ANSWERS: 13
  • something in the air
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  • I think that is a very good question and I hope someone that answers could give us some insight on that....
  • There are billions of reasons why, and to them cutting is survival. Why Do People Self-Injure? This problem is not completely understood by health care professionals or psychologists. It seems to be most common among people who have been sexually abused as children, molested as children, or by survivors of incest. Whatever the context or reason, self-injury seems to function as a coping mechanism. "Cutters" use self-harm to feel calm, "in control," or just to "feel something." However, self-injury is not a healthy coping mechanism - it is a self-destructive behavior that probably reflects deeper, more complicated mental health or personal problems. (See the end of this article for some quotes and "stories" of people who self-injure). Some Common Factors of Self-Injury Age of onset between 10 - 16 years old There was a major change in the teen's life -- parents divorce or death There is a history of family violence, abuse or sexual abuse Intense feelings of fear, hurt, anger, rejection or abandonment Feelings of loss and or need for control Some Common Reasons Why People Cut Themselves These are some of the reasons our readers who "cut" shared with us. They find it soothing: To feel pain on the outside instead of the inside To cope with feelings To express anger towards themselves To feel alive and real A way of communicating what they can't say with words: To tell people they need help To get people's attention To tell people they should be in hospital An attempt to get people to react to their actions: To get people to care for them To make other people feel guilty To drive people away To get away from stress and responsibility To manipulate situations or people Triggering Events Reported by Young Adults Who Self-Injure: Being rejected by someone who is important to them Being blamed for something over which they had no control Feeling inadequate Being "wrong" in some way http://www.coolnurse.com/self-injury.htm Why Do People Cut Themselves? It can be hard to understand why people cut themselves on purpose. Cutting is a way some people try to cope with the pain of strong emotions, intense pressure, or upsetting relationship problems. They may be dealing with feelings that seem too difficult to bear, or bad situations they think can't change. Some people cut because they feel desperate for relief from bad feelings. People who cut may not know better ways to get relief from emotional pain or pressure. Some people cut to express strong feelings of rage, sorrow, rejection, desperation, longing, or emptiness. There are other ways to cope with difficulties, even big problems and terrible emotional pain. The help of a mental health professional might be needed for major life troubles or overwhelming emotions. For other tough situations or strong emotions, it can help put things in perspective to talk problems over with parents, other adults, or friends. Getting plenty of exercise can also help put problems in perspective and help balance emotions. But people who cut may not have developed ways to cope. Or their coping skills may be overpowered by emotions that are too intense. When emotions don't get expressed in a healthy way, tension can build up — sometimes to a point where it seems almost unbearable. Cutting may be an attempt to relieve that extreme tension. For some, it seems like a way of feeling in control. The urge to cut might be triggered by strong feelings the person can't express — such as anger, hurt, shame, frustration, or alienation. People who cut sometimes say they feel they don't fit in or that no one understands them. A person might cut because of losing someone close or to escape a sense of emptiness. Cutting might seem like the only way to find relief or express personal pain over relationships or rejection. People who cut or self-injure sometimes have other mental health problems that contribute to their emotional tension. Cutting is sometimes (but not always) associated with depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, obsessive thinking, or compulsive behaviors. It can also be a sign of mental health problems that cause people to have trouble controlling their impulses or to take unnecessary risks. Some people who cut themselves have problems with drug or alcohol abuse. Some people who cut have had a traumatic experience, such as living through abuse, violence, or a disaster. Self-injury may feel like a way of "waking up" from a sense of numbness after a traumatic experience. Or it may be a way of reinflicting the pain they went through, expressing anger over it, or trying to get control of it. http://kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/feeling_sad/cutting.html Why do people Self-Injure? Most people Self-Injure to relieve some unpleasant emotion, ranging from anxiety to depression. "Studies have suggested that when people who self-injure get emotionally overwhelmed, an act of self-harm brings their levels of psychological and physiological tension and arousal back to a bearable baseline level