Understanding why people Self Harm

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What is Self Harm?

Self harm is an act of deliberately hurting oneself either physically or emotionally. 

When we think of self harm, many of us think of cutting. The image that pops into my head is one of razor blades and bandaged wrists. This is certainly a large part of self harm and there are many forms of physical harm people inflict on themselves purposefully and often ritualistically that can be mild to severe. Self harm is common amongst teenagers and there is a great deal of concern and fear amongst people (professionals included) around the dangers this form of coping creates. There are often a great deal of misconceptions about 'why' people do this as well as around the risk and dangers. A common misconception is that people who self harm are suicidal. This is often not the case. Self harm is a coping mechanism that people who are hurting emotionally adopt. It is done to create a sense of relief, regardless of what that relief may be to each individual person. 

Why choose self harm?

The reason I am writing about self harm today is largely due to this question. Why hurt yourself MORE when you are already hurting? I feel it is this mentality that creates a big divide between people who self harm and those trying to understand why. To help someone who self harms or to help yourself if you are self harming, this is a very important question to gain answers to and seek to understand.

I mentioned before that the intention of self harm is to create a sense of relief. For a person who is self harming, the goal is to hurt less, not more. To understand how physical pain or discomfort makes a person hurt less, you need to understand how emotional pain can hurt. Many people find this concept so difficult to comprehend as we live in a world that has mastered the art of repressing painful emotions. Many of us are very cut off from our difficult emotions and wear many masks in our daily lives to hide how we really feel. People who self harm are struggling to keep these masks on. They are finding their emotions difficult to live with, to bare, to keep in. They are in pain. Inherently,they have lost a sense of control and feel powerless to their emotional pain.

Self harm is a controlled act. It gives the person control over their pain. They are able to choose their pain and where to place it. They are able to distract from the emotional pain by redirecting their senses to their self inflicted physical pain. They have taken ownership of their bodies. They have pushed through numbness and reconnected with something tangible, something real and something that they can feel and manage the feelings of. Many people feel so awful inside that this form of punishment mirrors what they feel they deserve. It reflects what they are feeling inside. The outside wound helps to highlight the inside wound in a way that is outside of the 'unknown'. We all fear the unknown to some extent. Many of us fear our internal pain. The more emotional trauma we have, the greater the internal pain and the more enormous and frightening this 'unknown' part of us becomes. Self harm is a coping mechanism, it is done to create relief and ultimately 'help' the person. This is not the mentality of suicide, this is not giving up. In fact, this is a fight for life, for connection, for relief.

The Emotions behind Self Harm:

This is not a black and white answer because each person is unique and there will be many different core emotions. Some people, depending on their past childhood experiences and trauma, may have more than one core emotion. I would say that people who reach this point of coping will have an accumulated range of trauma ranging from mild to severe. Childhood sexual abuse is a common example to give for trauma leading to self harm as a coping mechanism. Chronic neglect (physical and/or emotional), physical abuse, unprocessed grief, chronic emotional abuse and disability are also good examples. There are also situations such as bullying, medical trauma and other external stresses and hardship that may come into play. Thus the core emotions can be fear, anger, disgust, shame or sadness; it all depends on the experiences and individuals involved. The key factor to understand, however, is that these core emotions have not been regulated or processed by the individual. These feelings have been repressed and the trauma has not been integrated.

The act of self harm and actively harming oneself in order to gain relief is done from a place of shame and/or disgust. Self harm is the opposite of self love and self care. As this act is a reflection of what the person feels inside themselves, it reflects a self hatred and loathing. Self harm thus comes from these negative feelings inside that are, for want of a better word, 'dark'. The act of self harm is a form of self punishment and the person consciously or unconsciously believes that they deserve this pain. Internally they are punishing themselves through negative thinking, low self esteem and judgement. The physical act is a reflection of this. They are not placing value on their physical bodies and have become detached from who they really are (their authentic selves) underneath all their internal pain and suffering. Shame is linked to powerlessness. As mentioned above, self harm is a controlled act which invariably brings about a renewed sense of power (however short lived). For people who feel powerless, self harm may relieve this feeling of powerlessness and the sense of control and power understandably can become addictive. 

