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When Pain Is All You Have

Some people in great emotional pain turn to cutting, burning, and other types of self-abuse. How can you recognize this cry for help?

WebMD Feature

Reviewed by Craig H. Kliger, MD

Aug. 28, 2000 -- Lauren McEntire was 17 the first time she intentionally cut herself. She was sitting in a darkened movie theater next to a boy who was her best friend. On the other side of him sat his new girlfriend. "I was jealous. I was scared he wouldn't be my friend anymore," she says, two years later from her home in Austin, Texas. "But I didn't know how to tell him how I felt."

Instead, fidgeting nervously in the quiet theater, she yanked the tab off her soda can. Without much thought, she pressed its sharp edge deep into the flesh of her thumb. The pain and blood that followed made her feel, for the first time, as if she were in control. But with the blood came something more: anger. "A lifetime's worth exploded in that one minute," says McEntire. Within a month, she was a full-fledged self-injurer, graduating to a single-edged razor blade and using it to carve deep grooves into the skin of her arms and legs.

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Long misunderstood by outsiders, self-injury (also known as self-mutilation and self-abuse) is finally being taken seriously, and a growing crop of books, television programs, and even a recent made-for-TV movie are spotlighting this surprisingly common phenomenon. The audience is certainly out there: Although few firm statistics are available, those who have treated self-injurers estimate that about 2 million people in the United States engage in some form of this behavior. Cutting is the most common expression of this disorder, but burning, self-hitting, hair-pulling, bone-breaking, and not allowing wounds to heal are other variations.

While more than 70% of self-injurers are women, mostly between the ages of 11 and 26, they come from all races and social classes, says Steven Levenkron, MS, a psychotherapist in New York and author of Cutting. What self-injurers have in common, says Levenkron, is that they are often children of divorce, and as many as 90% grew up in homes where communication between parents and child was lacking and where messy problems were ignored, avoided, and ultimately left in silence.

Cuts Run Deep: Understanding Why

About 50% of self-injurers have a history of sexual or physical abuse, says Wendy Lader, PhD, a psychologist who co-founded and is co-director of SAFE (Self-Abuse Finally Ends) Alternatives, the nation's only in-patient center for self-injurers, in Berwyn, Ill.

Heather Collins, a 26-year-old from Oregon, says the physical pain she inflicted with her own hand for nearly a decade -- using razor blades to cut herself and smoldering cigarettes to burn her flesh -- helped her forget the emotional pain of a childhood marred by sexual abuse. "After I [cut or burned myself,] I felt better," says Collins. This kind of nonverbal expression of anger and frustration is common, says Levenkron. "Many cutters simply lack the language skills to express their emotions." Instead, they feel only self-loathing, alienation, and an intense desire to do themselves harm.

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