Spiral

What happens when all your coping mechanisms are destructive . . .

Well not all (yes there is yoga, painting, blah blah blah), but the ones that work, that are instant gratification...

When your mind is screaming, or worse talking in dull monotone, repetitive suggestion . . .

When you just want to scream 'Shut the F*ck Up!'

When your first thought is 'No one will know' and the second is where is my kit . . .

Who does it harm?, nobody ... doh! that's why its called Self Harm


If you give someone 50 reasons why they shouldn't, they could give you 50 why they should.

But the main ones are

"I cant deal with this pain"

and 'It keeps me alive'

So before you judge, think about that

Stereotypes

I had a client once, beautiful, vibrant. Her father (perfectionist, career man) sounded proud of her recovery, her determination to not cut. After our session was finished he confided 'Im not really concerned about the self harm business. I read that its a teen thing and I'm sure she will grow out of it'

Wrong Mr W. , its not a teen thing . . .

Hope

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Dale Carnegie
American Author

No matter how many times I try and fail, how stupid I feel for daring, how many promises I make to myself that end broken, I will keep trying because deep in my soul, where no one treads but me, I know I am worth more than this, I know I deserve better and I will keep trying till I succeed . . . Love Abbey

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]

Dissociation World

Dissociation exists on a continuum with these everyday symptoms at one end and at the other more severe symptoms such as amnesia and identity alteration. At this end dissociation is often described as ‘going away’ as the sufferer voluntarily leaves their own body. These severe symptoms usually indicate a dissociative disorder especially if they are persistent, difficult to control and affect the sufferer’s everyday life.

There are five dissociative disorders:

1. Dissociative Amnesia – this is indicated when there is an inability to recall important personal information

2. Dissociative Fugue – this refers to the situation where a sufferer finds themselves in a place with no memory of getting there and sometimes with no knowledge of who they are.

3. Depersonalisation Disorder – this is a recurrent feeling of being detached from yourself or your feelings.

4. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – previously known as multiple personality disorder this is characterised by the existence of two or more separate identities within one person who are able to take control.

5. Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (DDNOS) – this often precedes a diagnosis of DID and is used until a definitive diagnosis of DID is able to be made.

Causes

Although dissociation is a common experience those with an actual dissociative disorder almost universally have a background of childhood trauma especially sexual and physical abuse. Over 99% of those diagnosed with DID have a history of prolonged and severe childhood sexual abuse usually with an early age of onset (before the age of eight) and the abuser being one or more of the child’s caregivers. There has been no genetic link indicated. This is probably because everybody is capable of dissociation as a young child but few people are in the situation of having to use it on a regular basis. This regular usage as a defence leads to the ability to dissociate being retained into adulthood and therefore leads directly to dissociative disorders.

There are a few cases where dissociative disorders have developed after a single trauma and they have been observed in those kept in captivity for long periods of time. Little is currently known about the phenomenon of dissociation itself. It is currently considered to be a highly creative and intelligent defence and a ‘trick of the imagination’. However newer studies have shown that dissociation is a biological phenomenon – brain imaging has shown that associative pathways in the brain are shut down during the dissociative experience. This suggests that the dissociative experiences may well be ‘real’ as opposed to imaginative.

Link to the excellent site is in the banner...

The Mind

" Each thought has power of its own.
Positive thought has a power and negative thought also has a power.
With positive power we build; with negative power we break.
Each positive thought is creation and each negative thought is destruction."

" When a negative thought comes, we have to feel that it is a thief.
A negative thought comes in the form of doubt, fear, jealousy, hypocrisy or meanness.
We have to feel that each negative thought has come to commit a theft,
to take something away from our inner life and inner wealth."

*"Negative Thoughts" - Excerpt from The Soul's Evolution by Sri Chinmoy."

The Black Dog

Since Churchill, people have related to the term of depression being a black dog, in fact in Australia the depression institute is named that. Its not like that for me.

Depression is more of a person, a shadow self. This friend is familiar to me, no surprises. Even at his worst and most destructive this friend is there. He envelopes me in negativity, talks to me in sense, 'You cant do that, dont try that, dont believe others, you know your not good at that' He is like the life coach, holding my hand, drawing me deeper.

With a deep slow voice, he entices me to stay with him, 'you know your not good enough, stay here with me where you belong' I fall into his arms as easy as too a lover & a blackness envelopes me, even the air is thick. There is no need for me to eat, to bathe, to dress or go outside. I slow my breathing, my thoughts and movements to his pace. Everything is slow, everything is meaningless.

