If you need support now
If you are thinking about harming yourself, or you are in immediate danger, please stop reading this site and contact emergency services or a crisis line where you live. Do it now rather than later, and if you can, tell one person you trust what is happening.
Right now
- Call your local emergency number. In the UK 999, in the US and Canada 911, across the EU 112, in Australia 000.
- US and Canada: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).
- UK and Ireland: call 116 123 (Samaritans, free, 24 hours), or text SHOUT to 85258.
- Australia: call 13 11 14 (Lifeline).
- Anywhere else: the International Association for Suicide Prevention keeps a directory of crisis centres by country — find a crisis line in your country.
- If you are not sure it counts as an emergency, it still counts. Crisis lines are for the hours before things get worse, not only for the worst moment.
When self-reflection is not the right tool
Everything on this website is educational self-reflection. It is not therapy, assessment, treatment or crisis care, and there are situations where it is genuinely the wrong thing to reach for.
Professional support is likely to be the better tool if you are experiencing:
- Intense or persistent distress that is not shifting.
- Intrusive memories, flashbacks or nightmares you cannot put down.
- Periods where you feel detached from yourself or your surroundings.
- Thoughts of harming yourself, or thoughts of suicide.
- Ongoing abuse or an unsafe situation at home, at work or in a relationship.
- Panic, or emotional overwhelm that stops you doing ordinary things.
- Significant disruption to sleep, work, study or relationships.
- Anything you are struggling to manage safely on your own.
None of that is a failure, and none of it means self-reflection was done wrong. It means the situation needs a person, not a worksheet.
Finding a professional
- UK: your GP can refer you, or you can self-refer to NHS talking therapies — NHS mental health services.
- US: the SAMHSA national helpline can point you to local treatment and support.
- General information about therapy, what to expect and how to choose someone: the American Psychological Association and, in the UK, Mind.
If inner child work itself is what feels too much
That happens, and it is information rather than failure. Stop the exercise, do something ordinary and physical, and come back to it another day — or not at all. There is a longer piece on this: what to do when inner child work makes you cry, and how to tell when a therapist is the better tool.
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