What is self-injury?
Self-injury is a form of emotion regulation that provides relief when emotions are too intense to deal with. Watch psychologist Jennifer Hartstein, PsyD, explain this unhealthy behavior and describes the most common ways people self-injure.
Transcript
Self-injury is a form of emotion regulation that provides relief when the emotions are too intense
to deal with. [GENTLE MUSIC]
So for many people, they engage in some sort of self-injurious behavior when they are feeling something so intensely they don't know how to handle it.
And so they self-injure in some way, which brings that emotional intensity down to a manageable level.
Or conversely, they might be totally numb and use the self-injury as a way to feel something. So it's a way to regulate emotion,
albeit in an unhealthy waveforms.
Forms of self-injury can include-- cutting, burning, picking at your skin, punching walls, banging your head,
burning, embedding things in your skin, all sorts of things that create some sort of injury or self-harm
to the body without suicidal intent. They aren't necessarily linked. You aren't necessarily suicidal if you're self-injurious.
But you are regulating emotion in a potentially damaging and unhealthy way. [GENTLE MUSIC]
mental health behavior
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