Lived Experience Forum

[Phoenix_Rising]

Hi all,

This article appeared in my inbox this morning and I thought it might be of interest to some people here in Forum Land: https://theconversation.com/why-do-people-intentionally-injure-themselves-90451?utm_medium=email&utm...

Personally, I self harm (SH) primarily to regulate super gigantic emotions. One thing I find interesting here in Forum Land is that many people seem to experience guilt / self-hatred after self harming. I have never experienced that. My body, my choice. 

I am interested in hearing about others thoughts/experiences around SH. Just keep the community guidelines in mind - we can talk about SH generally, but not specific forms of it. 

[greenpea]

@Phoenix_Rising Hi Pheonix_Rising and everyone I have only done it once when I was totally psychotic and needed help but couldnt vocalise what was going on for me at the time. I can barely remember it ... but I felt no guilt just was crying out into the void for help which didnt come lol.

[Phoenix_Rising]

I can definitely relate to the idea of crying out into a void @greenpea. Thank you for sharing. 

[greenpea]

@Phoenix_Rising 🙂

[Appleblossom]

  Hello  @Phoenix_Rising @greenpea and others reading

I was dealing with a lot of SH with my sister and brother. We were trying to work out our complicated messy childhoods which were in some ways also quite different. They were triggered a lot. I was out of the family system working and studying, but I was running around trying to calm them with no support or idea what to do. That went on for a long time. 4 years for my sister and 15 years for my brother.  In all that time there were 2 token family meetings which I knew about and attended,  during hospitalisations, one for each of them.  It was never raised, but it should have been. Thats the 1980-90s for you. Anyway in trying to reach out to my mother often in attempt to alert her to or calm down an escalation ... I also started to SH. It was NOT CONSCIOUS or deliberate and quite different to my sibs.  I had no sense of "my body my choice".  Just many pressures from different directions. Having spent so much time and energy and angst trying to help sibs stop or get help. It was during reaching out for help and getting frustrated ...to a cynical self interested husband ..  to a stony faced  and then treacherous mother ... It began in a very small way but then got bigger before I finally managed to conquer it.  It was selfharm in that I started a behaviour and it ended up having permanent serious negative physical effect on me. (and then there are the social consequences.)  It was over a period of 12 years. I did not even have the concept that it was SH until BOUT 5 YEARS AFTER i STOPPED.  I did not have any direct therapy or discussion about it.  I managed it myself from my own research and meditation and affirmations and wirking with body therapies and straight out old gym..  When I realised that it was a common form of SH I was very surprised.  I so did not want to do to others what my sibs had done to me, but the pressures upon me were such I honestly could not help it.  Shame came from many things. My church and extended family's many shames and unsaid or notworked through issues.  Mostly I think that is where a lot of the shame is. I did not have words for the feeling or behaviour until I saw it on the internet which gave me the concept that it was SH. I also did not have easy access to the internet. SO only started looking those kinds of things later. Part of MY shame was that I could not hide it from my young children.  It was scary for them, but apparently I was the best option they had, according to the best and brightest in the field. There was always too many things going on for my feelings or behaviours to come up "in therapy". Maybe they made quick judgements, but did not help. They were overwhelmed too I think.  My ex had a way with legal wrangling which scared off mh workers. Sad but true. That is part of the reason that I am still critical of mh systems. Yeah I am still alive but def walking wounded. One alive out of 4 abandoned children. It took for a Royal Commission worker to tell me about 2 years ago that I had been sexually abused. Then all the situations started to fall into place.  It just all did not make sense without that piece of the jigsaw.  I always was the big strong one who did have it as hard as the littlies, but I was also damaged and relinquished myself and needs in authority situations without even realising it.  It took someone who was looking out for me and not covering their own butts ... which is unfortunately what ended up being my family's main concern.  In many ways I did not associate shame or blame in traditional ways ??? I had not actually forgotten any of the incidents but not attributed enough to their long term effects upon me.... and how one things leads to another.

Its a big subject for me ... from diff angles. Thanks for raising it again @Phoenix_Rising each time I get more distance on it.

Just trying to frame and limit a very awful situation.

[TheVorticon]

Hi PR and others. Thanks for sharing your experiences with this topic.

My reasons are/were:

• To validate how I'm feeling (I'm really bad at this)
• To give me some more words to communicate how I'm feeling (e.g. "I feel ______", vs "I feel ______ and I can tell that I'm struggling with that because the resulting urge/action is ______")... which works a bit better when talking to myself, but doesn't seem to work for me in terms of getting help via communication with other people so I'm still stuck there
• To help handle feelings of embarrassment and disappointment in myself in a punishment sort of way
• To prove to myself that I'm strong/tough enough
• To clear/reset the thought of doing it when it gets stuck in my mind as like a repetitive intrusive thought

Depending on the situation it could be one or a combination of those reasons. I also don't feel guilt about doing it, although would feel ashamed/embarrassed if anyone noticed any physical evidence.