almost immediately." There are many speculations about why people Self-Injure. Some experts think the behavior stems form childhood abuse or trauma. However, statistics don't support this theory. The backgrounds of people who self-injure are varied, coming from both abusive and non-abusive households. People also cited the need to feel real among their reasons for self-injury. Hurting themselves makes them feel something, where they otherwise feel numb to the world around them. Another theory concerning people who self-injure is they have a brain chemical imbalance: "Just as it's suspected that the way the brain uses serotonin may play a role in depression, so scientists think that problems in the serotonin system may predispose some people to self-injury by making them tend to be more aggressive and impulsive than most people." Unfortunately for the Self-Injurer, much social stigma surrounds the issue. "In emergency rooms, people with self-inflicted wounds are often told directly and indirectly, that they are not as deserving of care as someone who has an accidental injury. They are treated badly by the same doctors who would not hesitate to do everything possible to preserve the life of an overweight, sedentary heart-attack patient." Click here to read about what you can do to help your friend at the emergency room if s/he Self-Injures. Unfortunately, people are ignorant about SI. Many of them think Self-Injury is simply about getting attention. However, this is rarely ever the case. People self-injure to relieve tension and unwanted emotions. If someone is committing self injury for attention, they are probably asking for help and need the attention. http://www.healthyplace.com/Communities/Self_Injury/BloodRed/index2.html Why do people harm themselves? A person who self-harms is likely to have gone through very difficult, painful experiences as a child or young adult. At the time, they probably had no one they could confide in, so didn't receive the support and the emotional outlet they needed to deal with it. The experience might have involved physical violence, emotional abuse, or sexual abuse. They might have been neglected, separated from someone they loved, been bullied, harassed, assaulted, isolated, put under intolerable pressure, made homeless, sent into care, into hospital or to other institutions. Experiences like these erode self-esteem. Emotions that have no outlet may be buried and blocked completely out of awareness. If a trusted adult betrays or abuses them, and there are no other witnesses, children will often blame themselves. They turn their anger inwards. By the time they become adults, self-injury can be a way of expressing their pain, punishing themselves, and keeping memories at bay. There is often an absence of pain during the act of self-injury, rather like the absence of sensation that often occurs during abuse or trauma. The body produces natural opiates, which numb it and mask the emotions, so that little is felt or realised consciously. A badly traumatised person may end up feeling quite detached from their feelings and their body. Some may injure themselves to maintain that sense of being separate, and to convince themselves that they aren't vulnerable. Others may injure themselves in order to feel something and know that they are real and alive. There can often be myths and negative attitudes surrounding self-harming and they exist even in the healthcare industry. Professionals can often make assumptions as to why someone is self-harming and therefore how to treat them. There can be instances of healthcare professionals with an unsympathetic attitude to someone who comes to them with injuries; for example, believing that a person who is cutting themself is causing their own injuries and therefore wasting the time of the nurse who has to stitch their wounds. NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) produces guidelines on the treatment of self-harm, explaining the need for exploring the underlying reasons someone may be self-harming, rather than just the self-harming behaviour itself. (See References and Useful websites) http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Booklets/Understanding/Understanding+self-harm.htm Why do People Self-Injure by Kevin Caruso People engage in self-injury for many reasons. But the people who self-injure usually trying are unable to cope with and successfully express their feelings. Also, many people who self-injure have a mental disorder, such as depression bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. And some of the people who self-injure have been physically or sexually abused at some point in their lives and they are still trying to work through the difficult emotions of that abuse. Another underlying cause that applies to almost everyone who self-injures is low self-esteem. After people begin to self-injure, they often continue the behavior in order to gain “relief” from their problems and feelings -- many people who self-injure say that it makes them feel better. And although that may not seem logical, there is a physiological explanation for these feelings. Self-injure may cause the release of endorphins, which is a hormone that is also released