by the act."

"Self-injury brings horror to the hearts of family members. They may also view it with anger as a form of defiance. Because it presents serious risk to health and life, it may become the occasion for an involuntary hospitalization. Extreme measures, such as constant observation or physical restraint, may be brought to bear to prevent the more serious forms of self-injury. The power struggle that follows may become one of the forces that keeps the compulsion alive."

To the borderline person, self-mutilation may be rich in meaning."Dr. Moskovitz then outlines 6 interpretations of self- mutilation. They include:

1) "Self-Mutilation as Punishment:"

Here he summarizes that guilt over real or imagined wrong-doings or inappropriate behaviour is punished through self-mutilation. Moskovitz writes: "Self-Mutilation may be a particularly fitting punishment for the crime of forbidden sexuality."

2) "Self-Mutilation as Sacrifice:"

Moskovitz suggests that a body part, through splitting, may take on the symbolic meaning of all that is bad about the self. The body is then punished for the sins of the owner and made a scapegoat.

3) "Self-Mutilation as a Cry for Help:"

Here Moskovitz explains that visible forms of self-mutilation catch the attention of others and invite rescue. He suggests that for many borderlines, feeling out of control, self-mutilation as a cry for help may be an unconscious plea for hospitalization, for the kind of structure that can provide the safety that the borderline is unable to provide for him/herself.

4) "Self-Mutilation as Directed Pain:"

Moskovitz explains here that, for many borderlines, emotional pain can often seem unbearable and so the self-inflicted pain can serve as a distraction from emotional distress that feels intolerable. It can also be another way to convey to others that you are hurting. Many borderlines, in the face of emotional pain that they feel is unmanageable, end up in a rather numbed state where they aren't feeling their feelings at all. This state of being then builds up an intolerable situation after a period of time and leads the borderline to injure him/herself as a way of renewing contact with the world of sensation.

5) "Self-Mutilation as Coded Message:"

Moskovitz says that this type of self-mutilation often contains symbolic messages for self or others within it.

6) "Self-Mutilation as Reenactment:"

Moskovitz makes it clear here that most with Borderline Personality Disorder have experienced physical and/or sexual abuse, self-abuse often represents a reenactment of the early injury. This reenactment is a compulsion as well. It is a compulsion to reenact past traumatic events in what are viewed as efforts to create a new, happier ending to what are painful memories. This is seen also as a way of developing some emotional continuity between past and present.

I, myself, went through this for years. I have not, however, had any impulse or desire to harm myself now for about 15 years. For me it is truly a thing of the past. It was not an easy transition though from self-harm to self-care.

As much as there are, as Moskovitz and other professionals will attest, impulses and compulsions behind this behaviour I believe, from my own experience that this behaviour is also a part of choices made. Sometimes, choices made subsconsciously until one understands on a more conscious level what is going on inside and what is driving the choice to self-mutilate.

As one who has been through Borderline Personality Disorder and recovered from it, and who knows that often indescribable pain and agony I can truly attest to you here and now that continuing to harm yourself, look to others to rescue you and provide you with a safety that you need to learn how to provide for yourself is holding you trapped in the pain of BPD.

It is truthfully more painful to stay trapped in those cycles then it is to face the pain that all this self-harming behaviour seeks to defend against, avoid and escape. The truth is that this pain is NOT escapable. It will perpetuate itself in your experience until you decide to face it, to feel it, and to let go of the self-mutilation as a defense. Do you really need to punish, sacrifice, cry for help, give yourself and/or others coded messages, and keep yourself trapped in your past by constantly reenacting it?

The answer to that question, in my experience, was no. And with that answer, and some determination I made a vow to my inner-child over 15 years ago now that I would never again hurt her because I was still experiencing past pain. After all it is that little one in each and every one of us that has felt, held and carried that pain for years. Your little one needs you today. Just as you need yourself.

Recovering from self-mutilation and indeed, BPD itself, requires that you find that authentic self, that child within that holds both your past pain and that essence of you and connect with him/her in a deep and profound way. This can only happen when you make the choice to stop abusing yourself and to feel the feelings that your inner-child has been holding for you for years.

Through grieving this child's pain you will then connect to your authentic self (inner-child) and further integrate your past experiences into your adult life. This is the emotional maturation needed to overcome BPD. When you are much more connected to your true self you will then be able to connect to the world in ways which build relationships in the here and now as opposed to the borderline way of trying to re-live and fix past relationships from the past in your here and now which ruins those present-day relationships, alienates you, leaves you isolated, lonely, and feeling that profound re-abandonment over and over again.

Self-Mutilation is abandonment of the self. It is re-abandonment of the lost authentic self. It is living in and through your false self. It is not your destiny. It is not what you deserve. It is not the measure of your worth. Your past and any and all abuse suffered in your past is not a reflection on who you really are or the inherent worth that you have because you simply are, you. Believe that. Trust that.

Seek to know your real self and you will find your way out of this most painful, trapping and self annihilating behaviour. You deserve so much more. You deserve to feel and to heal the pain that you have lived with for so long. And when you choose to do just that you really can do just that. I won't sugarcoat it, healing that pain is often a long process, it is involved and it takes dedicated determination and the shedding of millions of tears.

