and in some cases not self harming would lead to something much worse. There is a lot of advice both on the website and the messageboard about stopping or reducing self harm, and coping strategies or distraction techniques, but we encourage people to stop in their own time, after looking at why they self harm and what they hope to achieve through stopping. Self harm is usually used as a coping mechanism; it's the first thing you think of when things go wrong, or you feel like you need to be punished. As a coping mechanism it works well in the short term. It provides an escape, it gives you release, it grounds you, it's the one thing you can control and it can even punish you, if that's how you use it. But the one thing it fails to do is help you with the issue that made you want to escape in the first place. You wake up the next day with the same stresses, the same problems, but with extra wounds, pain and guilt. In the long term, self harm causes more problems than it appears to solve. So how can you stop self harming without worrying about slipping up or falling back into old routines? Self harm isn't usually the problem itself, but the way that the problem is expressed, so to stop self harming you need to work out what the problem is and what you can do about it. Working out the pros and