self-harm?

Post Reply New Topic

I used to cut myself and bang my head alot pinch skin untill it bled things like that i think mostly out of frustration i think i'm not sure.
Do you or have you ever self harmed? what did you do? and why did you do it?

I have self harmed. It was due to being overwhelmed with negitive emotion. I'm still working on how to find healthy outlets, I'm finding that being about to talk freely with someone seems to work more often than not as an good outlet.

Self-harm is a means of establishing your own stimulus and blocking out unpleasant stimuli. It is a means of establishing control in a situation where you have little control. The sight of an injury can help to visualize a situation that is hard to understand. Some forms of self-harm (e.g. cutting) release endorphins, which lift mood and soothe pain (NB: it is not necessary to cut deep, or even to cut at all, for an endorphin high).

Self-harm is usually regarded as maladaptive in the sense that it does not solve any situational problems, whereas other methods do, but some professionals now support safe(r) self harm as preferable to punishment.

Some people find that a slightly loose elastic band around the wrist is a very effective substitute for some forms of self harm. Snapping the band on the bare wrist hurts. A bright red band may have a useful visual effect.

Thank you for the rationale on self-harm StuartN. I can relate to that as I used to (back when I was young) practice a self-pain kind of ritual to deal with built-up anxiety/stress. I have described this quite a bit in a thread I started on Members Only about self-harm/pain as a release. I put a poll on that thread and have found approximately 75% of those taking the poll have practiced this. There could be flaws in the poll because most members who visit that have probably self-harmed. Many who have never self-harmed probably did not visit it. I don't know if that is accurate to say, but it's what I think. I would like to know the percentage of we autistics who have practiced self-harm.

I have described what I used to do on that thread, but I will say I classified it more as self-pain because what I did left no marks on me. But it could still be argued as self-harm.

Interesting to note is the endorphin rush that StuartN mentioned. That rush does have a calming effect afterwards. I have experienced that with getting my tattoos.

Yes. When I get upset I sometimes hit my head or bite myself. I also sometimes cut myself. I just had to get 20 stitches in my arm because I cut myself in a meldown at work with a razor.

Yeowch. ColdBlooded, I learned that the hard way myself--never, ever use anything that you could mess up with and injure yourself seriously. You want to use something more like a pin or a pair of scissors or a dull knife, something that'll cause scratches, not deep cuts. Having to go to the emergency room for stitches can get you admitted to the hospital for no better reason than your own clumsiness. (Or you could just bite yourself or hit hard objects. But I'll admit the quality of the sensation is different for those cases.) Also: Never, ever self-injure in public. You're liable to get yourself pinned down, the ambulance called, and whisked off to the mental ward before you can say, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm not suicidal!" If you can help it, never self-injure in an area not covered by a swimsuit.

The reason I self-injure is most likely that injury has a powerful biological effect on the human body and mind. Rather than feeling overwhelmed or anxious or ashamed (etc.), injury forces your mind to focus on the injury--that is an adaptive mechanism, because if Cave-Man Joe just got himself hurt, he needs to marshal his resources to get away from whatever hurt him instead of being overwhelmed by whatever emotion he's feeling. Similarly, injury forces you to tap into your mental reserves. Tiredness, mental and physical, has a function: It forces you to sleep and recharge yourself regularly. But in times of emergency, tiredness can be banished; the theoretical limit of exhaustion is far beyond mere tiredness, which is more of a protective mechanism to make sure you go to bed long before you would simply fall asleep where you stand. When you hurt yourself, your body says, "Emergency!" and you go into fight-or-flight mode, where you'll ignore all those safety mechanisms that are designed not to let you get exhausted long-term.

So when I used self-injury to try to cope, I used it to stave off meltdowns by basically ignoring emotions like fear or shame and forcibly putting myself into emergency mode. Of course, that meant inevitable burnout; but in the short term, it worked.

Now I'm learning a lot about how to control stress and not exhaust myself like that. I don't hurt myself nearly as much as I used to, because I've found other ways to fill the purpose that self-injury used to have for me. But when you try to do too much, for too long, eventually you'll run past normal coping strategies and get desperate. The only solution seems to be not to try to do too much, or for too long; else you'll end up doing things that, in the long run, will hurt more than they'll help. Some people get angry and take it out on each other; some people self-medicate with too much alcohol or dangerous drugs; some people cut or bruise themselves. None of it works particularly well; but sometimes it's the last resort when you've got nothing else left to try.