Name: How I overcame self harm | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2025-10-13T07:28:46.000Z
Duration: 7 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past continuous

I can't believe that kid that was harming themselves would end up sitting here.

Present continuous

For the first time I'm seeing that there's an abundance of opportunity.

I wish I wouldn't have blamed myself so much for the way I felt and for the self harm because that's made it harder.

What I actually needed to do is be brave enough to step out of myself.

Self harm behaviors are warning signs that something is not right.

There's great optimism for people making a recovery that's good and that lasts.

I first sort of started to self harm when I was about 16.

It was a lack of confidence and sort of feeling like I didn't fit in anywhere.

And I just had all this frustration about my identity, who I was.

My mum was just worried about me constantly.

I was not really talking to anyone about it, just assuming this was normal and everyone felt like that.

I experienced self harm related to my anger.

I kind of learned that anger was a scary thing or a thing that I shouldn't allow myself to feel.

I experienced trauma that I blacked out that I couldn't access for years.

I didn't really know what I was doing or have a plan or purpose even, but

Self harm is a behavior and it's a form of communication.

Self harm expresses emotional pain through a transformation into physical pain.

There are few statistics in relation to self harm.

One in six children and young people aged 16 years in England had a probable mental illness in 2021 would translate to something like five children in every classroom of 30.

It doesn't always have to be through the standard ways that we know self harming relationships, substance misuse.

So there's a variety of different ways in which people do it.

I just became very secretive and then it sort of turned into more neglecting myself.

I'd been out drinking and I just didn't stop.

I noticed that a lot of my anger was directed at myself.

Whether it was like pinching myself or biting the inside of my cheek, things like that.

A lot of my binging would happen when I was angry or upset and didn't feel like I was being listened to.

In a very traditional gender based, often males will tend to self harm in quite violent ways.

So getting into a fight, sometimes they put their fist through a glass.

We're learning a lot more about the experience of trauma.

There's a kind of capital t Trauma, but there's also small t trauma.

All those small wounds that we all have from adverse life experiences where perhaps we felt we haven't been seen or known.

So it's not that something happened, but maybe something didn't happen.

People know that it's hard being a teenager.

My parents wanted to help, but they didn't know how.

I didn't want to ask for help because I didn't want to seem like I was attention seeking or belittled or made fun of.

You want to be seen, but you don't want attention for the self harm.

When people say that self harm is attention seeking is to see it as attention needing.

Because self harm is a form of communication.

In order to move forward, you need to find an alternative form of communication, convert it into any other outward form of communication, rather than making it implode, making the pain implode back on you.

Well, something I'm doing to work towards living a better life is therapy.

I still withhold a lot of myself from other people, but

I definitely get to talk to myself through the art that I do.

Being angry doesn't make me an angry person.

I got a journal out and just started writing.

I tend to show a lot of my poetry or anything I've written with my mum.

Through running my Instagram account and working in the mental health industry, I think it's shown how much helping other people has helped myself.

Walking allows me to process things in my mind.

I've had to plan my life in a way that I feel good and I don't relapse.

It's important to get your feelings out in whatever way.

In order to learn how to verbalise things and understand what's going on.

Coming together with a group of people that were like myself, sharing words and experiences feels really comforting.

Expressing myself in a creative way, using my own words I never thought would be possible for someone like me.

One thing I've learned over the last year or so is that it just takes a few moments of bravery to get the support that you need.

You don't need to feel that you deserve it, you just need to know you need it.

It's not always going to be perfect, but just do your best.

No matter what you do, people are there to support you.

We definitely need to be open for people to tell us what they need.

Society just needs to be a lot more person centred and trauma informed being trauma aware.

We have a responsibility with our young people to relate to them where they are.

Having some compassion that somebody may have expressed is helpful.

It's really important to see this as a period of time in your life which you marked as being distressing and to be able to see that as a phase that you have now moved from and to be proud of having got through it.

I thought that was it whatever I was feeling wherever I was then what's going to be forever and it wasn't.

It hasn't been easy every step of the way growing up or as an adult but it is not the same but things change and they get better and come and go rolls everything fall thanks for watching.

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