Self-injury: Self-expression inside out – What is self-injury?
The second part of my article first published in the Healthcare Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal (HCPJ) published by the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP), in January 2009: At FirstSigns (LifeSIGNS) we define self-injury as a coping mechanism - something a person learns to rely on to help them deal with intolerable distress. We do not focus on the self-injurious behaviour or method of wounding, but rather consider the emotional drivers behind the behaviour and the emotional state that self-injury brings about. We have learned that a great many different behaviours that cause pain or damage to a person in an immediate ...
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Self-injury: Self-expression inside out – Introduction
This article (to be seven blog articles) was first published in the Healthcare Counselling and Psychotherapy Journal (HCPJ) published by the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP), in January 2009, and is reproduced here with permission. With some surprise, we find it has been re-published within the Encylcopeia Britanica, under self-injury. Over the next few weeks we'll be pubishing all seven ...
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Help us with a magazine article
We'd like to hear from people from within the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) community about self-injury. We have the chance to feature in a magazine that champions diversity and the BME community. So, we'd like to ask if you, as a member of the BME community, if you'd be willing to provide a quote about your experiences. We'd only need your ...
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Self-help self-injury groups
Guidance for running or supporting a real-life group, from FirstSigns / LifeSIGNS We are frequently asked for guidance from people wishing to set up and run a real-life support group for people who self-injure. Running such a group is more complex than might be imagined, and in our experience we have found they often fail to continue ...
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Happy new year, let’s make it a good one
What’s your focus for 2010? What ever you resolve to do, whatever ambitions and goals you wish to achieve, I hope you’ll keep an eye on your health and happiness every day. There’s so much to get done isn’t there? The world seems to speed up and time flies faster and faster. Through all the ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ matters, remember to ...
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Our first FirstSigns Calendar – help raise funds and awareness
After months of planning I'm very excited that our lovely FirstSigns 2010 Calendar has finally gone to print! It's been a complicated journey trying to get everything just right (I'm a terrible perfectionist and I wanted to ensure we had a product to be proud of). Well, I am proud, and I hope that a great many of you will ...
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Our visitors in 2009
Just a quick update to give you a wonderful view of where many of our visitors come from - where you are, in other words! Click for a larger image. Thanks to 'Analytics to Earth' and Google Earth, we're able to visually display our visitor statistics, and as you can see, people come from all over the world to visit FirstSiigns. It's great ...
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Who self-injures?
We are frequently asked the question: who self injures? Despite the media’s frequent portrayal of self-injury being something that predominantly affects teenage girls, at FirstSigns we know this is wholly inaccurate. FirstSigns itself was founded by Wedge – and he’s never going to be a teenage girl! Self-injury can affect anybody, at any time in their lives. Gender, age, sexual orientation, race, religion, ...
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CBT – Addressing invalidation, criticism, feedback and self-criticism
It’s easy to lead ourselves to believe that we cannot change how we feel. Granted, it can be very difficult, but how we feel can very much depend on our thought processes and how we choose to think about things. By changing the way we think, it’s possible to change the way we feel. Something that can severely affect the way ...
