Beneath the Wound: Understanding Self-Harm

I was 10 years old the first time I cut myself. I didn’t fully understand why I was doing it; I just remember feeling like my body was going to break with all the emotion I was experiencing, and I had to do something to diffuse the intensity.

I felt relief afterward, like I could finally breathe.

From age 10 until I was 18, I struggled with self-harm and went through every kind of treatment intervention possible: therapy, medication, outpatient programs, inpatient stays, wilderness therapy, and a therapeutic boarding school. While I struggled with other maladaptive behaviors, self-harm was one of the most difficult to stop.

I know the notion of self-harm can be confusing and scary to people. We have a natural impulse toward survival, and self-harm seems to go against every instinct meant to keep us alive. But for me, and likely for your children, there is a logic and reasoning behind this behavior.

I was incredibly sensitive and didn’t know how to process my emotions.

Self-harm is, at its core, a person's mismanaged deep sensitivity. It's someone who feels deeply, absorbs everything around them, and struggles to process what they’re taking in. The voices in my head of criticism, anxiety, and blame were so loud. I didn’t know how to quiet them. I didn’t know how to care for myself and truly be present with my emotions.

I could put the pain somewhere else.

My inner world was consumed with self-loathing and despair. My baseline of feeling, of just being in my body, in my life, was agony. During the day, I felt like I was carrying around 500 pounds on my back. I'd look forward to getting home at the end of the day, and being able to cut. Cutting made me feel like I was putting all that pain somewhere else — like I could pull it out of my mind and put it in my skin. It was a way of releasing the emotional charge I felt all day.

Especially regarding the shame I had — shame for doing poorly on an exam, sounding stupid in class, having to miss a practice because I was too depressed — cutting helped me feel like I was “doing something” about my mistakes and challenges. It felt quicker and easier to cut myself than try to study or resolve things with a coach. I didn't actually feel capable of taking those steps to make amends, or face my sham. But the shame was overwhelming. So cutting helped me relieve it because then, at least I had punished myself.

It made me feel like my pain was real.

Cutting helped me validate myself because it made my pain visible. I would sometimes wonder if I was being dramatic, if things were really that bad, or if I was making everything up. I’d feel weak for struggling as much as I did. But when I cut, and there was a visible indicator of my pain, I would feel validated. I would trust that my pain was real.

It helped me feel seen, even if only by myself, and like my pain mattered. For a long time, I felt like I had to be bleeding for my pain to be valid.

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What helped me more than anything was learning how to become in touch with my sensitivity and channel it in healthy ways. In all the teens I know who struggle with self-harm, that's always the root of it, as it was for me — deeply sensitive humans who get overwhelmed by it, lost in it, burdened by it, suffer from it, and then turn that in on themselves.

Self-harm is mismanaged sensitivity, but your child can learn to manage it, honor it, and become skillful with it. Their sensitive hearts need love, understanding, and guidance to appreciate that what they really have is a gift when they know how to care for it.

If you’d like to hear me, I go deeply into the topic of self-harm in this episode of Parenting Post Wilderness with Parent Coach, Beth Hillman. We talk about why teens turn to destructive behaviors to relieve pain instead of “healthy” ones, and how you can support their sensitivity.