Dear Anita,

I hope you don’t have any bad feeling about this misunderstanding. As I said many times I value and respect  you greatly and I care about your feelings.

Recent days were a bit overwhelming. yesterday I had a feeling, it’s hard to explain. Ever since I started to control my self harm, I noticed that when I finally do it, it gives me noticeable relief. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It’s good because it’s a relief I do not get that often so I know I can live without it, and it’s fine. But it’s a bit bad because when I do feel it I kind of realize it’s a relief nothing else can give me besides self harming. I read about substitutes like doing sports, etc making yourself feel something in physical way so that it helps. Yes, it helps a bit.

Feeling of guilt has returned, beating myself up for harming myself. Just yesterday, this one episode. I’ll try to let go of this feeling of guilt and I probably won’t do this again in a long time. Trying to get rid of that guilt, because it’s even worse than self harm itself.

Besides, this month I’ve been doing chemical peels on prescription to get rid of some small scars on my face after last year’s acne so the urge to pick on my face and to “hurt it” is fulfilled/satisfied for a moment.  I have “a permission” now to not leave my face alone for a next week or so, but then it’s over and I will have to leave it alone and not touch it. I recently have two feelings, if you’re interested in hearing this, of course, : one, that I want my face to look finally good like it looked a year ago before this acne, and I can’t wait to finish this treatment, and two, when I recently see that it’s getting better I feel happy but also I feel the need to destroy it, I don’t even know what is this feeling. It’s like when I looked worse, somehow this urge to self harm was satisfied on its own, because my face was “destroyed” in a way. So I again feel I don’t deserve to have a pretty face and when I see it, I want to look ugly again. Looking ugly makes me feel miserable and bad, and adds guilt but I still want to do this to myself. Of course with all I know to this day, I can say I probably will never do anything that would leave scar, because I know better  but that feeling versus my conscious knowledge about my self harm.. It’s so tricky and evil almost, so impertinent. It’s laughing to my face, this feeling. It denies logic and my self awareness. I seriously have to ask myself and convince myself that there is no reason I should look ugly, I look for reasons to look ugly and say to myself that there are none so I should leave it alone, I look at other people and say to myself “They don’t do that to themselves so apparently this is not normal what I *plan* to do so seems like there is no need (well I don’t plan it, I really don’t want to, but those feelings are so obsessive I need to handle them somehow)”