I don’t really understand why people do it. Not like “they’re doing it because they are depressed and feel bad”, I had depression myself but never had a call to injure myself. I hate pain, and doing something painful to myself while I’m already feeling bad doesn’t really sound appealing. So I don’t quite get what self-harm gives people so they keep doing it.
Like, is it a way to “ground” yourself and stop dissociating, or is it “just to feel anything at all”, or as a “punishment”, or something else?
This is the only answer here that speaks to me. I didn’t cut habitually though, it was the occasional result of boiling over with sadness and frustration and rage turned inward over and over and over and over because there were zero external actions I could take that wouldn’t make everything even worse. I was a trapped animal starting to chew my own leg off to escape. This ended when I found a community and moved out, though the depression remained strong until was able to finally get treatment. Treatment worked for me.
For anyone reading stuck in that particular cycle of self destruction right now you have heard it gets better until it became a bitter joke. Maybe it does but my perspective is fucked. In my experience you get stronger, and learn that change is a constant; good times die out but so do the bad times. I feel like I can endure just about anything now which makes it hard to relate with people’s struggles sometimes, but at least that’s more of a social issue than an existential one.