*Understanding Self Harm*

Understanding self-harm can be easy or very difficult. It’s really up to the person involved with the self-harmer. Some people are naturally understanding and for others it takes more of an effort. The same thing is true about patience. Those things are just born inside of people. For me, accepting self-harm was easier than understanding it.

No doubt, self-harmers have encountered a number of reactions when they’ve told people. I’ve had to read a few books and ask my wife many questions on the subject. I’ve come to the conclusion that a person’s ability to understand and accept self-harm has to do with how they are made up. I’ve had to do a lot of work understanding self-harm because of the way I’ve grown up. Logic pretty much ruled over feelings in my world. If things hurt me, I would just move on and accept it. If I felt not so good, I’d figure out what was bothering me and deal with it. Understanding self-harm takes much patience. Patience also depends on the person’s inner being. Some people are naturally impatient. Many simple things test my patience. I can only imagine that it’s a hard thing for a self-harmer to trust someone and finally confide in him or her about their secrets. I can understand the reactions of both sides.

Luckily for me, I got to know my wife as a friend before I developed any feelings for her. This helped me to improve upon my patience and understanding. It’s easy to love her when there are times that it is very hard to be patient. Probably the one thing that has been a huge test on my patience with my wife is her stubbornness. I understand why she is stubborn, and on some occasions, I’m just as stubborn as she is. We’ve both come a long way and are becoming less and less stubborn with each other.

My wife will usually become stubborn when she is feeling bad or if I ask her about her feelings. She’ll either respond with short, curt comments and pretty much try to ignore me. My first instinctive reaction is to get absolutely frustrated and close myself off too. She is quite the master at evasiveness and being stubborn and this at times makes me super frustrated and impatient. But when I feel extreme bouts of impatience, I go back to my rules of logic and I’m able to understand. I’ll just sit there with my arm around her and wait until she’s ready to talk. Forcing her to talk doesn’t get her to talk any faster and it only helps to increase my impatience. What I’ve learned over time is that she really wants me to help her. This is just a natural reaction she has. So, I try my best not to be hurt or offended and try to be calm and collected.

I’m not a saint by any sense of the word. I’m just a guy who fell in love with a wonderful girl who happened to be a self-harmer. I wasn’t in love with a self-harmer. I never once used the title ‘self-harmer’ to identify her. To me, she was someone I deeply cared for and wanted nothing bad to happen to her. We worked together to help her. I never ordered her or told her to stop what she was doing. She threw her razor blades out on her own. She came to that decision on her own.