What it all comes down to is self-mutilation or releasing your self from the legacy of your past and your most profound pain. You cannot learn to soothe yourself while you are still hurting yourself and perpetuating all the pain that you have had inflicted upon you in your past.

Before I could get to my pain and heal it I had to STOP all my self-harming behaviour. To do anything less would never have been enough to further integrate my inner-child and to gain the trust of this most precious and hurting little one. In order to find new ways of coping and to be able to find and feel your pain you must first make the decision to stop the self-mutilation that, for many borderlines, is running and further ruining their lives.

You can recover from the pain that so haunts you. You can make new choices. You can recover from self-mutilating behaviour. You can let go of your past. You can welcome in the here and now and you can dare to dream about your future.


© A.J. Mahari, December 26, 2001

[A.J. Mahari]

Borderline Pain - It Cuts Like a Knife
By A.J. Mahari

Why borderlines self-mutilate (self-injure) and how can they stop.

Pain: It cuts like a knife quite literally in the lives of many borderlines who self-abuse, self-injure, or self-mutilate. From my past experience,when I had BPD, I assert that self-injuring, cutting and the like is the result of the transference of emotional pain into the physical realm which is a frantic effort to avoid feeling the pain, dealing with the pain or healing the pain.

The results of this are not only self-mutilation but are also the manipulation behind the borderline’s attempts to control what hurts on the inside by abandoning that and trying to control all that is on the outside of that pain. What is on the outside of borderline pain, is the borderline's body, and the environment in which the borderline lives and the people in the borderline's life.

In his book, "Lost In The Mirror", Dr. Richard Moskovitz writes: "Perhaps the most shocking and mysterious of all borderline behaviour is self-mutilation...Whether burns or cuts or penetrating wounds, these self-inflicted injuries are the products of compulsion. Like other compulsions, a buildup of tension leads to an irresistible urge, and the tension is discharged by the act." (Pages 71-72)

If you are borderline and you self-injure, self-harm or self-mutilate based upon my own past experience I would assert that you are doing that because you feel driven to. The impulses that are leading you to feel driven to hurt yourself are the by-products of your inability and or unwillingness to feel your feelings.

A continued refusal to feel, deal with and release your feelings often leads to a buildup of tension inside that then leaves you with a familiar feeling of angst. It is an aggravated sense of something about to explode or implode if relief is not sought. It is a feeling that can leave you feeling out of control. When you self-injure yourself there is then this false sense of being in control. It gives you a sense of power. What it really represents is your helplessness in action, however.


Cutting, or burning yourself is not the act of someone in control of themselves. It is surrender to one's repressed emotions run amuck inside. It only increases your pain each time you hurt yourself to relieve yourself of what you know to be intolerable feelings.


Self-mutilation can be a way of trying to punish yourself for what you have done or what you feel guilty for as if you had done. Your guilt may be the result of something that you've recently done or it may be related to what happened to you as a child. Self-mutilation in the extreme, as in the sacrificing of a limb or a body part can be a way of attempting to set your past apart from the current chapter of your life. It can also be an attempt to purify yourself from what you feel is so wrong with you. Self-mutilation can also be a cry for help, and it can also be an attempt to re-direct pain.

When you feel intolerable emotional pain or distress you transfer those feelings into the realm of the physical by hurting yourself. It is also a way of saying loudly to the world around you without ever uttering a sound that you are in a tremendous amount of pain. Self-mutilation can also be a reenactment of earlier traumatic events that you experienced in the past.

In my past experience, when I had BPD, I would cut because I was that dissociated from my feelings. All I could feel was agitated, angry, rage, or "bugged". I could not identify any further than that what I was actually feeling. The sensation of being "bugged" would escalate inside of me until I felt compelled to act out. I would then cut. Cutting was how I cried. As the blood dripped, it was like tears cleansing the ocean of my psychic pain. After I would cut, I then would take care of myself.

I had learned how to simulate nurturing or soothing myself (my physical self only) by taking care of the wounds that I would inflict upon myself. I could not feel the emotional pain. I did not understand it or have much, if any concept of it back then.

In order to be able to stop the self-mutilating behavior you must come to realize, from the inside out, that you hurt very very deeply. Your wounds are emotional (intra-psychic) and you are transferring them out into the world of the physical in a maladaptive effort to soothe, nurture and take care of yourself. However, if you self-injure you are further hurting yourself and you are betraying your inner child in much the same way as you were betrayed as a young child. It is in the way then that you become your own abuser and continue to do to yourself what others have done to you in the past. There is no self-respect in this. There is no self-like, no self-love, no tolerance or true understanding of self either. You set yourself adrift and you betray yourself each and every time you choose to take your very real emotional pain and make it physical.

If you are borderline you are already deeply emotionally scarred. If you are a borderline who is self-injuring you are adding to those scars. You are sending a message to yourself that you do not matter, that you not worthwhile, that you cannot be loved. You are choosing to be as intolerant toward yourself as those who hurt you in the past were.

