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Join Date: Nov 2008
Posts: 4,538
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hip hop bunny hop
Self-harm is not a cry for help; it's attention seeking dressed up as a cry for help. Give them attention and you're enabling that behavior.
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Can't agree. I've found some information on reasons people self-harm and they seem to be legitimately convincing arguments, the least of which indicates casual "attention seeking".
Quote:
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Originally Posted by helpguide.org
- Expressing feelings you can’t put into words
- Releasing the pain and tension you feel inside
- Helping you feel in control
- Distracting you from overwhelming emotions or difficult life circumstances
- Relieving guilt and punishing yourself
- Making you feel alive, or simply feel something, instead of feeling numb
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http://www.helpguide.org/mental/self_injury.htm#how
Quote:
Many papers on self-harm (Miller, 1994; Favazza 1986, 1996; Connors, 1996a, 2000; Solomon & Farrand, 1996; Ousch et al., 1999; Suyemoto, 1998; and others), have uncovered possible motivations for self-injurious behavior:
- Escape from emptiness, depression, and feelings of unreality.
- Easing tension.
- Providing relief: when intense feelings build, self-injurers are overwhelmed and unable to cope. By causing pain, they reduce the level of emotional and physiological arousal to a bearable one.
- Relieving anger: many self-injurers have enormous amounts of rage within. Afraid to express it outwardly, they injure themselves as a way of venting these feelings.
- Escaping numbness: many of those who self-injure say they do it in order to feel something, to know that they're still alive.
- Grounding in reality, as a way of dealing with feelings of depersonalization and dissociation
- Maintaining a sense of security or feeling of uniqueness
- Obtaining a feeling of euphoria
- Preventing suicide
- Expressing emotional pain they feel they cannot bear
- Obtaining or maintaining influence over the behavior of others
- Communicating to others the extent of their inner turmoil
- Communicating a need for support
- Expressing or repressing sexuality
- Expressing or coping with feelings of alienation
- Validating their emotional pain -- the wounds can serve as evidence that those feelings are real
- Continuing abusive patterns: self-injurers tend to have been abused as children.
- Punishing oneself for being "bad"
- Obtaining biochemical relief: there is some thought that adults who were repeatedly traumatized as children have a hard time returning to a "normal" baseline level of arousal and are, in some sense, addicted to crisis behavior. Self-harm can perpetuate this kind of crisis state
- Diverting attention (inner or outer) from issues that are too painful to examine
- Exerting a sense of control over one's body
- Preventing something worse from happening
These reasons can be broadly grouped into three categories:
Affect regulation --
Trying to bring the body back to equilibrium in the face of turbulent or unsettling feelings. This includes reconnection with the body after a dissociative episode, calming of the body in times of high emotional and physiological arousal, validating the inner pain with an outer expression, and avoiding suicide because of unbearable feelings. In many ways, as Sutton says, self-harm is a "gift of survival." It can be the most integrative and self-preserving choice from a very limited field of options.
Communication --
Some people use self-harm as a way to express things they cannot speak. When the communication is directed at others, the SIB is often seen as manipulative. However, manipulation is usually an indirect attempt to get a need met; if a person learns that direct requests will be listened to and addressed the need for indirect attempts to influence behavior decreases. Thus, understanding what an act of self-harm is trying to communicate can be crucial to dealing with it in an effective and constructive way.
Control/punishment --
This category includes trauma reenactment, bargaining and magical thinking (if I hurt myself, then the bad thing I am fearing will be prevented), protecting other people, and self-control. Self-control overlaps somewhat with affect regulation; in fact, most of the reasons for self-harm listed above have an element of affect control in them.
In an interesting theory that combines all three categories, Miller (1994) posits an explanation for why such a large majority of peep who self-harm are female. Women are not socialized to express violence externally and when confronted with the vast rage many self-injurers feel, women tend to vent on themselves. She quotes the feminist poet Adrienne Rich:
"Most women have not even been able to touch
this anger except to drive it inward like a
rusted nail."
Miller says, "Men act out. Women act out by acting in." Another reason fewer men self-injure may be that men are socialized in a way that makes repressing feelings the norm. Linehan's (1993a) theory that self-harm results in part from chronic invalidation, from always being told that your feelings are bad or wrong or inappropriate, could explain the gender disparity in self-injury; men are generally brought up to hold emotion in.
Alexithymia
Alexithymia is a fairly recent psychological construct describing the state of not being able to describe the emotions one is feeling. Alexithymia was positively linked to self-injurious behavior in a 1996 study (Zlotnick, et el.) and is congruent with how people who self-injure often describe the emotional state before an injury; they frequently cannot pinpoint any particular feeling that was present. This is especially important in understanding the communicative function of self-injury: "Rather than use words to express feelings, an alexithymic's communication is an act aimed at making others feel [those same feelings]" (Zlotnick et al., 1996).
Self-capacities and Invalidation
A constructivist theory of self-injurious behavior (Deiter, Nicholls, & Pearlman, 2000) holds that people who self-injure usually have not developed three important self-capacities: the ability to tolerate strong affect, the ability to maintain a sense of self-worth, and the ability to maintain a sense of connection to others. The first of these speaks directly to the affect-regulation role of self-harm; the others are perhaps related to its communicative functions.
Pearlman et al. (2000) note that "when children experience shaming and punitive rhetoric or physical blows rather than responsive words" they cannot internalize others are loving and cannot develop the capacity to maintain a sense of connection to others. They further state, "The ability to experience, tolerate, and integrate strong affect cannot develop fully when strong feelings are met with punishment or derision." Having a sense that some feelings are unacceptable and not allowed also impairs this ability. And the ability to maintain a sense of oneself as a person of worth cannot be developed when a child never feels she is good enough, when her "existence and accomplishments are met with silence or abusive words or actions."
Interestingly, all of these conditions are found in invalidating environments, which Linehan and others have tied to future self-injury.
Finally, Haines and Williams (1997) found that self-mutilators reported more use of problem avoidance as a coping strategy and perceived themselves to have less control over problem-solving options. This feeling of disempowerment may in turn be related to the chronic invalidation many self-injurers have experienced.
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http://www.palace.net/llama/psych/why.html
Notice specifically the subsection Communication. It makes the point that even attention seeking (manipulation) is an attempt to communicate something which the sufferer simply can't seem to communicate effectively, I'd personally imagine being for any range of psychosomatic reasons.
While I think chalking it up to attention seeking is the easy thing to do, I don't think it is the most sensitive or scientific approach. It seems to me like a shrug-off. I actually used to share a similar opinion. However, the research tends to show that there is no simple answer. As stated, this is not a black and white issue, and there seems to be no "majority cause" of this symptom. It's a difficult issue to approach subjectively, however I feel that like depression, it is simply misunderstood at this time and will eventually be brought to light as more sufferers come out and admit they have a problem.
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03-14-2012, 08:33 PM
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