Self Harm and connectedness:

The physical pain or discomfort also brings about a connectedness between the mind and body. For those who have endured physical and sexual abuse, this connectedness is a way to combat dissociation. Dissociation is a splitting of the mind from the body in order to cope with the physical trauma the body is enduring. This becomes a coping mechanism for many survivors of abuse, particularly sexual abuse. Survivors of this form of abuse develop many emotional triggers and will dissociate regularly when faced with reminders and triggers of their past abuse. Self harm is a way to feel, to connect to the body and to ground oneself back into reality or the present.

Self Harm is not always black and white:

Self harm is not always about cutting or burning or other visible methods. Many people harm themselves in other less overt ways. Eating disorders are a good example of this. Not all eating disorders require hospitalisation, starvation and obesity. Many people over or under eat and do this from a place of shame or disgust (self-loathing). I personally used to emotionally eat when struggling and at times still do. How many people eat food which they know is bad for them? How many people need caffeine to get by, a chocolate fix, a sugary reward for a tough day? Where is the line between treat and self harm? You just need to look at the number of people struggling with weight issues, body image issues and addictions to see that self harm is not a black and white issue. It is an emotional issue. Unprocessed emotions and trauma that have led to a place of shame and disgust.

How do you tackle Self Harm in terms of healing and awareness?

The first point I would like to make is that this is not a simple issue of 'attention seeking'. I find those 2 words extremely hindering in our modern world as I see them minimise and deflect very real and important issues going on for people. I often say to people, in any attention seeking context: If the person is going to this extreme to gain attention, it is a clear indicator of something being wrong. Our society likes to blame the victim. I feel this stems from fear and a lack of understanding and resources to deal with what they are being faced with. Seeking to understand, growing in awareness and finding compassion is vital.

We need to stop burying our heads in the sand. People who self harm are hurting and internally wounded. They need help not judgement. They are doing this from a place of shame, your judgement will increase this shame and place them more at risk. Ignoring them and pretending everything is fine is also shaming them as this translates into: I am not worthy of help, I disgust and repel people, I am not cared about, I am unlovable. This is when the self harm may start moving into a destructive path of suicidal ideation.

Shame is at the root of low self esteem

Self Harm is a cry for help. To help someone is to look past the behaviour and focus on their feelings. Listen, care, support and refrain from judgement. You can't remove someone's coping mechanism without giving them new ways to cope. The solution starts within, emotionally, through a positive relationship without judgement. Helping people to learn how to build up their self esteem and access self love. This is not an over night process and will often require professional support as well as support from loved ones. In a nutshell, the more support and care the person receives, the better!

Lets change the focus from 'what' the behaviour is to 'why' are people hurting so much internally? Why are people coping in this way? What do they need emotionally? Learn about the emotion 'shame'. The solutions lie within compassion, love and empathy. 

Lets not turn our back on those most in need of help.

Be kind to yourselves

XX

Paula

 

Emotional Triggers: What are they and how do they affect us?

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Most people will have heard of the term 'being triggered'. How many of us actual understand what that really means? This blog is for everyone as we ALL have emotional triggers to varying degrees. It is especially important for parents to understand what these are as they will influence how you parent. The number one area triggers seem to emerge for us is within our relationships, particularly our romantic relationships. Today I am going to explain what triggers are, how they work, the impact they have on our lives and how we can recognise them so that we can gain control back.

What are 'triggers'?

Triggers can also be called 'overreactions'. This has a negative connotation though and doesn't do any justice to the impact these triggers can have on us. This goes a lot deeper than simply 'being dramatic' or'seeking attention'.  We have an overreaction to something in the present, absolutely, but the reason for this overreaction or trigger is very much in proportion to the feelings and associations in our unconscious that have been brought about by past emotional trauma. In other words: Something in the present that we have become upset about is unconsciously reminding us of an emotional trauma in our past. Rather than seeking attention,we are seeking to get our emotional needs met that have otherwise not been met in childhood.

Childhood Emotional Trauma:

Childhood emotional trauma is actually unavoidable, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. This is because children do not have the brain development to make sense of their worlds outside of feelings and emotions. The thinking part of their brain develops later on. If children do not understand certain emotions and are not taught how to handle difficult emotional experiences, they are unable to understand and work through what they are going through. This means that they have not been able to get their emotional needs met and the experience becomes traumatic. When our emotional needs are not met we unconsciously develop ways to cope with this difficult emotional experience. As children we are not equipped to find healthy ways to do this for ourselves so the behaviours and unconscious strategies we adopt to cope with our difficult feelings will often become hindering and even harmful to our well-being later on. We bury these experiences deep down in our psyche and are often completely unaware of the impact they are having on our lives. Things go wrong, relationships break down, we develop low-self esteem, become very hard on ourselves etc. and will often ask ourselves: What is wrong with me or why do I keep doing this?

