Coping with self-harm triggers can be difficult enough during normal, everyday life. It should come as no surprise that major stressors like the COVID-19 pandemic can make coping with self-harm triggers exponentially harder.

Do self-harm scars ever go away? Let's discuss the answers to that question.

That someone who self-harms must be unhappy is an easy assumption to make, but the truth is more complicated than that. While self-harm and mood disorders do often go hand-in-hand, self-harm is not intrinsically linked to mood. Not everyone who is unhappy self-harms, after all, and not everyone who self-harms does so exclusively when they are suffering. So why do people self-harm even when they're happy—or at least appear to be so?

My name is Kim Berkley, and I'm the new author of Speaking Out About Self-Injury. I’m looking forward to putting my writing skills to particularly good use here where I hope my words will bring some measure of comfort and clarity to those struggling with self-harm.

You can regulate your emotions and better respond to distress through dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills training. Dialectical behavior therapy emotional regulation skills have proven to be especially effective in people struggling with self-harm and other self-destructive, maladaptive behavior. 

Using mindfulness for self-harm is a dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skill. Dialectical behavior therapy is an effective type of treatment used for issues of self-harm. Originally developed to treat borderline personality disorder (BPD), it is currently used to treat a variety of mental illnesses such as eating disorders and chronic depression. Dialectical behavior therapy targets emotion dysregulation to help patients cope with the severity of their distress.

Distress tolerance skills are coping skills taught in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Dialectical behavior therapy is a type of treatment that teaches patients how to regulate their emotions and respond to distress through skills training. Distress tolerance skills have proved to be especially effective in people struggling with self-harm and other self-destructive, maladaptive behavior. 

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a type of treatment that teaches patients how to regulate their emotions and respond to distress through skills training. It has proved to be especially effective in people struggling with self-harm and other self-destructive, maladaptive behavior. 

If you have been struggling with self-harm and are considering professional help as an option, you may have already come across a type of treatment called dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) for ending self-harm. Though many find success with other common therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), DBT has proved uniquely suited to patients who engage in self-harming behavior.

Many people misunderstand those who self-harm. One of the things that make self-harm an inaccessible subject so prone to misunderstanding and even ridicule is that it is something most people cannot imagine ever wanting to do. The less we understand a behavior, the more tempted we are to look beyond the behavior to the person behind the behavior for an explanation. We assess each person’s background, history, personality, and even physical appearance to probe for similarities, the thinking being that the explanation for the behavior can be found in these similarities.