<p>My girlfriend cuts herself. She doesn’t know why. She’s an extraordinary athlete, student, and person. She says she just can’t control herself sometimes, and just cuts herself. I recently found out about this, and want to help her. She doesn’t want to do this anymore, and I don’t want her too either. Our relationship is pretty strong and healthy. She’s been doing this since we started dating.</p>
<p>Contacting a psychologist is something that will have to be done, but I don’t think she wants to do that. What else can I do to help her? I’ve been very kind to her, and I don’t think any of this is due to our relationship (it might be, but I doubt it). What do I do to help?</p>
<p>Onequestion – how old is she? Is she living at home? You’re a great guy to be worried about this, but age and location has a lot to do with what to do.</p>
<p>Hi OneQuestion99
Cutting is obviously something that deserves attention-STAT…your community should have a 24 hour help line…your girlfriend needs to talk to someone who can help. This coupled with your support should help her seek out even more assistance-ie-parents, teacher, counselor. It is THAT important. Encourage her to make the call NOW.
I am glad you are there to love and support her.
APOL-a Mum</p>
<p>You must have a good relationship if she was willing to open up to you about something that people usually try to keep a secret. But you have to know that you can’t fix this.</p>
<p>If she’s cutting because it helps her relieve some sort of intense emotion, stress, or tension, then you can help by continuing to let her use you as a pressure valve. If she’s cutting for some other reason, then maybe you and she can talk about it to try to find out what her trigger is.</p>
<p>But at the end of the day, she will almost certainly need professional counseling to help her change her thought patterns. Depending on the cause, she may also need medication.</p>
<p>Best of luck - she sounds lucky to have you.</p>
<p>i know it sounds nice to tell u to hang in there and be her shining knight, but honestly you’re too young to be able to deal with this. run as fast as u can in the opposite direction. this is MUCH bigger than you and your “relationship”. whatever is causing her to do this started WAY before she met you!!! get out of this relationship as quickly as possible and don’t look back.</p>
<p>Do any adults know about her cutting? If not, I suggest you tell a trusted adult. Maybe your parents or a teacher at school. This is a problem that you cannot solve but you can be a good friend and get her some help. But you need an adult to act as a liaison. You may feel that you are telling on her or turning her in, but she needs professional help.</p>
<p>Is she willing to reach out to her parents? That’s always a good place to start. She has you to stand by her side, and that is geat, but her parents have resources and wisdom, and that is great too. Besides, your girlfriend will then have three people to turn to rather than one. </p>
<p>Of course, if she is not willing to open up to her parents just yet, just stay close to her and take good care of her. I agree with other posters…she is lucky to have you stand by her side.</p>
<p>All good advice here. May I also add that even though she may resist “coming out” now because it’s “inconvenient” in view of all of the stresses/events associated with end of senior year, or because she argues the summer off will “cure” her, please encourage her to act now. It is essential and ideal for her to address this problem while she’s at home, has the support of her parents and is in a familiar school-social-sports environment with lots of loving folks around her. Studies show one of the biggest psychological stresses in our lives is freshman year of college–and if you think about it, that makes sense. Everything’s new and unknown–new academics, new social scene, new teams, etc. You enter with huge expectations. You’re living on your own the first time. You have no proven on-the-scene support system but yourself and perhaps a HS classmate or two. It’s a challenge for people who have it together to successfully and happily navigate that first semester! When people go into it when they are not in their strongest emotional state, they can suffer terribly and spiral down into dangerous situations. So please encourage her to act now.</p>
<p>Best wishes. You are a good friend. I think the suggestions about distancing yourself are aimed to raising your awareness to the idea that supporting a friend in trouble can take its own toll on you. So take care of yourself.</p>
<p>I removed my response when I saw ararab’s post because I realized that I was giving advice to a “kid” and it might have been somebody older.</p>
<p>So, what I said: You absolutely cannot help her with this. </p>
<p>You need to get an adult involved. You don’t want to go behind her back, so I would suggest you suggest she tell her parents. If you are willing to go with her and be with her while she tells her parents for moral support? That would be a very supportive thing to do. Keeping this a secret is not only not going to help her, it will end up hurting you, as well. Not a good outcome for anyone.</p>
<p>If she is not willing to tell her parents, I would suggest you suggest to her that she talk to the school social worker. If she will not go to the school social worker, then YOU need to go to the school social worker to talk about YOU. You can’t force her to do anything, but you need to be talking to a professional about this.</p>
<p>Also, you need to talk to your own parents about what is going on. This is really a matter for the adults to handle.</p>
