Understanding self-harm
Page 3
Executive summary
Secret self
Key findings:
- Feeling that your thoughts and feelings, if known by others, would be unacceptable to them was found to be associated with both current self-harm and history of self-harm (and more strongly with the former)
- Feeling unable to let your thoughts and feelings manifest in your behaviour was found to be associated with both current self-harm and history of self-harm (and more strongly with the former)
- Out of participants who were harming at the time of filling in the survey, those who thought their inner lives least acceptable and most in need of hiding tended to be those who harmed most frequently.
Recognising that there was something different about their emotive experience, participants often expressed that there was something wrong about how they were feeling. This sense of inner life (feelings, thoughts, beliefs) being something incongruent with what is acceptable, something to feel bad about and to hide from others, was present in many guises throughout the participants’ responses.
When participants talked about the function of self-harm in their lives, they often mentioned that it helped them to keep their real feelings under wraps, to stop their anger or sadness “spilling out”. There was a ‘secret self’ that had become separated from the ‘social self’, and participants worried about “being found out” as someone who hates herself, is angry, anxious or depressed.
This tendency to think of one’s inner thoughts and feelings as unacceptable to others and as something to avoid showing in behaviour was found to be associated with a history of self-harm among the participants, and even more strongly, with current self-harm. Those who thought their inner lives least acceptable and most in need of hiding, also tended to be those who harmed most frequently.
Given that the thoughts and feelings of the ‘secret self’ are not allowed to manifest in the physical, interpersonal world of expression and behaviour, it is little wonder that the fourth most frequently named function of self-harm was its ability to give mental distress a physical form, to make it tangible rather than the elusive experience it can be when it is refused its natural ground for playing itself out. What makes emotions tangible? Is it possible that people who find themselves having to resort to self-harm experience emotions in a way that makes them somehow unusually intangible? What do you think?