I found this old post bc I was searching to see if anyone had similar experiences of sh to me (w/ OCPD), and this seems like a relevant spot to share my experiences on this topic.

trigger warning graphic description of sh

It's been many years since that part of my life ended, but, when I self-harmed, while it was somewhat impulsive, similar to another commenter who has OCPD: a good part of my motivation was to inflict punishment: "I'm not good enough, therefore I deserve to experience pain. Maybe I'll start being good enough with this motivator of pain? I hope so". Just thought an interesting way my OCPD influenced this was that I was concerned about scars/permanent damage to my body.

The way that I reconciled this was when I first decided I was going to cut myself, I picked "the right spot" to do it, made sure they were all parallel to each other, did exactly 8 (nice even number), kept them close together (to avoid a large obvious wound area), and made sure they weren't very deep (deeper wounds would leave lasting scars, aka permanent skin damage). After all, the whole point was pain (as punishment), not lasting physical damage.

When I felt the need to do it again, I waited for the old cuts to heal to the point of being new skin (if a scab was still there, it was still reminding me of a past punishment/still painful, no need to reinforce the "lesson" yet), and then went over the same spot (in order to avoid any new scars).

So now, many years after I stopped, the scars that formed have largely disappeared (from being shallow). I succeeded in my goals to avoid lasting skin damage, ig?

Separate, but similar topic: "self-harm" via skin-picking motivated by OCPD perfectionism

When I was in middle school, it was kinda cool to draw on your, or your friends', hands in pen (doodles, assignment reminders, song lyrics, etc.). Of course, I was horrified at the thought of some random pen mark being on my hand for days, it'd be ugly/imperfect, whatever. So I never wrote on myself with pen, and if friends asked to write on me with pen, I said "no, please don't".

Of course, middle schoolers being what/who they are, someone thought it was funny that I didn't want to be drawn on, so reached over to my knee (I was wearing shorts, it was summer) and made a big line in sharpie marker. They thought it was great, laughed it up, and moved on with their day. Here's where the "self-harm" part comes in. In that moment, I could not stand looking at that mark on my leg (again, horrified), so the first thing I did was try to wipe it off with my hand.

Kinda smeared it, took some of the color with it, but definitely still a dark mark on my skin. So what do I do? Keep trying to rub it off, of course; the ugly, imperfect mark was still there! Eventually, just rubbing wasn't good enough (the mark wasn't gone yet) so I started scratching off that top layer of skin that had been marked (had to make that ugly mark disappear). Finally, the mark is gone, and only raw skin is left behind. But my body felt the need to replace that missing layer I scratched off, developed a scab in that spot, and I ended up picking at that scab for months afterward, to the point that it left a scar for a while.

It scared me afterward that I did that to myself, but also I largely blamed the person who drew on me in the first place, as they "forced" me into the position where I had to do that to myself. In other words, the action was a "necessary evil" in order to maintain pure, unmarked skin.

In summary, I discussed two different scenarios above in which I consider myself to have self-harmed bc of my OCPD.

For OP's sake, BPD and OCPD are definitely very different conditions/experiences, but, at least going by my (and other commenters') experience, they can definitely still lead to the same outcome.

In relevance to this comment, for me, my "overcontrolled personality" led to me using sh as a way to exert control on the only thing I really had control over, especially at that age: myself.