What do you know about self-injury?

“Truth often hurts, but it’s the lies that leave the scars”

What is self-injury?

Self-harm includes anything you do to intentionally injure yourself. Some of the more common ways include:

• Cutting or severely scratching your skin with a razor blade, piece of glass, or other sharp objects.
• Burning or scalding yourself
• Hitting yourself or banging your head. Including the pulling out of bodily hair
• Punching things or throwing your body against walls and hard objects
• Sticking objects into your skin
• Intentionally preventing wounds from healing
• Swallowing poisonous substances or inappropriate objects

Self-harm can also include less obvious ways of hurting yourself or putting yourself in danger, such as driving recklessly, binge drinking, taking too many drugs, and having unsafe sex. These are behaviors that misdirect and anesthetize your painful feelings and thoughts. Self-injury is not necessarily an attempt to commit suicide. Instead, it signifies intense emotional pain.

Why do people self-injure?

Essentially, self-injury is a way to cope with life: current problems or past problems, strong feelings or lack of feeling, desire for calm or desire for pain to find release or to inflict punishment.

1. To release emotions you can’t put into words
2. To show hatred for oneself (Guilt /Punishment)
3. To feel pain or see blood (Sobering/Sensationalism/Distractions)
4. To calm racing thoughts /releasing the pain and tension you feel inside
5. To stop flashbacks or intrusive, vivid memories
6. To avoid suicide (Interrupts hopelessness)
7. Making you feel alive, or simply feel something, instead of feeling numb
8. To get control (Enabling you to function in everyday life or to break from the grip of authority figures

Profile of a cutter

4% of the population or 1 in 5. They are equally divided between male and female. However, more women than men seek help. Self-injury is most prevalent among high school and college students. Research shows us that nearly 50 percent report physical and/or sexual abuse during his or her childhood. Inadequate parental nurturing or a suppression of emotions, like anger or sadness, may also contribute.

 Myths and facts about cutting and self-harm

1. Myth: People who cut and self-injure are trying to get attention. Fact:   No, most do it in secret because of shame and fear.
2. Myth: People who self-injure are crazy and/or dangerous. Fact: Most people who self-harm suffer from anxiety, depression, or a previous trauma-but no danger to others.
3. Myth: People who self-injure want to die. Fact: Wrong —They are trying to cope with their pain and self-injury may be a way of living for them.
4. Myth: If the wounds aren’t bad, it’s not that serious.  Fact: The severity of a person’s wounds has very little to do with how much he or she may be suffering.

If self-harm helps, why stop?

• Although self-harm and cutting can give you temporary relief, it comes at a cost.

• The relief is short lived, and is quickly followed by other feelings like shame and guilt.

• Keeping the secret from friends and family members is difficult and lonely.

• You can hurt yourself badly, even if you don’t mean to. Dangerous cuts & infections.
• Shame and guilt are the by products of this act ! 
• If you don’t learn other ways to deal with emotional pain, it puts you at risk for bigger problems.

• Self-harm can become addictive. It may start off as an impulse or something you do to feel more in control, but soon it feels like the cutting or self-harming is controlling you. It often turns into a compulsive behavior that seems impossible to stop.

In their own words

• “It expresses emotional pain or feelings that I’m unable to put into words. It puts a punctuation mark on what I’m feeling on the inside!”
• “It’s a way to have control over my body because I can’t control anything else in my life.”
• “I usually feel like I have a black hole in the pit of my stomach, at least if I feel pain it’s better than feeling nothing.”
• “I feel relieved and less anxious after I cut. The emotional pain slowly slips away into the physical pain.”

 What Can I Do to Help?

1. Put proper labels on behavior: The self-injurer doesn’t have an illness that can be medically diagnosed; what he/she has is a faulty coping mechanism that has become a sinful habit. (Romans 6:13,16-19) (1 Cor. 6:9-11).
2. Deal with their past: “Until I finally admitted all my sins to you and stopped trying to hide them. I said to myself, “I will confess them to the Lord.” And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.” Psalm 32:5 TLB
3. Deal with their Heart: (Jeremiah 17:9), (Mark 7:21-23) Take the focus off self. Off the pain, loss, feelings, their wants and desires. Begin to understand the role idolatry plays in their behavior. How worshipping idols only leads to guilt, shame and deception. Only God can take away the pain, not self-injury.  
4. Give them hope: Romans 8:28-29     God can make a message out of their mess!
5. Give them Purpose: 2 Cor. 5:9 What is their main purpose in life? Relief from pain, or obedience to God?
6. 6.    Teach them to manage overwhelming stress and emotions: (Eph. 4:17-27)  Run to the pain, not away from it!
7. 7.    Identify their self-injury triggers:  Remember self-injury is most often a way of dealing with emotional pain. What feelings make them want to cut or hurt themselves?  Sadness? Anger? Shame?  Loneliness?  Guilt? Emptiness?  Genesis 4:3-8 Teaches us to let our feelings and emotions be our friends and to “walk by faith not by sight.’ Use your pain to motivate you to action.  Don’t anesthetize it!
8. Put off the old self: Ephesians 4:22-24   You must help them to examine these areas: Computer, friends, school, job, privacy, and the tools they have used to harm themselves. Restructure!   (Jeremiah 29:1-14).
9. Help them to overcome the Ugly Duckling Syndrome: 2 Corinthians 5:17 Teach them that their true Identity is in Christ not living in their past trauma identity.
10. Encourage them to seek Counsel from people who have life experience as well as book knowledge.   Not just from people who call themselves “Professionals.”
11. The path to wholeness:   (Jeremiah 29:1-14)   “For He will deliver the needy when he cries for help, the afflicted also, and in him who has no helper, He will have compassion on the poor and needy, and the lives of the needy He will save.” Psalm 72:12-13