Understanding self-harm
Page 8
Executive summary
Discontinuing self-harm
Just over a quarter of participants with a history of self-harm (26.6%, n=220) stated that they had stopped harming. The most commonly identified driving force behind stopping was social pressure (20.1%, n=44), often in the absence of a sense of personal desire to cease harming, e.g. “I still miss it, and would continue if the scars were not so hard to hide and long in fading”.
For many, the perceived pressure to stop was related to their understanding of their role as a parent, an employee, a wife or a husband. A related reason for success in stopping harm, also given frequently, was the perceived impact on loved ones (12.8%, n=28), e.g. “My parents found out and made me feel bad about it… I’m glad I don’t do it anymore but only because I don’t want to upset anyone.” Again the reason to stop seems to be purely social.
Other important factors enabling participants to stop harming included self-development, sometimes in the form of insight into reasons for harming gained through counselling, other times simply through growing older and benefiting from the increase in confidence, stability, self-knowledge and control over life associated with that.
Counselling was reported to have been helpful by about twice as many participants as medication. On this subject, quite a few of our participants reported (without having been asked about it) that some medications (in particular, some tranquillisers and anti-depressants) had increased their self-harm, either in frequency or severity, or both. More precisely, it increased the type of self-harm that is motivated by intolerable emotional numbness, i.e. feeling too little. Have you had this experience? Please discuss it with your doctor, and if you’d like to, email us to describe what you felt like.
As discussed in an earlier section of this summary (‘Self-loathing and the need for self-punishment’), helping someone to stop self-harming may require the radical step of adopting a permissive approach towards it. Why would this help? Because radical acceptance by another person may pave the way towards the person letting go of the guilt, shame and self-recrimination related to self-harm, which may previously have helped to fuel it. The opposite strategy, prohibition, may serve only to drive the person to secrecy, making open discussion of harming, its precipitants and effects impossible.