with intense exercise. Endorphins reduce pain and positively affect emotions. But this “fix” is short-lived, because there is MUCH more harm than good done to the body, and to the mind, when people self-injure. And after the endorphins wear off (they do not last that long), people are usually left in a deeper depressed state than before, with lower self-esteem, and new physical injuries. The CYCLE of self-injury can then continue, as people can then repeat their self-injury behaviors more and more in order to escape, while their physical and mental health go into a free fall. So how is the cycle broken? Treatment. Period. People who self-injure MUST be receive treatment AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. If you self-injure and need help, please immediately call 1-800-DONTCUT, and make appointments with a doctor and a therapist. God bless you. I love you. Take care, Kevin Caruso Suicide.org Founder, Executive Director, Editor-in-Chief (Self Injury Help.com is a Suicide.org website.) http://www.selfinjuryhelp.com/why-do-people-self-injure.html Why do people deliberately injure themselves? Drowning in the dark blood of would-be brothers who, beyond the pressing of fingers, those for whom the slice is only the beginning, and a different kind of light comes in, begs recognition and peace of mind. -- Judybats This may be the aspect of self-harm that is most puzzling to those who do not do it. Why would anyone choose to inflict physical damage on him or herself? Because they cannot imagine themselves doing such a thing under any circumstances, many people dismiss self-injury as "senseless" or "irrational" behavior. And certainly it does seem that way at first glance. But people generally do things for reasons that make sense to them. The reasons may not be apparent or may not fit into our frame of reference, but they exist and recognizing their existence is crucial to understanding self-harm. With understanding of the reasons behind a particular act of self-harm comes knowledge of the coping skills that are lacking. When you know what skills are missing, you can start trying to introduce them. This page is in two sections. The first has to do with what people who engage in SIB say it does for them. The second deals with possible biological or psychoneurological reasons -- why some people find relief in self-harm while others don't. The message of both is simple: It's about coping. The assumption is that the alternative to self-injury is "acting normally," but on the contrary . . . the alternative to self-injury is total loss of control and possibly suicide. It becomes a forced choice from among limited options. Solomon and Farrand (1996) Psychological motivations: What self-injurers say SI does for them 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. Physiological concerns: What the researchers have found People who self-injure tend to be dysphoric -- experiencing a depressed mood with a high degree of irritability and sensitivity to rejection and some underlying tension -- even when not actively hurting themselves. The pattern found by Herpertz (1995) indicates that something, usually some sort of interpersonal stressor, increases the level of dysphoria and tension to an unbearable degree. The painful feelings become overwhelming: it's as if the usual underlying uncomfortable affect is escalated to a critical maximum point. "SIB has the function of bringing about a transient relief from these [high levels of irritability and sensitivity to rejection]," Herpertz said. This conclusion is supported by the work of Haines and her colleagues. In a fascinating study, Haines et al. (1995) led groups of self-injuring and non-self-injuring subjects through guided imagery sessions. Each subject experienced the same four scenarios in random order: a scene in which aggression was imagined, a neutral scene, a scene of accidental injury, and one in which self-injury was imagined. The scripts had four stages: scene-setting, approach, incident, and consequence. During the guided imagery sessions, physiological arousal and subjective arousal were measured. The results were striking. Subject reactions across groups didn't differ on the aggression, accident, and neutral scripts. In the self-injury script, though, the control groups went to a high level of arousal and stayed there throughout the script, in spite of relaxation instructions contained in the "consequences" stage. In contrast, self-injurers experienced increased arousal through the scene-setting and approach stages, until the the decision to self-injure was made. Their tension then dropped, dropping even more at the incident stage and remaining low. These results provide strong evidence that self-injury provides a quick, effective release of physiological tension, which would include the physiological arousal brought on by negative or overwhelming psychological states. As Haines et al. say Self-mutilators often are unable to provide explanations for their own self-mutilative behavior. . . . Participants reported continued negative feelings despite reduced psychophysiological arousal. This result suggests that it is the alteration of psychophysiological arousal that may operate to