exjuny wrote:Ok so I'm not sure whats normal (lol, normal) but I'm a 41 year old male and I've been self-mutilating for as long as I can remember. I realize there's a stigma attached and it defies social norms but can someone explain to me why. Why if it helps me and doesn't hurt anyone else why is there such pushback to stop or prevent it. I cut or burn for several different reasons but I can tall you that afterwards I always feel better than I did before hand....so why the anti?
It really sounds like self-harm has become so normalized to you over the years that you've lost (or never had) the grasp of how shocking and damaging a thing it really is. I get where you're coming from - I started self-harming at around age 8, and still self-harm now at 30. My parents responded to my self-harm with mockery or as though it were just a silly habit. However, for most people, (or healthy people), it's just completely horrifying. My current boyfriend was the one who actually made me realize that I was doing something seriously bad and detrimental and dysfunctional. If you've been self-mutilating for as long as you can remember, it's not going to seem like a big deal, because it's been normalized to some degree over the years, and it "works" as a short-term solution.
Why the anti?
- Most healthy people don't respond to stress by being violent toward themselves. They have healthy ways instead (which don't involve any harm toward themselves) of dealing with issues, so it's something which seems very hard to understand and so seems strange to others.
- Blood is blood. Gore is gore... People mostly tend to try to actively avoid those things: things that cause pain, blood and injury. Self-
inflicted gore takes it to another level of horrifying for many people.
- It actually
does hurt other people. If you have people who love you in your life, the knowledge that you're hurting yourself can be anything from deeply concerning and worrying, (knowing this is what you do), to actually traumatizing to them, (if for example, you're hacking at yourself in front of their eyes). I realize you probably don't self-harm in front of others, but still, it can absolutely cause emotional distress to people around you.
- It doesn't actually
solve anything... It's literally a dysfunctional way of handling issues, which carry certain risks depending on how you do it, how much you do it, and how and if you treat the wounds afterward. It might "work", for a period of time, but you'll always need to do it again because it doesn't solve the problem, and you're still hurting yourself. Any dysfunctional way of dealing with problems is just that: a dysfunction. It's in your best interest to learn how to replace a dysfunctional way of handling your stresses in a healthy way rather than self-injury.