TRIGGER WARNING: DISCUSSION OF SELF-HARM

maybeishouldgoalready:

I have had trich for 8-9 years and I will be a senior in highschool. I have self harmed for 3-4 years now. I cut myself. I see no connection between the two. Trich and my cutting are two separate mental disorders I need to conquer. Trich is much much much harder because it is an obsession. I wouldn’t call it an addiction. It’s an obsession. Not quite OCD, which I also have, but close. Self harm is hurting yourself purposefully because you are depressed, hate yourself, the way you act or look or whatever! It’s because you’re angry at yourself or you’re so numb you self harm to feel something. You do it because of the intense depression and hate you have of yourself or your actions to punish yourself. My trich, and everyone else I know in real life, doesn’t pull on purpose to hurt themselves or to punish themselves. They do it because it’s obsessive! Because you have NO control of it. You catch yourself pulling hair and you didn’t even know you were, then you look around and see all the hair around you and you feel bad and sad guilty and it snaps you out of it and you stop pulling for a while. Then the cycle goes again. Pulling feels good. Self harm, no. In a way yes bug it actually inflicts physical pain. Pulling hair does hurt but to people who have had trich for a whole, it feels like nothing. A pluck of a hair has no pain anymore. Unless you pull your hair out because you believe you deserve it, you want to hurt yourself and inflict pain on yourself, and you just hate yourself so much you pull your hair to harm, then trich is self harm, but I don’t know many people who would do it voluntarily to feel better. Trich is miserable, self harm is too! But the misery is different. With trich you just feel guilty and disappointed. No one wants bald spots, no one wants to have trich. But people do want to cut, bleed, hurt. They do have similarities however, it can be triggered by a picture, song, emotion, or anything really! And it starts from some form of extreme stress. You can hurt yourself, you can get infections and bleed from pulling your hair, but the people I know, don’t do it on purpose. So there, that’s my opinion. You may disagree. But I believe trich is not self harm.

This.