Understanding Teenagers
Who Mutilate Themselves
Page Two
Re-enacting Previous Abuse to Gain Control: People who have been injured or abused by another person sometimes replicate the abuse in order to gain a sense of control or to bring relief of their tension and pain. Their unconscious logic goes like this: “If I hurt myself, I am in charge of my pain. I can control it and keep it manageable. If I don’t, someone else may hurt me and I will have no control at all over that.”
Self-Protection: Other adolescents fear sexual victimization. They produce scars because they believe that will make them unattractive and scare away anyone who may approach them with a bad intent.
Relief from Numbness: Few things are worse than feeling inwardly numb or emotionally dead. Although this is difficult for many parents to understand, many teenagers feel inwardly numb—almost like they aren’t really alive. They are kind of floating emotionally or feeling dazed rather than alive and alert. This is a terrible feeling so they look for a way to prove to themselves that they are alive. Few things prove this better than seeing ones own blood running or feeling physical pain. It is a terrible paradox, but many people hurt themselves to prove that they are alive and real.
How Can I help?
The key to helping someone who is self-mutilating is to remember that people don’t do this just by chance. There is always some underlying cause or reason. The most important thing to do is find out why the person is hurting themselves, not just try to get them to stop. We need to be good listeners and draw the person out. Only then can the real problem be resolved.
Since most people who self-injure do so in order to gain some sense of control, it doesn’t help to take a controlling, dominant stance or try to force him or her to change. It will need to be the person’s choice to stop and they will have great difficulty doing this until they have faced their emotional pain and learn better ways of coping with emotional stress. Anything that you can do to help the person identify their painful feelings, talk about them, and discover effective problem-solving strategies, will divert the focus away from self-injury and onto the real source of the problem.
 Never hesitate to consult with a
mental health professional
when you become aware that
someone is engaged in self-injury.
Providing a model of self-awareness and honesty and being able to talk about our own conflicts, grief, or other forms of emotional pain can encourage a teenager to do the same. So does pouring our hearts out to the Lord and allowing Him to heal us in our own brokenness. Instead of acting as if we have it all together we need to be real and open with our children.
Once it comes out that a person is self-injuring, it will be important to provide ongoing support and care for him or her even after it seems that the self-injuring has stopped. Relapse prevention principles are useful here. It is important to help the person anticipate when he might be tempted to hurt himself again—under what circumstances and in what way. Then this person can be helped to develop a strategy for what he or she will do in that situation. It’s also important to try to reduce their shame in case they do hurt themselves again, since shame makes it difficult to let anyone know that they still have a problem.
Never hesitate to consult with a mental health professional when you become aware that someone is engaged in self-injury. Self-injury might be due to other types of problems such as sexual abuse, depression, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, or substance abuse.
As with any kind of behavior with addictive components, it can be a long road to recovery with relapses and pitfalls along the way. Christian families and caregivers will want to use all of their spiritual resources of prayer to help their children or others learn to face their inner hurts and find deep and lasting solutions. The child may or may not be ready to participate in prayer with you and should be given the choice but in either case, we should be seriously seeking God’s guidance, support and intervention.
References and Reading Resources:
The Scarred Soul: Understanding and Ending Self-Inflicted Violence by Tracy Alderman.
A Bright Red Scream: Self-mutilation and the Language of Pain by Marilee Strong.
Bodies Under Siege by Armando Favazza.
Websites:
www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=bus;list
www.palace.net/~llama/selfinjury
Karen Carr, Ph.D, is Clinical Director of MMCT (Mobile Member Care Team) residing in Accra, Ghana. She is an experienced licensed clinical psychologist and has conducted training in crisis response, interpersonal skills, and member care with various missions in ten countries, including several in Africa. www.mmct.org
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