Even living seems meaningless, his seductive voice whispers on, it all makes sense when you hear it from him & you fail to hear your own voice or the voice of others but give in to his as fighting is just too hard.

Cutting and Self-Injury

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

January 5, 2009

This entry may be triggering or difficult to read for some people.

Self-injury behavior is something that is more common than many people realize. (In one study by researchers at Brown University of high school students, 46 percent had injured themselves in the past year on multiple occasions.) It is often misunderstood, not just by the lay public, but also by the mental health professionals who ostensibly should know what self-injury it is and how best to treat it.

Self-injury is used by people as over-drinking is used by others — to drown out emotional pain with something else. In the case of self-injury, that something else is physical pain. It focuses your attention and takes your mind off of your emotional pain, if only for a little while.

Cutting is the most common form of self-injury — making skin-deep cuts on one’s arms, wrists, or less noticeable areas on one’s body. The cuts are not meant to cause permanent damage or harm, nor are they meant as a suicidal gesture. The cuts are the means to an end themselves — they provide a source of immediate but non-serious physical pain (as long as they are allowed to heal cleanly). Other forms of self-injury include burning, or keeping old wounds open or inviting infection in them to keep them painful.

The people with the most severe self-injury behavior often can think of little else as they go through their day — it becomes something more than just a way to deal with emotional pain, it becomes its own obsession, as it did with Becki, a person who self-injured and is profiled in an article that appeared online in Newsweek last week:

Becki describes it as an obsessive battle, and one she often lost. At her worst, she says she spent every hour living and breathing self-injury. She dreamed about it. She’d think about it at school. She bought every book published on it. She searched for self-injury Websites, and compiled what she found into a 13-page Website of her own. “I was cutting 10-plus times a day, and still, if I didn’t do it, I would feel like I was missing something,” she says.

Newsweek’s article is a fairly good read on self-injury and self-harm, describing what self-injury is, using Becki as a case study, and brings us up-to-date on treatment options and the latest research into self-injury. If nothing else, it helps bring this behavior out into the open more, helping people understand that it is not something that one should be ashamed of and that it can be treated.

As the article notes, self-injury isn’t recognized as a mental disorder by itself. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be treated. Treatment usually is done through psychotherapy, and focuses on helping the person identify their own triggers for self-injurious behavior, and find alternative methods for helping them deal with the emotional pain in their life.

Read the full article: Why She Cuts (Potentially Triggering)

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central and has been writing about mental health and psychology issues online since 1992.

What Depression Feels Like

The following is a description of how I feel when I'm going through a depressed period. It is not how I feel most of the time.

Useless: When I get depressed, I feel useless. I have this feeling that everything I've ever done is worthless, and that anything I'll ever do will be equally worthless. I feel like nothing I do matters. When I do try to accomplish something, I feel like it isn't good enough no matter how hard I work on it. Even worse, I feel like everybody is aware of my failure, and I feel incredibly guilty for being a failure. I look at my lazy housekeeping and feel like a failure as a homemaker. I mentally replay all of the mistakes I've made with my kids, and I feel like a failure as a mother. I look at my body and feel like a failure as a wife because I'm not as attractive as I'd like to be. My self-esteem plummets, and I feel like a burden on my poor husband.

Tired: When I get depressed, I'm too tired to do anything. Everything feels like an overwhelming task, even getting dressed or brushing my teeth. If somebody tries to convince me to do anything, I feel guilty for not wanting to comply and resentful at the idea that they would ask me to do anything when I'm feeling so tired. Along with my physical fatigue I feel mentally fatigued. I have to force myself to do everything I do.

Irrational: When I get depressed, I have a hard time thinking. Problem solving is difficult, even for little things like adding two numbers or figuring out which tool to use to complete a task. I react to situation emotionally rather than logically, so I end up making mistakes I regret. I lose my temper with my kids and pets when they don't follow the family rules, and I start yelling at them rather than logically disciplining them. In extreme cases of depression, I may even think about running away or suicide even though I don't plan on doing either.

Unsocial: When I get depressed, I don't want to socialize even though I realize that it probably would be good for me to get around other people and lift my spirits.

Stuck: When I get depressed, I feel like I'm trapped, stuck in this pit of worthlessness. While I'm trapped, I feel like life is passing me by. I sometimes think that things will never get better.

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