Many people who self-harm celebrate spending a certain amount of time “clean” of self-harm. Counting days since the last event of self-harm can be a great source of motivation to some but it can also put pressure on others. When someone relapses and self-harms again, this method can become unforgiving and demotivating: it sets the number of days without self-harm back to zero and progress seems to be lost.

Yet progress is not linear. It should not be seen only as either progress or regress. It can be a mix of both at the same time and it involves stepbacks.¹ But defining the recovery of someone only by a number seems detrimental to me. Why define it by one single day of vulnerability and forget many days of strength? Relapsing is not losing progress, it is part of the recovery process.¹ It is not starting from scratch again. Feeling all progress is lost can be demotivating and push people into further indulging into self-harm.

But it is not. Why not forget that one day and focus instead on the next one, on the long term. Instead of feeling guilt and remorse, we should see this moment of self-harm as a message from our brain and try to understand why we self-harmed and what enabled us to resist the urge on past occasions. Given self-harm occurs in the context of a broader psychological turmoil, recovery is complex as well and cannot be simplified to self-harm cessation only.¹ Moreover, how we perceive self-harm can play a role in recovery. People who consider themselves as having stopped self-harm have more chances of recovery than those who ceased self-harming but do not consider themselves as self-harm free.²

We make our own rules. If we do not want to set the tracker back to 0, we can. If we want to track the number of days without self-harm, instead of the number of days since last self-harm, we can. At least we would be quantifying the positive instead of the negative. And if we don’t want to track anything at all, we can as well. There is no right nor wrong speed in recovery, everyone has their own rhythm and recovery varies person to person.¹ After all, we are rated and judged everywhere and everytime in society. So why not make our mental health a purely non-judgmental and positive place for once.

References:

1 – Lewis, S. P., & Hasking, P. A. (2021). Self-injury recovery: A person-centered framework. In Journal of Clinical Psychology (Vol. 77, Issue 4, pp. 884–895). John Wiley and Sons Inc.

2 – Claréus, B., Hasking, P. A., Gray, N., & Boyes, M. E. (2022). Is ceasing self-injury enough? Differences in psychological health between people reporting behavioral cessation of non-suicidal self-injury and those who consider themselves to have stopped self-injuring. Journal of Clinical Psychology.