Understanding self-harm
Page 3
Short Report
Feeling too little or too much
Key findings:
- When asked how self-harm had helped them, 39% of participants wrote that it helped them regulate or release emotion
- 62% experienced overwhelming emotions before harming
- 34% had harmed in order to feel something
- 42% of participants felt detached or unreal before harming
- After harming, the positive effects felt most commonly were relief/release (47%) and sense of calm and peace (24%)
- Those who harmed less frequently were more likely to cite ‘wanting to feel something’ or ‘wanting to feel real’ as a reason for their harm.
One way of helping someone come to terms with their self-harm is to engage with their reasons and motivations for doing it. This is not always easy; many of our participants wrote about hiding their self-harm so that they wouldn’t have to explain it to others, and the second most often cited reason for hiding self-harm was that family and friends would not understand.
When it comes to the most frequently reported function of self-harm, emotion regulation, there seems to be an inherent difficulty in putting the experiences into words. This difficulty seemed to arise in two main kinds of experience. First, emotions are felt and recognised as, for example, sadness, anger, anxiety and so on – but the way in which emotions are felt is different: they are overwhelming, out of control, physically uncomfortable or confused. Alternatively, the person feels nothing, empty, dead, disconnected from the world and other people, and they feel as though they are struggling to maintain a coherent sense of self.
These ways of feeling are very hard to find language for because they are not part of the ‘normal’ experience. The person who harms is often left with a feeling that only those who share such experiences (i.e. others who self-harm) can understand why they do it.
There are many aspects of this function of self-harm that are a mystery: it isn’t known, for a start, why it should be that self-harm is capable of releasing anger, lifting depression and alleviating anxiety. There is even a sense in which the function of self-harm is paradoxical; it appears that whilst self-harm can help someone to feel less, it can at other times help them to feel more.
We are working on this question at the moment and hope to be publishing our findings soon, watch this site for announcement of results! The last finding presented in the box above is also curious: why should it be that those who harm less frequently are more likely to do it in order to feel something, or feel more real?