Self-Mutilation? Here's a Counseling Tip

By Rick Thomas

 

I received an email recently from someone who is trying to help a family. A daughter in the family is into self-mutilation (more commonly called cutting). The helper was asking me how she could effectively counsel this family's daughter. The question regarding cutters is becoming more and more prevalent in counseling. It is epidemic among some teens in the way that drugs were a big thing in the sixties and seventies.

 

Drugs are still a big thing, but it seems that many kids are seeking alternative ways to act out their frustration. The cutting, of course, is not the real issue. Cutting is merely outward behavior that springs from internal turmoil. The core issues could be varied and mixed. I suggested to my friend that some of the core issues in cutting could be guilt/shame, frustration, anger, fear, insecurity, confusion, hopelessness, and a growing detachment from their culture.

 

Cutting is, in some cases, a way of "letting the pain out" (as one teenager told me several years ago). For this girl, there was so much pent-up conflict that cutting herself seemed right. This teenager was, for the most part, all alone. Her parents were unable or unwilling to come alongside her to speak into her world.

 

My other teen friend said that he cut himself because he came to the place where he felt guilty for most things that went bad in his world, whether he was the cause of it or not. He had been conditioned to think bad things of himself because of the continual dripping of negative reports from parents and other authority figures in his life. In short, he was blamed for most everything. When things went wrong, he just took it out on himself rather than waiting for the usual punishment. Shaping influences can be an awful thing. We are all shaped by a variety of things: family, experiences, education, society, culture, genetics, economics, personal choices. Like a palm tree at the beach that leans inland because of the consistent winds from the ocean, we can be bent in the wrong direction by the consistent negative influences in our lives. Fortunately, these shaping influences do not determine us. We can change. There is always hope for change as long as we have air to breathe. When change is desired, the proper course of action is to have a clear perspective of objective truth. Because we are all often subjective in our thinking, it is hard for us to see objectively. In fact, no one is completely objective.

 

Therefore, we come to trust our methods, philosophies, and interpretive grids to guide us in the right direction. No matter which way we turn, we have to act out our life by faith. That is, faith that we are doing the right thing. Ultimately, we have to determine what truth is. Everyone is seeking it and most everyone has an opinion as to what truth is. I am reminded of the couple I was counseling a number of years ago. I asked them to describe to me the mug setting on my desk. The woman said it was pretty, big, had flower-type things on it as well as a chip. The man said it reminded him of Arizona because of the earth-tones, and that it was a "man's" cup. He would not have noticed the chip until his wife mentioned it. Their descriptions of the mug were radically different. Why? Because each one of them had an interpretive grid through which they filtered all data. That interpretive grid was shaped different for different reasons. At the end of the day, we had two people looking at the same thing (a mug) but interpreting it very differently. It is a rare jewel to find someone who is pursuing objective truth. And where is that truth? We believe and teach that there is only one place known to man where objective truth can be found: it's God's Word.