Most parents do their best to meet their children's needs but it is impossible to fully meet every need as the child does not have words to explain what is wrong or what they want. Emotional needs are often far more difficult to identify as they are not commonly known. Most people know about physical needs and do a great job with these. It is. however, very important for parents to understand the concept of emotional needs too as this will determine how we see ourselves, the world and other people. Many people find it very difficult to view their parents in a negative light and I was one of those people too. It is one of the hardest things to admit this to yourself, that your emotional needs may not always have been met. By being an adult who makes mistakes it is actually unreasonable to presume your parents did not make some mistakes too. That is normal and human. That doesn't mean you have not been affected by them though and to turn things around and gain back control you will need to honestly look at yourself, how you react and behave and where this all began.

An example of an emotional trauma:

As a baby you were scared in your cot at night by yourself. You did not have the brain development to understand that your parents were in the next room and you started screaming and crying because you were afraid that you were all alone. Your parents may have believed in the technique of leaving a baby to 'cry it out'and self soothe - this was and still is a popular strategy and is seldom done with the intent to create harm. In fact parents often struggle with it but persist as they believe it is the right thing to do.
Babies run on survival instinct and they will instinctively know that they need someone to keep them alive. If no-one attends to their fear by coming into the room and comforting them, anxiety will be created. If parents are inconsistent and the child is not regularly attended to, this may create an emotional trauma around fear and their sense of safety in the world.

The Impact: If inconsistency persists in the home and fear is not properly regulated, the impact of this early experience will be greater. People are all unique and how this under regulated fear will present and become triggered later on will be dependent on many factors. These factors are likely to include things like: Your personality, gender, other past experiences, your home life and environment, your insight and awareness and many more.
Perhaps the person will become either extremely clingy and dependent or become so used to self-soothing that they become emotionally distant and unable to rely on other people. This baby may grow up to realise that she 'overreacts' when her boyfriend does not come home when he said he would. This original fear will often come out in the form of other emotions such as anger, frustration, jealousy etc. The reaction is actually happening because the unconscious mind is making an association between the fear from childhood and the triggered fear of her boyfriend not coming home (fear of abandonment). Regardless of how each individual reacts, deep down they do not feel not secure and trust was therefore not developed between child and parent around emotional and/or physical safety. Thus a deep set anxiety or avoidance is developed within us unconsciously.

 Triggers and abuse:

I have clearly stated that we all have triggers and will have struggles from time to time in certain areas. It is up to each individual to decide whether they are happy with how they feel, regardless of the hiccups along the way, or whether these patterns and reactions are creating problems and require change. Awareness of what triggers are and that they are linked to deeper set beliefs and experiences may be enough for some people to create some changes if desired.

There are many people who are very affected by their triggers and are at the mercy of their reactions. Often this comes in the form of blame. This can be to the point where their triggers are having a negative impact on their life and their ability to function and be happy and healthy,particularly within relationships. In other words these triggers may be causing harm or have become destructive. This is when we need to look a little deeper as this often comes from a place of  child abuse and/or childhood emotional neglect. The impact of emotional trauma is much greater when their are other forms of abuse and neglect occurring. This is often cyclic and parents who have been abused and have unmet emotional needs parent children based on their capabilities and what they have been taught.

Triggers play a large role in this as people who have abusive pasts will be triggered by their own trauma more regularly and extensively. This is due to the lack of trust in their past caregivers, the world and inherently themselves later on. The world becomes a frightening place deep down and life seems to be all about survival. Becoming a parent increases the risk of being triggered for many people and there will be regular reminders of their own emotional needs and childhood trauma.You will often find this with a reaction of anger and physical aggression. The child may bring on a sense of powerlessness and overwhelm to the parent. This trigger's the parents shame and in order to regain that sense of power, the parent lashes out in anger. This is one of many examples. Parents who have not been taught love will have a hard time showing love. Parents who have been shamed or put down or violated will  often have a hard time creating boundaries and structure. They may also have a hard time being fully present. Some parents create too much structure and become almost Draconian in their parenting styles out of fear of losing control.
Often triggers and the pain and discomfort they arouse will become too much for people and they will find a way to escape or self-medicate (substance abuse, addictions, dissociation etc.). It is not hard to see why people who have been abused often go on to abuse later on. Some children bully other children for the same reasons, they are desperately trying to gain back a sense of power and control.