<p>Good luck. You are obviously a caring and compassionate person, but that has nothing at all to do with assisting someone with something like cutting. You didin’t cause it and you aren’t going to be able to cure it. And, even though I know at your age it can feel like a “betrayal,” it is the most loving and caring thing you can do to involve the responsilbe adults in her life who can get her the help she needs, and also in your life, so you have some real support for yourself.</p>
<p>I’m going to echo the other responses on this page. Your girlfriend needs help NOW! from a professional! Go see that counselor NOW while you’re still in school to get things started to help her. And she needs help…she knows it too. Tell some adults.</p>
<p>I agree that your GF should talk to an adult counselor. It is encouraging that she has reached out to you. I believe that means that she is getting ready to get some help. You have lots of good advice above. I wanted to add that there is an organization to help people suffering from self-injury. It is called “To Write Love On Her Arms” and you can check it out online at [url=<a href=“http://www.twloha.com%5Dwww.twloha.com%5B/url”>http://www.twloha.com]www.twloha.com[/url</a>]. Perhaps she could start there.</p>
<p>Cutting is a coping mechanism that releases endorphins for many people who self-injure. That is the addiction component. A quick fix, while you work on getting her to speak to someone, is to get her to exercise somehow whenever she feels the intense emotions coming up and feels the urge to cut. Maybe she could call you and you could go for a walk or run, or she could just pick up her MP3 and go walking alone (it’s more fun to be with someone, of course). The exercise will give her the endorphins, the effects last for hours, and she will see that over time she can use this better coping mechanism wherever and whenever and feel good about it, instead of having to hide. She keeps things bottled up, and needs to learn to talk, but that can take time, and building the trust with a counselor takes time to help her talk. Exercise can start right away, will release endorphins quickly, is free, and requires no trust in anyone but herself to start with. You can’t fix this, but you can steer her in the right direction. It takes time to stop, but it isn’t a suicide attempt, it usually looks worse than it really is, and is not something to be embarrassed about. It just means she keeps things too bottled up inside and doesn’t know how to safely get those things out. Remind her that feelings come and go, and bad feelings do go away when you give them some time. The great thing is that she told you. That means she is ready to find help to stop.</p>
<p>Cutting is actually more common than many people think. It may take some time to change this habit. It may take some time to find other ways to deal with her emotions, and she may stop, relapse, and so on. This is a very stressful time for high school seniors, so things may be tough right now.</p>
<p>I think it sounds as if your friend is ready to come out in the open, since she told you. But telling you should not be a substitute for getting help. Maybe, since she trusts you, you could have a conversation with her about which adult she might be comfortable talking to about this. If she is over 18, she can choose whether or not to tell her parents.</p>
<p>There are medications that help, yes, but also cognitive behavioral and other therapies can really help. And exercise was a great suggestion. Some studies show that exercise does more than antidepressants for many people, and endorphins from running are a lot healthier than endorphins from cutting, as teachandmom said.</p>
<p>My college daughter is home and I asked her about To Write Love on her Arm (as I remember) and she is familiar with that organization, which seems to be on a lot of campuses. That should help a lot next fall. Peer groups are a great adjunct to therapy.</p>
<p>Don’t worry too much, yourself. Teenagers get over this behavior all the time. Give her hope, perhaps, and tell her she can get better if she works at it with a therapist. But it really is up to her.</p>
<p>Another vote for the therapist. If she has been cutting for quite awhile it is likely she is addicted. If this is the case, she will only be able to get better with therapy.</p>
<p>While it may be wise to get out of the romantic relationship, you also have a responsibility to tell an adult what’s going on. If “don’t look back” means you just dump and ignore (which I think “Don’t look back” implies) her, that is practically sociopathic, akin to dropping and ignoring someone because they have a physical illness. You don’t have to keep dating her, but you do have to alert someone else to what is going on. She’s SICK. She’s ILL. Keeping this to yourself is like letting someone underage with diabetes go untreated.</p>
<p>One of my DD’s friends was cutting in 8th grade. She is Asian and under incredible parental pressure to succeed. My DD got the courage up to go and talk to their GC. The GC went to the gym teacher (the teacher most likely to see the girl’s arms and “discover” the cutting without outing my DD) and the parents were called to school. She got help.</p>
<p>There are meds that can help with the urge to cut and the underlying sadness.</p>
<p>I would commend you for caring and urge you to go to an adult at school who can make an intervention happen. If you fear being exposed as the person who told, do it anonymously. </p>
<p>I don’t know that dumping her now would help her or your conscience but as someone who stuck with a bipolar bf from the age of 18 - 25, I would highly recommend that you not continue to see her after graduation…</p>