2. It's ok to cry

No seriously, it is. When I was a child and I was upset I'd cry, and sometimes I was upset because I'd got caught doing something wrong, and yeah I was in the wrong but it still hurt and upset me that I was being shouted at or hit for it, it still felt the same as other upset so I'd cry, this would annoy my parents and my teachers and they's scream at me for "turning on the waterworks for sympathy" which wasn't what I was doing, I was crying because I was upset. Anyway this led me to thinking that feeling sad was a feeling I should associate with shame, and that I shouldn't cry ever, which led me to bottling up my feelings (ironically the same people who had put me in this position would then go and tell me not to bottle up my feelings), and because my feelings had no outlet I began to feel weird and numb, I went from feeling everything to feeling nothing, and as a young teenager I self harmed because I wanted to feel something other than empty, and while that totally wasn't a healthy outlet it did make me feel something, the trouble was it became a bit of a crutch and I quickly became addicted to doing it. It'been elven years now since I last self harmed, but re-balancing my feelings was a long and hard process, and it was very hard to break the "don't cry" conditioning, but now as an adult, if I feel myself needing to cry, I do. Sometimes it's because something sad happened, sometimes it's just because oestrogen is getting the better of me, sometimes it's frustration, fear, regret, loneliness, joy, and sometimes because I did something wrong and I feel bad about it, they're all valid reasons to cry and it's ok to let it out.