2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Self-injurious behavior is a concept that describes a wide range of actions associated with intentional physical damage to one's own body. Such actions include cutting, hitting the body, burns, pricking with sharp objects, scratching the skin, etc.
Self-harm in adolescence is determined by a combination of psychological, social, cultural and biological factors. More recently, self-harm was seen as symptoms indicative of psychopathological disorders, but today it is known that a significant percentage of adolescents who commit self-directed damaging actions do not necessarily meet the criteria for one or another mental disorder. It is more appropriate to understand this behavior in functional terms rather than as a separate diagnosis.
In many cases, self-harm indicates psychological problems. In the adolescent period of life, new methods of controlling and managing one's own behavior appear, new ways of influencing the behavior of other people, the sphere of designating personal boundaries and forming an image of oneself is transformed.
Identity in adolescence is formed on the basis of the integration of ideas about oneself, the world and those social roles through which the social assimilation of a person takes place. It is during this period that the characteristics of “confused identity” are observed, which, when exposed to unfavorable conditions, can transform into “diffuse identity”, i.e. identity is unsettled, vague, with a lack of stable internal content, the main problem of which is the inability to connect and keep together its different parts, which is characteristic of the borderline level of organization.
During adolescence, there are significant transformations that affect both the perception of yourself and the idea of how other people perceive you. Adolescence is an age of extremes that can include not only rebellious tendencies, but also self-destructive tendencies in the search for identity. There are suggestions that pain has something to do with self-knowledge, the formation of identity. In a way, the practice of self-harm of adolescents can also be understood as an attempt to get to know oneself (this can also include methods of body modification sanctioned by society - tattoos, piercings, etc.). Self-harm provides a kind of transitional identity for the adolescent. As the personality develops, this practice loses its function and meaning.
Adolescents who experience difficulties in self-regulation of their emotional states and do not have access to an adult who would perform the function of a "container" which will help to survive uncontrollable, frightening, incomprehensible states (contained), so he gives these experiences (in the form of pojective identifications) to the mother, who will accept them and return the child back in a more acceptable and easily tolerated form for him; over time, the child acquires the ability to independently perform function of the container) are forced to resort to self-harm as the only available way of complacency. The difficulties of self-regulation inherent in this age find their expression in impulsivity, anxiety, problems of self-esteem and control of emotions.
Considering self-harm as a destructive way of emotional regulation, researchers find links between emotional closeness and the frequency of acts of self-harm. A narrowed repertoire of emotional regulation is associated with childhood abuse and adolescence and self-harm. Adolescents who commit acts of self-harm have a small arsenal of methods of emotional regulation available to them and are not sufficiently aware of their emotions.
Thus, non-suicidal behavior can be labeled as a painful form of self-help. The main purpose of self-injurious behavior is to regulate emotional states and manage anxious thoughts. Non-suicidal injuries most often function temporarily and are used to alleviate unbearable negative experiences such as shame, guilt, anxiety, frustration, a sense of “deadness” and a way to experience reality (fighting depersonalization, dissociation), and regulating sexuality. Self-damaging actions are preceded by intense negative emotions, and these acts lead adolescents to reduce negative emotions as well as to calm down. In some cases, self-harm is in the service of gaining a sense of control, as well as stopping dissociative experiences. Some adolescents report that these actions function as a form of self-punishment for failures and blunders. In addition, non-suicidal injuries can perform many other functions, such as trying to influence others, attract attention, confirm the reality of pain (wounds, cuts as evidence that emotions are real).
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