Healing Self-Injury

I wanted to share the wisest sentence I have heard about healing from SIV. This pure and simple sentence is the answer I use when I get asked “How can I make myself stop cutting, burning, punching myself?” I say the same when I am asked by friends and family of people who self-injure, or mental health or criminal justice professionals, how to “end self-mutilation.”

Most people, even some who live with SIV, focus almost completely on making SIV go away, as if it were an evil to be eradicated, after which there would be peace for all. This attitude is understandable, yet it has caused incomprehensible suffering for many who have lived with SIV. When you only care about making a behavior stop you will do anything you feel you can to make it stop. So the mental health community, and the general public as well, have accepted the need to “force” people to stop SIV. What does this force look like? Simply stated, coercion is never pretty. Nor is it effective. Force, most often, replicates previous trauma that the person who is living with SIV is trying to cope with.

If you keep healing, you will reach a point where you no longer need SIV. That will be your time to live without it. In the meantime acknowledge that it serves as well as harms, and nurture compassion for yourself while you are on the journey. SIV does not need to be forcibly stopped. SIV often helps people cope when suicide seems the only possible solution (many people don’t understand this and equate SIV with suicide attempts). I think it is crucial that we find things to live for, whether we self-injure or not, as we struggle with the pain of our histories. Many of us go on for our children or other groups of people we care about. Some turn to the arts or nature. We can discover things we are passionate about to balance the pain and the fear that we live with. And we can find others who share the journey. It helps to have a safe place to discuss all this, and that is how I hope this blog feels – like a safe place. What is it that keeps you going?