First off, we need to remove shame from the world. Shame is what leads people to harm themselves. Shame is a meaningless construct. There is only what is healthy and unhealthy.
Cutting is very rational in certain respects. I find it easy to understand. There have been times in my life where I felt so bottled up with painful emotions that I wanted to punch things or be hit just to overwhelm the tight ache inside. At points in my life I have punched myself in the leg to try to unblock the feelings, to overwhelm the fear keeping me from letting the pain inside.
We do not have a language anymore for suffering. We are uncomfortable speaking about it. But, we should not be. To live is to suffer. Just as joy is part of life, so is suffering. Pain is central to life. As soon as you see its value, the fear drops away and you can integrate yourself fully and go on to live.
Harming yourself is a way to connect with your feelings. It is not that you are feeling the pain and marking it physically. It's generally that you are NOT feeling the pain. Something is holding you back from letting painful emotions overwhelm you. We try to control how we feel. But, since emotions are connected very deeply to our physical feelings
we can reconnect with our feelings by working through the body.
Cutting probably operates in many ways. By signifying internal pain with signs of physical pain, pain becomes comprehensible. We can see it. We can also see the process by which we heal. That can be comforting.
Likewise, cutting is often done in private so it can have a certain ritual quality to it. I imagine there may be a correlation between OCD and cutting.
I imagine there is also an aspect of anger to cutting. The desire to do violence is internalized and controlled. A young man may punch a wall and harm his hand, while a young woman may cut herself. The initial feeling may be identical.
Also, women have to deal psychologically with the notion of being penetrated so they may be less squeamish about the concept of chthonic, bloody interiors of our bodies. They know they are likely to be penetrated and implanted with offspring. All these things involve blood and violence so it is unlikely to be as threatening to females in the sense that they prepare themselves for this reality whereas typically men do not.
It's usually done for one of two reasons with me: Either I feel a lot of emotional pain I don't know what to do with, or I'm punishing myself for not being as pure or strong as I feel I should be.
The release of emotion is also a reconnecting to the emotion.
Thank you all for your insight. While speaking with a friend today she told me her 15-year-old daughter had been cutting herself. Her daughter is currently in group therapy and has stopped cutting herself. However, I thought maybe her daughter might feel less self-loathing (if that is why people cut themselves) if her way of perceiving the world was validated through type. To those of you who have experienced this, did learning about your type help you in anyway? Thank You
I would also be curious what her home life is like.
My introversion, at least, has something to do with self-harming impulse. My weak sensing probably contributes.
I'm not really interested in punishing myself, I like me just fine.
I burn myself on rare occasion, and not badly. Mostly, it's about carrying a lot of emotional tension without physical release without realizing it, some major/minor thing triggering me going over the edge of *needing* to release it, and me being unable to cry easily when I need to.
For whatever reason, I can't cry. The endorphins are like a crazy drug.
It is also about control.
People cut for various reasons. I think it started out with more women/girls doing it, but I know quite a few boys who do as well. It isn't for attention because most people I know who do it go to great lengths to hide it. There's a huge sense of shame that accompanies it, and yet it appears to be a coping mechanism to deal with pain that has no legitimate outlet for expression. Some people even take it a step further and put things inside the cuts to make them fester (crayons, bits of metal etc that get healed into the skin and then cause problems). I think there is a feeling of control that it gives as well as some release in the pain (I think there is actually some euphoric feeling from that). Unfortunately it is a cycle and creates more shame than before and therefore more cutting to cope. Where I used to work, cutting was done by over half of the kids I taught (and those are the ones I knew about). Often people will even choose a place on their body that others can't easily see. There is some element of it catching on - in schools, prisons, youth facilities etc if one person is cutting, there are soon more. I think it truly stems from not having adequate emotional attachments to a strong adult. These attachments need to be fostered and developed rather than just trying to treat the symptoms (cutting or depression).
Interesting. Never heard of people leaving things in the wound.
Self-mutilation is a whole other species of depression, it's masochism in its purest form.
To be hurt by others is one thing, but to hurt yourself, well, that's a whole other bag of beans, beans that you can control, and understand.
To hurt oneself is to find relief, feel a release, and discover a sort of fucked up redemption.
Perhaps you'll only understand it if you do/done it.
Sometimes it's nice to reflect the way you see existence in your body.
I did used to cut (Not anymore. I refuse to) Now I just cry to music. Pahahhaah
Music is also good for connecting with the emotions.