How do we recognise a trigger?

We are all different and the best way to recognise a trigger is to look at your reactions in relation to the situation. I have put together a few key points to assist you with this (there are many more and these are some guidelines to get you started):

• Look at how upset you have become and honestly ask yourself if this is proportionate.
• Look at who or what has made you upset and ask yourself if this has happened before in a similar situation
• Are you having physical reactions, if so, what are they and what emotion are they associated with
• Are you under-reacting or feeling 'numb' or apathetic when you feel you 'should' be upset
• Are you unable to let this go
• Are you thinking negatively about yourself or other people
• Are you feeling emotional or fragile
• Do you want to withdraw or hide away from the world
• Are you so angry you can think of nothing else
• Are you struggling to calm down
• Do you feel resentment towards someone for 'making you feel a certain way'
• Are you feeling threatened despite no immediate threat
• Do you feel as if this reaction is 'taking over'
• Do you feel panic when thinking of a potential outcome
• Do you feel disgust to the point of feeling sick in the stomach
• Do you feel you need to fight hard to get your point across and be right
• Are you worried about what people think of you

Making changes:

The best way to tackle a trigger is to recognize when it is happening and be brave enough to explore your feelings around this. The key to change lies in understanding where it has come from and how it is impacting you. Some people don't like the idea of looking back into the past and that is ok too. It will mean that although you will not be attending to the trigger and meeting those emotional needs (healing), you can still gain back a sense of control through recognition and awareness. 

Ask yourself: When have I felt this way before. Go as far back as you can remember. Learn about the emotions behind your triggers and make a point of meeting your own emotional needs. Allow the emotions to come. Soothe yourself instead of beating yourself up. If fear is at the heart of it, deliberately create safety and comfort yourself. If you are angry, find healthy ways to release this emotion (creatively or physically). If you feel shame and disgust towards yourself, be mindful or how you are thinking and treating yourself. Focus on your strengths and do things that make you feel good. If you are feeling sadness and sorrow or even despair, comfort yourself and be gentle and loving towards yourself. Take active and deliberate steps to attend to your own needs. Sometimes this means asking for help. Work on your communication skills. Be honest with yourself about what you need and start making plans to achieve this. Get some therapeutic support if you need to. You have the power to take the power back without causing destruction or harm to yourself or others.  

Remind yourself that when you are being triggered it is about YOU and your needs, not the situation. Therefore you will not find comfort in 'fixing' the situation, the answers to feeling better lie within XX

Take care,

Paula

You deserve peace of mind! 

    

How to cope with difficult emotions as adults

Please check out my video's on my Youtube channel or like my Facebook Page for parenting support and information XX

To teach your children you need to understand yourself:

I have been wanting to put something I have recently discovered down for you all around coping with difficult emotions. I say recently because until recently, I have been a bit of an 'avoider'. Not deliberately and not completely. I have always been in touch with emotions in general. I have never been uncomfortable around other people's emotions (with the exception of anger at times). Today though, I am talking about those deep buried emotions that we try our best to avoid or ignore. Those emotions we deny because of the fear and negativity we experience when we feel them. The ones we think will swallow us up whole, never returning us to the light.

All emotions, including happiness, have the potential to be difficult:

The reason for this is because of the experiences associated with the emotions and what these emotions mean to us. Fear is one of the big and uncomfortable ones. Fear is also something we enjoy in certain contexts such as watching a horror movie or going on a ghost tour. There is a huge market for spooky things for Halloween due to our love of getting thrills and chills. Why is this? Why can we invoke fear on one hand and build up massive defences against it on the other?

It is not the emotion we are fearing:

It is not the emotion that gets us so to speak. As children, we are driven by emotions and our 'felt sense' or how we perceive the world outside of thoughts and logic. We have the strongest instincts when we are children because we are unable to understand other people's feelings outside of our own experience of them. We don't talk ourselves out of feelings. We don't anticipate what loss, anger, sadness etc. will feel like. We live in the present and take each experience as it comes. We don't fear emotions. What we are afraid of is the lack of understanding, the unknown.

