It seems like a lot of people are afraid to try to help those who self-injure, partially because they don't know what to say or how to approach the subject. SI is a sticky situation and sometimes seems overwhelming to talk about. I thought maybe if I, as a self-injurer, wrote up some suggestions, it might help those who are brave enough to try to help. (Note: In About Bipolar Chat you are never obligated to take on a one-on-one chat with a self-injurer. You can usually ask a host or assistant, privately, if there is someone present who can talk to a self-injurer at the time.)
When you talk with someone who SI's, you may feel a variety of emotions: anger, frustration, empathy, sympathy and sadness.
Anger and Frustration
You might feel that the SI behavior is unnecessary, which might anger you. It may be very frustrating to hear that someone continues to self-injure on a regular basis. You might feel the need to scold the person or tell him or her to stop self-injuring. This frustration comes about from your inability to control others' behaviors. No matter how much you may dislike what the self-injurer does, and no matter how much you might try to control what he or she does, you simply cannot. Realizing your helplessness in this situation may also cause you to feel anger and frustration.
Empathy, Sympathy, and Sadness
Understanding how much another person hurts emotionally is good and bad. It allows you to help. But it also may cause deep psychological pain within you.
Empathy is the "ability to understand the perspective and situation of another." When you are empathetic you are able to enter the emotional world of another. You take perspective and see the world through the eyes of that person. Of course it is impossible for you to feel exactly what another feels and to experience what he or she experiences. But empathy may help you to gain understanding of the self-injurer's situation.
Self-injurers feel a lot of emotional pain. Understanding this pain is very helpful when you are supporting and assisting the SI'er. But there is a negative part to empathy; that is the loss of detachment or "separate perspective." When you are looking into and experiencing another person's inner world, it does affect you. As a human being you are often unable to stop this, so as a result you might feel some of the sadness and pain of the SI'er. So empathy might result in sadness.
You might feel sad for the person who SI's. This sadness you feel for another is sympathy. When we feel sympathetic towards another person, we see him or her as someone worth our pity, which can be a condescending view. Empathy is a helpful emotion, but sympathy is not. Sympathy puts the SI'er in an inferior position. When we feel sympathy, we presume to understand how the other person feels and how that person see his or her situation. A self-injurer might see SI as a positive behavior that helps him or her survive. But from a sympathetic stance the SI might look like a negative behavior. So basically sympathy and the sadness that may come with it are not useful; rather, sympathy blocks understanding and "objectifies the person for whom you feel pity."
Thoughts You Might Have
Along with the feelings you might have because of SI behavior are thoughts that reinforce and support these feelings. There are a large variety of thoughts that often come when you come in contact with someone who self-injures, such as:
- "You're crazy."
- "You're doing this to manipulate me."
- "I can fix this."
- "You're not who I thought you were."
