Masturbation releases endorphins, right? See? Masturbation does solve everything.
My ex-girlfriend, when she was in high school, would heat up a spoon with a candle and burn herself with it. She never touched cigarettes, though. Obviously, the plural of anecdote is not data, but there’s at least one former SI who’s a non-smoker.
I’m just saying I doubt it is the endorphins that cause the benificial effect of cutting. I would be interested to know if cutting (which tends to cause little pain) releses as much endorphins as other forms of self-harm like punching a solid object or bruising. There were people in the other thread who seemed to suggest that pain was not necessary at all to receive the ‘benifit’ from cutting.
I’ve looked through some of the academic literature and it seems that chemicals that block the effects of beta-endorphins can be of help in preventing self injury. So at least in some cases the self injury is done to stimulate beta-endorphin release.
I can only say from my own experience: The feeling during the acts of cutting, punching or bruising are all much different, but the after effect was the same for me.
Punching walls seems to me to be a different sort of thing than cutting, burning, or bruising yourself. Punching a wall might end up injuring you, but you’re not really aiming the action at yourself.
You must never have punched a wall…
Punching a wall HURTS. Doing it once seems to be done mostly either because you missed your target or as transference (you’d like to hit the wife but hit the wall instead, SIL sees this in many of her ER patients). Doing it more than once is self injury.
I punched a wall once when I was 15 (transference). I’m told I also banged my head against one when I was three: I banged once, stopped, frowning, slapped the wall (yep, definitely hard), thought a bit, looked around, grabbed a pillow from a nearby armchair, placed pillow against wall, kept banging head against pillow. I was pissed, but neither dumb nor intent on hurting myself.
My cousin who would bang his head against a wall without the aid of a pillow later became a cutter.
Thanks for all the sharing so far. This is a very strange topic for me. It’s interesting that SailBunny is at Penn and has never encountered it but so many others have seen a lot of it. I’m with SailBunny on this and kind of out of the loop.
I think I’ve had my share of depression and bad feelings in my life - maybe more, maybe less than most - but it has just never occurred to me that I would get any kind of relief by SI. But my pattern seems to fit what’s been discussed above. I never smoked, never let myself get overweight.
And as the parent of teens this really scares the hell out of me.
As I said in the other thread, cutting feels like it would release something that is all pent up. When I despair that I am binging or going to binge, I think that cutting would be a good alternative. I don’t know if it’s the pain or just the localized feeling that I am doing something about the pent-up-ness.
I haven’t done it, but that is what it seems like it would do for me.