This fear of emotions comes from childhood and feelings we have experienced that have not been made clear to us. We have not understood our emotions within a difficult experience and have had to find ways of making sense of them without the tools of logic, learning and reason. Many of us build up defences in order to cope with these tough emotional experiences. When we feel something that unconsciously (or consciously) reminds us of this difficult experience, we logically assume it is the emotion that makes us feel this way. That the unbearable nature of what we are feeling must be due to our anger or fear or pain or sadness etc. We build up walls against these particular emotions and feelings and attempt to move out of them as quickly as possible in various ways. I hope I am making sense?

Let me give you an example:

My father was not a part of my life. Fundamentally I felt abandoned and rejected. I felt sadness and hurt that he 'didn't want me'. My mother did her best to compensate for this by believing in me and expressing how much I was wanted by her. She tried to explain to me all the reason why he couldn't be a father to me. As much as she tried to help me to see that it wasn't because of me as an individual that he wasn't around, I still felt abandoned by him. I still felt loss and sadness at the fact that my father was not around and didn't want to be. This sadness was not attended to, by my mother and then later on by me. The reason was due to it being misunderstood and it was not something she was aware of in terms of my emotional needs. Sadness and emotional pain has always been quite difficult for me on a fundamental level. The deep sadness. Even in my grief, I struggled with truly experiencing this on a full level. I shoved it down and moved on from it as quickly as possible. I built up a world of defence mechanisms to cope with feelings of sadness, rejection and abandonment. One of my biggest defences is anger (an associated emotion I developed). For years the feelings I have felt towards my father have been anger. Anger has been a much easier emotion to bare, it has protected me and given me a false sense of security and justice. I have also developed the habit of trying to 'fix' other people when they feel sad. I have always felt sadness and pain is something that needs to be fixed or something I need to help people to avoid. As a therapist I have had to work extremely hard at allowing people to be in these emotions without trying to move them out of it and give them solutions. People will heal from discovering their own solutions.

The truth is though, in order for you to feel relief, you need to fully experience your feelings!

The pain comes in when we bury them or build these defences up against them. We take these defences on board and keep using them way beyond their necessity. In my case, the anger has been holding me back in so many ways. My lack of ability to experience sadness fully has also held me back from being who I really am. It made the significant loss I have experienced incredibly hard and drawn out. It effects my relationships (all of them). It prevents me from being true to my own needs and living in a way that is in alignment with who I really am and would like to be.

To overcome difficult emotions, you need to allow them to come up to the surface:

Think of something at the bottom of your tea cup, it is much harder to reach inside the cup and dig it out than it is to scoop it out when floating on the surface. You may just burn your fingers trying. Your buried emotions are the same. You need to have patience and understanding as each emotion starts to float. It won't all come at once although it can often feel like it does. To reassure you, your higher self or unconscious is in tune with your needs far more than your conscious self. In the same way as our dreams, we will never be given more than we can bare. If you are experiencing a difficult emotion, know that you are strong enough to cope with it. It wont feel good. That is to be expected.

The minute you let go of your expectations around how you should be feeling, you will accept and work through how you really feel. If you can allow the emotion to come through and have your full presence, your organic, natural and instinctual self will integrate and work through it. Once you have worked through it, it will be released. It will not only be released but you will be much better for it. You will learn from it and grow from it. You will feel relief and you will no longer have to bare the weight of the heaviness that comes with holding it in. This can take some work, especially if you are like me and have a lot of resistance to your difficult emotions. Start with trying to identify how you feel in your body.Get to know how you experience emotions and be gentle with yourself. Find time to be by yourself to think, feel and behave in the ways you need to. I personally like to be by myself to grieve and cry. I play sad music, light a candle and look at photos. When I am angry I like to vent, play heavy rock music or to sing or write. I am starting to honour the complex nature of my emotions and feelings and I have taken control back. I make it a point to understand all of the emotions and appreciate the importance they have in my life. In all our lives. The key to happiness and relief is in you, in being true to who you are and what you honestly feel.

There is no such thing as a bad emotion! Only bad experiences associated with emotions.

Love and light XX
Paula