Feeling guilty over SH incident from when I was younger

[Nonoanddefintelyno]

I was 12 when it happened. I'm 26 now.

Do you mean someone touched you inappropriately? If so, you obviously have nothing to feel guilty about. You were a child. Do you have someone you can talk to IRL? x

I should elaborate. I am aware that SH is an abbreviation for sexual harassment however in this case of this post, i have used the abbrevation in relation to self inflicted injury/self harm injuries. I didn't have the coping tools I have now to deal with my anxiety because I was younger, but even now the stress of what I put my family through by whar I did to myself in terms of having to require hospital treatment(surgery) for what I did to myself causes me to feel quite guilty and i feel like there's not necessarily a lot of information online about how to process the guilt of actually harming yourself and the knock on effect it has on the people who care about you.

Well, I haven't been in your shoes, but if my child self-harmed as a teenager to the point of needing surgery, I wouldn't want them to feel guilt - I'd just want them to be happy. I'd probably feel guilty that I wasn't able to support them better and it got that bad before they got the help they needed. I wouldn't, ever, blame them.

Any parent who'd blame you for hurting (emotionally) so bad you needed physical release of some sort by self-harming, isn't worth listening to.

Have you spoken to your family about those feelings ? Or if you can't speak to them, a friend or a professionnal ?

You don’t need to feel guilty OP. You were a child and obviously in a lot of mental anguish to physically harm yourself so badly. As you say, you didn’t have any more healthy coping strategies at the time so you just did what you could to survive.
Maybe you need to have some counselling to talk through your feelings of guilt with an impartial professional?

My son harmed himself, and eventually did it so catastrophically that he died. Obviously was traumatising for me and his dad. But the notion that he should feel any guilt for that is awful and abhorrent to me.

The trauma of the parent is bound up with their love and compassion and understanding. It hasn't got the space for any hostile judgement of the child, it hasn't got the space for the child to be in any sense 'guilty'.
. As a parent you are traumatised because you know that your child is suffering and you haven't been able to take their distress away. In that sense it isn't really the child's actions that have caused the trauma - it is the horror of the whole situation, in which you and your child are both unwillingly placed.

Also, you were only 12!!! You were very much a child. (My son was older when most of this happened.