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injury occurs among distraught anxious and depressed but functioning, educated
women. They taught me that self-injury can serve other purposes, such as reduction
of distress. Since then I have read in recent publications about similar motivations.
One of the most detailed and readable articles about self-injury is in Look Beyond
in depth 24 self-injurers from all over England. I have relied quite a bit on their
impressive report.
Painful life circumstances can lead to self-produced pain
In the kinds of self-injury cases I am concerned with here, there frequently is
some very hurtful and disturbing condition in which the tendency to self-injure
develops. You don’t usually start with a method to hurt yourself; you start off with
horrible circumstances and psychologically painful thoughts. A very wide variety of
distressing circumstances and feelings precede intentional bodily injury—here are
some examples:
Young people are sometimes emotionally abused and told they are bad, sinful,
selfish, hurtful, hateful, uncaring, crazy, or weird. They may be blamed for their
parents’ troubles or divorce, etc. It isn’t surprising they may end up feeling guilty,
shame, self-hatred, and wanting to hurt or punish themselves.
Some have grown up in physically and sexually abusive families (beatings,
threats & torture) and were called useless, stupid, ugly, slut, and a total failure;
many were bullied by peers; some were raped. Some responded with resentment,
intense anger, and repressed rage; others adopted the negative evaluations and felt
worthlessness, felt no one could ever care for them, and felt like a piece of trash.
Some responded to being hated with a defiant attitude, e.g. “you can’t make me
change” or “I deserve to be abused but I can hurt myself more than you can.” Some
wanted get back at the abusive person by hurting themselves via self-mutilation,
i.e., showing visual signs of their feelings. Some physically responded to pain,
punishment, and self-punishment by actually feeling better, something like having an
adrenalin rush or taking drugs; others found that burning or cutting themselves
numbs them to pain.
Others were feeling depressed, helpless and hopeless or were without feelings,
almost like being dead. Some responded to self-injury while feeling dead with “The
self-abuse showed me that I could feel and was alive.” Others felt alone, uncared for,
scared, sad, not just neglected but utterly worthless, rejected by family and friends,
placed in foster care, dumped by boy/girlfriend, etc. so, it felt better to hurt
themselves and, in that way, escape the hurt from others. Many were well aware
they had seriously disabling psychological problems and felt weird, unable to cope,
scared, helpless, and inferior. Still others felt out of control, couldn’t do anything
right, but were reassured by the courage they had when self-cutting, surprised at
what injuries they could force themselves to inflict. Also, some developed an eating
disorder which countered the helplessness feeling; it meant “I can control something
(eating, not eating, and throwing up).” Some had heard about self-injury from others
and were impressed with their willpower.