reinforce and maintain the behavior, not the psychological response. (1995, p. 481) In other words, self-injury may be a preferred coping mechanism because it quickly and dramatically calms the body, even though people who self-injure may have very negative feelings after an episode. They feel bad, but the overwhelming psychophysiological pressure and tension is gone. Herpertz et al. (1995) explain this: We may surmise that self-mutilators usually disapprove of aggressive feelings and impulses. If they fail to suppress these, our findings indicate that they direct them inwardly. . . . This is in agreement with patients' reports, where they often regard their self-mutilative acts as ways of relieving intolerable tension resulting from interpersonal stressors. (p. 70). A recent case study (Sachsse et al., 2002) supports the idea that self-injury acts to reduce physiological and thus emotional stress. They tracked the nightly cortisol levels in a woman who self-harmed, then compared the results for days on which she did not engage in self-harm acts to those for days during which she did hurt herself. Cortisol excretion is increased under stress, which makes it an excellent marker for stress levels. An analysis of the results showed that on the days during which the woman had harmed herself, her cortisol levels were significantly lower than on other days. Another stress-reduction theory, set forth by Herman (1992), says that most children who are abused discover that a serious jolt to the body, like that produced by self-injury, can make intolerable feelings go away temporarily. This may help explain how self-injury gets entrenched as a coping mechanism. Brain chemistry and serotonin Brain chemistry may play a role in determining who self-injures and who doesn't. Simeon et al. (1992) found that people who self-injure tend to be extremely angry, impulsive, anxious, and aggressive, and presented evidence that some of these traits may be linked to deficits in the brain's serotonin system. Favazza (1993) refers to this study and to work by Coccaro on irritability to posit that perhaps irritable people with relatively normal serotonin function express their irritation outwardly, by screaming or throwing things; people with low serotonin function turn the irritability inward by self-damaging or suicidal acts. Zweig-Frank et al. (1994) also suggest that degree of self-injury is related to serotonin dysfunction. More recently, Steiger et al. (2000), in a study of bulimics, found that serotonin function in bulimic women was significantly lower in bulimics who also engaged in self-harm. More information on the likely role of serotonin in self-injury can be found on the psychopharmacology page. http://www.palace.net/~llama/psych/why.html
  • an exaggerated sense of the importance of the present, compared with the future (or a belief that death will come soon anyway) combined with a mixing up of pleasure and pain
  • from what i can recall, the emotional suffering was so intense and everlasting that the sensation of peripheral pain, in a way numbed my senses. i suppose it gave my brain something else to focus on: the physical aspect. i remember the peripheral pain actually being pleasurable and relieving. i know, it's really hard to understand but it's the best i can do.
  • honestly, i don't know. i cut but i think the whole thing is strange. all i know is it makes me numb, so i don't have to feel anything or deal with life. too bad it doesn't last...its really not worth it.
  • My experience: I started cutting in my 30's. A lot of emotional things had happened. I was abused as a child. I was raped. My son was molested.. I started cutting because I had so much guilt about everything that I felt I deserved to hurt and that was the way I punished myself. I blamed myself for being a bad kid thence the abuse, for being a bad women, thence the rape and then for being a bad mom because I did not catch the symptoms of my son being molested.. I felt I could have stopped it even though I was living 7 hours away and saw him only 1 x a month..As a mother I should have had that motherly instinct to know that something was wrong.. So when I cut my thinking was "I deserve all the pain in the world because I let my son get hurt and I didn't stop it". so know matter how much cutting hurt, I knew my son had gone thru more. The more I would bleed, the more I would like I was bleeding the "bad" person out and it would heal with "good " blood.. It wasn't for attention.. It was literally because I thought I deserved to suffer. Hope this helps
  • well as far as i'm concerned cutting was a survival method it kept me going, its like any other addiction, i mean people who do drugs drink and whatnot know its harmful but they still do it. I guess its just human nature to be self destructive even if it is in a passive way.
  • Depression
  • cutting is like being able to control at least one thing in your life, if you can't control anything else. like grasping at straws. its not about the survival instinct, but feeling something you can control.
  • it's best if did not understand and to stay away from those who do.
  • Mental deficiency.

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