About Self Injury

Self harm is when someone deliberately hurts or injures themselves. Self injury can take a number of forms including:

• cutting or burning - the most common forms of self-harm

• taking overdoses of tablets or medicines
• punching themselves
• throwing their bodies against something
• pulling out their hair or eyelashes
• scratching, picking or tearing at their skin causing sores and scarring
• inhaling or sniffing harmful substances
• swallowing things that are not edible
• inserting objects into their bodies

Why Do People Self Injure?

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 behaviours:

• 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 depersonalisation 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 behaviours 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 behaviour. 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

The assumption is that the alternative to self injury is acting normal but on the contrary…the alternative to self injury is total loss of control and possibly suicide.

Hence the need to carefully manage a young person’s self harm is crucial to enable them to remain safe. Ensuring that they are empowered to minimise the harm that they do to themselves and maximise their potential to gain positive control over their lives.

[taken from Newcombe House UK]