Articles: When One Pain Replaces Another
By Ronald Pies, MD.
If you get the proper professional care and treatment, there's a good chance you can stop cutting yourself.[/center]
If you get the proper professional care and treatment, there's a good chance you can stop cutting yourself. Self-cutting and other forms of self-injurious behavior have many causes. No single kind of treatment works for everyone.
Some people injure themselves to release tension or anger. Others do it to control racing thoughts or to "feel more alive." Some find injuring themselves takes their mind off an underlying depression or anxiety. Some say it's the only way they can get people to pay attention to how much emotional pain they are in. Still others hurt themselves because they hear voices commanding them to.
Survivors of Abuse
Many people who injure themselves have a history of being abused early in life. For some of these people, this behavior is a way of transforming an emotional pain they can't control into a physical pain they can, to some degree.
Dealing with self-injury and bleeding may be less scary than facing the deeper sources of emotional pain. Done over many years, self-injurious behavior can become a kind of addiction in which the fleeting relief from emotional pain reinforces the habit of cutting, burning, or other self-injury.
Getting Help
Marsha Linehan, MD, has developed some therapeutic techniques to deal with self-injury and other self-defeating behaviors. The various techniques can broadly be described as accepting reality, letting go of emotional suffering, distraction, self-soothing, improving the moment, reducing vulnerability to negative emotions, and becoming more effective in dealing with others. These are all areas you can work on in a type of psychotherapy called dialectical behavioral therapy.
In some cases, medications can also reduce self-injurious behavior. Prozac-type antidepressants seem to be especially helpful, according to work published by Cornelius and colleagues in the April 1991 Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.
A Web site that might help some self-injurious persons is www.navicom.com/~patty. You might also contact Self-Abuse Finally Ends [SAFE] at 800-DON'T-CUT for more information. But there is no substitute for being seen and treated by a professional.[/b]
If you get the proper professional care and treatment, there's a good chance you can stop cutting yourself. Self-cutting and other forms of self-injurious behavior have many causes. No single kind of treatment works for everyone.
Some people injure themselves to release tension or anger. Others do it to control racing thoughts or to "feel more alive." Some find injuring themselves takes their mind off an underlying depression or anxiety. Some say it's the only way they can get people to pay attention to how much emotional pain they are in. Still others hurt themselves because they hear voices commanding them to.
Survivors of Abuse
Many people who injure themselves have a history of being abused early in life. For some of these people, this behavior is a way of transforming an emotional pain they can't control into a physical pain they can, to some degree.
Dealing with self-injury and bleeding may be less scary than facing the deeper sources of emotional pain. Done over many years, self-injurious behavior can become a kind of addiction in which the fleeting relief from emotional pain reinforces the habit of cutting, burning, or other self-injury.
Getting Help
Marsha Linehan, MD, has developed some therapeutic techniques to deal with self-injury and other self-defeating behaviors. The various techniques can broadly be described as accepting reality, letting go of emotional suffering, distraction, self-soothing, improving the moment, reducing vulnerability to negative emotions, and becoming more effective in dealing with others. These are all areas you can work on in a type of psychotherapy called dialectical behavioral therapy.
In some cases, medications can also reduce self-injurious behavior. Prozac-type antidepressants seem to be especially helpful, according to work published by Cornelius and colleagues in the April 1991 Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.
A Web site that might help some self-injurious persons is www.navicom.com/~patty. You might also contact Self-Abuse Finally Ends [SAFE] at 800-DON'T-CUT for more information. But there is no substitute for being seen and treated by a professional.[/b]