Self-injurious Behavior

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Self-injurious behavior (SP) and suicide attempts are psychological problems that have a direct risk to life. The joint venture includes: cuts yourself with sharp objects, banging your head, pulling your hair out, scratching your skin and much more

As a rule, people who inflict such injuries on themselves do not set themselves the goal of killing themselves at the moment, the reason why they do this lies in another plane of their life. Like suicidal attempts, the joint venture also has its own background. And this story is full of pain. Deep heartache.

Here we can look at the average example of a client with self-injurious behavior.

So, this client, in the final and positive for him, ends up with a psychotherapist, where his long and difficult path to recovery begins. This path can begin under duress, because this category of clients is not inclined to directly ask for help due to shame for their actions and for further disclosing their story to other people. Most likely it will be a teenager, whose life began to undergo a lot of personal shocks. The clothing will serve to hide areas of self-harm. In hot summer, a person packed from head to toe will cause some questions from others.

The client is already sitting in the office and there is an extreme degree of awkwardness, embarrassment and shame. He does not know why he does this, and cannot really explain what drives him at the moment of self-harm.

What could be the reasons for this behavior? If you start to understand from the most obvious reasons, then most likely they will be:

1. drawing attention to yourself and your problem (unconscious), 2.sensory stimulation (new sensations are needed), 3. An attempt to stimulate the production of internal endorphins (a similar mechanism to addiction to psychoactive substances), 4. imbalance in the production of dopamine and serotonin.

The neurochemical causes seem obvious at first glance. In practice, very often the main reason is the deep psychological pain experienced by clients, and the joint venture is already considered only as a consequence and as a way to get rid of this deep, persistent pain.

What is this deep pain?

The pain that arises within us and is most strongly experienced by us at the moments when we feel helpless and not liked by anyone. Behind these two deep-seated beliefs, "I am helpless" and "Nobody likes me," there are states that give us the feeling that we are thrown away, controlled, criticized, abandoned by other people. Rejection, control, criticism and abandonment work in both directions, both for the client and the client, which as a result generates social isolation. The generated state is characterized by an attack of acute pain, which is felt somewhere inside, and at this moment an irresistible (at first glance) desire to get rid of this pain appears. Most often, the method of getting rid is either self-cutting (stimulation of internal endorphins), or an overdose of any drugs (drown out sensitivity, forget).

In most cases, these attempts do not lead to suicide, but only emphasize the tendency.

The step-by-step scheme of the joint venture looks like this: negative thoughts (caused by deep pain) Þ maladaptive behavior (self-cut, overdose) Þ temporary relief Þ long-term negative consequences (social isolation and confirmation of deep beliefs “No one likes me”) Þ return to negative thoughts.

When working with such clients, first of all, it is worth reducing the frequency or removing the joint venture. The way to achieve this can be different depending on the commitment of the therapist to a particular therapeutic area. A client who has experienced such an experience is in a certain state of “constant” stress, which also needs relief and correction in the direction of acquiring the skills of a sense of inner balance and tranquility. And as a goal in therapy, it can be to increase the client's self-esteem and increase his potential for self-realization, which may actually be absent due to the client's fixation on SP and social isolation.

An important part of therapy is to attract relatives and people significant to the client in order to understand the situation and provide resource support to the client.

This point can be very critical because the parents may ultimately be the cause of the underlying pain that pushes the client towards the joint venture. It is the identification of the causes of deep psychological pain, trauma, discomfort that will help the therapist to coordinate therapy not only to relieve the client's current symptoms, but also to a deeper and more thorough study of his problem.

Living with pain is very difficult. And moving away from pain to another pain is even more difficult. The vicious circle of pain is closed in the client's body and there seems to be no way out of it. It is not possible to extinguish the fire with matches and either the fire will consume everything that remains and leave us scorched earth, or we will call the firemen and try to save what can still be saved. Let's hope that over time, the level of general awareness in society will increase, and this will serve as a prevention, as a vaccination against the occurrence of such problems. In relationships with other people, in parent-child relationships, more understanding can emerge, which will lead to a more harmonious development of the personality without pain.

You can start with yourself. You might think who we hurt. You can still fix everything and enter tomorrow with less baggage of pain for yourself and for others.