Support for Friends and Family Members
LifeSIGNS has a history of offering fantastic information to people who need to know more about self-injury, and we are proud of the direct emotional support we offer people who self-injure / self-harm.
Our Message Board is an important offering from LifeSIGNS, and the Message Board Community are a wonderful bunch of people with personal experience of self-injury and recovery.
We are now expanding our Message Board community to include those who care for people who self-injure; we now have a specific forum within our Board for ‘Friends and Family’ members to express themselves and discuss their concerns, thoughts and experiences with self-injury / self-harm.
While LifeSIGNS and our Community Members can’t give advice, our Message Board is a safe and moderated space where people can express themselves and listen to other people’s experiences and ideas in a non-judgemental and non-directive environment.
Why don’t we give advice? Because we can’t possibly know what’s perfect and relavent advise! Only the individual knows the full details, and has all the information needed to make change in their lives. We believe that giving advice actually dis-empowers people and is disrespectful of their ability to manage their own life.
What we do is offer support and a fresh perspective. We offer ideas and new concepts, we offer our own personal experiences to reflect on, and we allow people to have the space to work through their own ideas, telling the story and working their way to a solution. It’s more than ‘active listening’, it’s empathic involvement – our members can often understand from the inside as they have direct personal experience of relying on self-injury while needing to work, study, raise children, care for loved ones, navigate their relationships et cetera.
We hope that you can let parents, guardians, carers and friends of people who self-injure know that there is help out there, and that LifeSIGNS can offer not only downloads and information, but emotional support and fresh ideas.
