Self-Harm
Self-harm is often misunderstood.
It is often misinterpreted as suicidal behavior. Although it is associated with an increased risk of suicide and can overlap with suicidality, it can be intended by individuals to be a way to stay alive - a way to cope with emotion when one has learned to use this behavior to do so. That said, it is still a life-threatening behavior and is a #1 target in therapy at Centered Ground if it is present.
Stopping this behavior requires learning other ways to cope with emotion, and a willingness to disrupt patterns that maintain the behavior. Repeated hospitalization can be one pattern that maintains the behavior, and at Centered Ground, hospitalization is usually considered a last resort for safety. Instead, therapy focuses on helping you learn new ways to cope in your own environment, as long as you are committed to using skills instead of engaging in self-harm, and as long as we are communicating effectively.
Specifically, Centered Ground provides dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) for self-harm, including individual treatment, skills training in mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and coaching support between sessions. Extensive research supports this approach to overcoming self-harm. It is possible.
Skin Picking & Trichotillomania
In addition to self-harm behaviors such as cutting and burning, skin picking and hair-pulling can also cause tissue damage and is classified by some researchers as self-harm. At Centered Ground, we consider this behavior from an emotion regulation perspective. In this case, the emotion that underlies the behavior is usually anxiety, and the pattern of behavior is usually more compulsive rather than impulsive, which means, in part, that the behavior can be more methodical and urges may feel different than those associated with other forms of self-harm. Learning to tolerate and accept emotion and behavioral strategies to create a new pattern is critical in both behavior cases.
