What self-injurers say SI does for them

Many papers on self-harm, 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

[taken in part from 'Suicide & Mental Health Association International']