I know only too well from past experience that when you are in the cycle of self-harm you feel trapped by the compulsions and you may not understand why you do what you do at all. For years I had not clue either. I would just do it and live with it. I did come to learn, though, over time that my injuring and cutting myself was in fact a choice. I hated myself and I was trying to punish myself further for being the child that my family deemed so unlovable as to sexually, physically, emotionally and verbally abuse me. Thinking that way was my surrendering to my past.

It was tantamount to my throwing up my arms and saying: "I am not going to grow up. I am not going to take care of myself. I cannot be anything but what they say I was/or am. I am helpless. I am powerless." Of course at the time, in the throes of black and white thinking I thought that by cutting and injuring myself I was powerful and in control and taking care of myself.

I was wrong.

If you are borderline and you are still cutting, or self-injuring in any way ask yourself what you are gaining by doing this. When was the last time you cried? What do you so fear about crying? Do you feel a void where that hurt screaming little child could be crying a river? Your hurt is real. Your pain is real. Your pain is yours. It is a part of you until you learn to feel it and release it in healthy ways. Your pain is not some tremendous outside force that can take you over and annihilate you. NO! It feels that way though because you have alienated yourself from yourself, from your pain, from your hurt from the very fact that you did nothing wrong, you did not deserve what was done to you as a young child. When you (in therapy) seek to get to know your emotions you will come to find, as I did, that they are not some monster lying in wait for you (no - that was the abuser in your childhood) but that these emotions you have are a very real and integral part of who you are. They are yours. You can feel them.

You can work them through, learn how to cry and grieve and to let them go.

You do not have to cut out what you feel. You do not have to punish yourself for what others have done to you. You do not have to hurt anymore than you already do. It is ironic how borderlines having experienced a lion-share of pain, find pain so overwhelming and scary that they dissociate from it, deny it, and avoid it....suffering excruciatingly all the while from it. Then instead of working to lessen it they choose instead to multiply it over and over again by self-injuring.

You hurt enough. I came to this realization one night and it was the last time I ever cut. When I realized that what was driving me to cut was pain, emotional pain, I knew that I could never hurt myself that way again. I HURT ENOUGH! Sadly, though as part of the borderline's struggle with anything and everything in life "not being enough" it is also true of the pain that one is in. Pain becomes a way of life for a borderline. It is sought out time and time and time again through self-injury, suicide attempts, acting out, damaging/losing relationships and self-imposed isolation. Why?

Because pain is familiar and the mindset (within the cognitive distortions of this personality disorder) fuel the belief that this is what one deserves and that this is how life is.

So, with this pain, this utter agony, the borderline continues to add to it until he/she can begin to gain insight into this cycle. If you are borderline and you are abusing yourself and or others ask yourself what hurts so much and why? Keep asking yourself until you begin to grasp the answer. Life is not something to be merely endured it is to be experienced and lived. You cannot do this when you continue to choose to hurt yourself in the name of "helping yourself". Much of this entire pattern also involves manipulating others as well. In order to heal this self abuse, and the manipulating of others and walk out of the relational nightmare that you are in when trying to relate to yourself and to others you must stop trying to control everything outside of yourself.

You must stop converting your emotional pain into the physical realm. You must learn to feel from the inside out and to control yourself from the inside out while letting go of all that is outside of yourself.....for what is outside of yourself is also outside of your control. You have the power to change your life. You really do. It is up to you. Do you hurt enough yet? Are you ready to stop putting your pain outside of yourself, through hurting your body, manipulating others and acting out in ways that hurt others. You are not your environment and it is not you. When you can come to know this you can then turn to the business of healing your internal environment which will render all other maladaptive coping mechanisms obsolete.

© Ms. A.J. Mahari, October 30, 1999

[A.J. Mahari]

How and Why I Stopped Self-Harming
By A.J. Mahari

I began to cut as a means of trying to cope with what was felt as rather overwhelming agitation. This aggravated agitation for which there was no connected feeling and virtually no conscious understanding for years was really driven by the pain I was in and didn't even know, at that time, that I had.

The cutting began around the age of 17, when I left home and was in College. I was living in a dorm and was extremely stressed and unable to cope with all of the people I lived in such close quarters with.

I cut, usually with razor blades and there were times where I would break glass and basically gouge myself with it. Many times the latter efforts required stitches.

When I would cut I would be so stressed, so agitated, and feel so overwhelmed and helpless. For years, though, the only actual "feeling" I could identify was ANGER. I knew I was angry and that I was very agitated.

I didn't know that I was as detached from my feelings and indeed myself as it turns out I now know I was. I was detached from all of the pain that fueled my agitation.

READ MORE ...

© A.J. Mahari, 1997 with additions and changes December 10, 2003

[A.J. Mahari]

What's the real harm of self harm in Borderline Personality Disorder?

I have a new video out now in my BPD Inside Out Video Podcast which you can read more about below or go directly to by clicking on the second link below.

Self Harm in Borderline Personality Disorder - The Real Harm

The Real Harm in Self Harm

© A.J. Mahari