I'm having trouble understanding what they mean the last paragraph of the article, and am wondering how other people interpret that paragraph. I eventually got to a satisfactory conclusion after some mental gymnastics, but to me it's missing part of its argument.

[Appleblossom]

I agree it did not go to the heart of the problem @TheVorticon but at least it will be good if the social side is studied more.

You also describe the build up to it very well.  It helped me to read your post.

My brother talked with awe and sadness after his first hospitalisation about how he learned that many people did self harm and about different methods. In those conversations I did not think he would do it again, but unfortunately he did go on to SH again, very frequently, til the evidence of it was all over him and added to his concerns and added to mine in a dominoe effect. He was not gratuitous in his self harm as he had enough reasons from early childhood to be stressed out, and also worked and was creative, but at that stage they did not have any idea how to treat BPD.  I believe he endured a lot of stigma and was "given the flick" by the authorities quite irresponsibly in his final hospitalisation.

The family often gets to carry the reverberations of both SH and suicide more than the mh system.

[Phoenix_Rising]

Hi @TheVorticon and @Appleblossom,

Super big thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences.

@TheVorticon I read the last paragraph as being an attempt to sensitively address the issue that self-harm can sometimes be a way of communicating to others how much emotional distress the person is experiencing. That is, it's a way of reframing the idea that SH is "just attention seeking." 

Not now, but in years gone by, I have engaged in extremely high-risk activities in public in an attempt to get people to "hear" me. It doesn't work - you just get labelled as attention seeking, which really really really sucks. It is perfectly normal to seek attention when in pain. If my clothes accidently caught fire I would yell and scream for help and no doubt help would be forthcoming. However, when people can't see the source of pain, then the perfectly normal action of seeking help from others by drawing attention to our pain and distress somehow becomes "just attention seeking." 

Does that fit at all with your reading of that paragraph?

[CheerBear]

Hi everyone,

I find it really interesting to read and listen to people's experiences with SH. Thank you for starting this conversation and to those who have shared so far.

I didn't really consider something I can engage in as being a SHing thing (it was actually reading the forum guidelines when I joined that prompted me to start thinking about it in a different way). Recently I had a conversation with someone from an organisation specialising in a particular thing I can do and I asked if they thought it was SH. I got a response that was something about how they didn't like to think of it as SH which at the time I took as "see it isn't really SH". When I thought more about that conversation though, I wondered if their response was a way to ease any potential shame (or guilt or self-hatred etc) I'd feel upon thinking about SHing.

I think of the idea of secondary emotions/responses that we were discussing over here when I think of guilt and self-hatred in relation to SH. Those secondary emotions often seem to come from the way other people respond to us and what they see us do, and that's where things can get tricky with what goes on with me in perhaps a different way to the way things can tricky with many other types of SH. I have been given positive messages in relation to the outcomes of my behaviour which feels very strange. It feels like reinforcing that it is more than ok to do what I do and it can (and does) add to difficulty in me addressing it. The outcome of this behaviour (and other unhealthy behaviours like it), often seems to be rewarded or almost promoted in the social world, which makes me feel quite jumbled up about it. It's interesting to think how similar 'jumbled' feelings might come from behaviour that is negatively viewed/judged by other's.

When I read through the article above, I clicked on some of the links and read something about how often the intention of SH is "not to terminate consciousness but to modify it" which, if I am interpreting this correctly, I can relate to. I think a control 'thing' is behind the behaviour I can engage in. It comes out mostly when things feel/are incredibly out of my control. I can feel very in control of this one thing and in a way, it feels really good. I know though, that the more I try to feel in control by leaning on this, the more it can take over and I lose control of it.

Interesting topic and conversation. I hope one day people (as a whole) understand SH better as I think it's tricky enough without needing further tricky added by misunderstanding 🙂

[TheVorticon]

@Phoenix_Rising yeah that's kind of what I was thinking, but I think it needs to go one step further back.

As I mentioned, I had to completely rearrange it to try and make sense of it.

So...

1 - "Engaging in self-injury can also be a means of communicating distress." - Agreed.
3 - "our social relationships reflect a key way in which people typically respond to and cope with adversity." - Agreed that it's one of the typical ways.
2 - "[therefore it] seems likely social functions of self-injury such as this are still related to difficulties in coping with emotions." - Huh? This is where I got stuck. The way that it's "related" needs to be better explained.

The interpretation that I'm happy with is:

(A) that the social relationships aren't in a state to allow the person to "respond to and cope with adversity" which causes "difficulties in coping with emotions" and so the self-injury functions as a way to communicate within the existing state of the social relationships.

The way that I first read the original paragraph (before spending a silly amount of time on it to get to A) and am not happy with is:

(B) that the person's "difficulties in coping with emotions" and "[responding] to and [coping] with adversity" is the cause of the need to "communicate distress" through self-harm.