Why - Part II of Self-Injury series
"Most women have not even been able to touch this anger except to drive it inward like a rusted nail."
As Miller says, "Men act out. Women act out by acting in." Another reason fewer men self-injure may be that men are socialized in a way that makes repressing feelings the norm. Linehan's (1993a) theory that self-harm results in part from chronic invalidation, from always being told that your feelings are bad or wrong or inappropriate, could explain the gender disparity in self-injury; men are generally brought up to hold emotion in.
Objective: What the researchers have found
People who self-injure tend to be dysphoric -- experiencing a depressed mood with a high degree of irritability and sensitivity to rejection and some underlying tension -- even when not actively hurting themselves. The pattern found by Herpertz (1995) indicates that something, usually some sort of interpersonal stressor, increases the level of dysphoria and tension to an unbearable degree. The painful feelings become overwhelming: it's as if the usual underlying uncomfortable affect is escalated to a critical maximum point. "SIB has the function of bringing about a transient relief from these [high levels of irritability and sensitivity to rejection]," Herpertz said. This conclusion is supported by the work of Haines and her colleagues.
In a fascinating study, Haines et al. (1995) led groups of self-injuring and non-self-injuring subjects through guided imagery sessions. Each subject experienced the same four scenarios in random order: a scene in which aggression was imagined, a neutral scene, a scene of accidental injury, and one in which self-injury was imagined. The scripts had four stages: scene-setting, approach, incident, and consequence. During the guided imagery sessions, physiological arousal and subjective arousal were measured.
The results were striking. Subject reactions across groups didn't differ on the aggression, accident, and neutral scripts. In the self-injury script, though, the control groups went to a high level of arousal and stayed there throughout the script, in spite of relaxation instructions contained in the "consequences" stage. In contrast, self-injurers experienced increased arousal through the scene-setting and approach stages, until the the decision to self-injure was made. Their tension then dropped, dropping even more at the incident stage and remaining low.
These results provide strong evidence that self-injury provides a quick, effective release of physiological tension, which would include the physiological arousal brought on by negative or overwhelming psychological states. As Haines et al. say
Self-mutilators often are unable to provide explanations for
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