Bodywork: Self-harm, trauma, and embodied expressions of pain

Abstract

Self-harm, or self-mutilation, is generally viewed in academic literature as a pathological act, usually born out of trauma and/or a psychological and personality defect. Individuals who engage in self-harm are usually seen as damaged, destructive, and pathological. While self-harm is not a desirable act, this paper argues through the narratives of those who engage in such acts that self-harm may be better construed as a meaningful, embodied emotional practice, bound up in social (mis)understandings of psychological pain and how best to attend to such pain. In particular, this paper suggests that those who engage in self-harm practices are performing embodied, socially situated acts of healing, survival, and self-creation in a physical attempt to retell complex, fragmented stories of abuse, existential angst, trauma, and loss of self. While these individuals may be more or less successful in such attempts, this paper suggests that understandings of self-harm would benefit from more nuanced approaches to individuals’ embodied expressions of pain that take into account the difficult nature of psychological suffering and the effects of trauma.

The Violence of the Cut: Gendering Self-Harm

“…The bruise on the paper and Amber’s bruises in her accompanying story were subject to multiple readings. A nurse asked if “someone else did it.” This question—assumption perhaps—that someone else must have caused harm to Amber’s rib cage speaks to the more usual way in which violence is gendered when read on a female body: it is assumed to have come from “another,” often a “male other.” When enacting violence both on the self and on others, violence and aggression from women elicit shock, disbelief, disgust—pathologisation [ 42 ].…”

Young Peoples’ Perspectives on the Role of Harm Reduction Techniques in the Management of Their Self-Harm: A Qualitative Study

“…Self-harm is relatively common in adolescence, practiced by approximately one in five to one in ten young people (Doyle, Treacy, & Sheridan, 2015). Despite the perceived benefits of relieving emotional distress (Townsend, 2014), self-harm carries risks of scarring, tendon damage, and serious blood loss (Gurung, 2018), and is a risk factor for psychosocial problems (Borschmann et al, 2017), repeat self-harm (Cully, 2019), accidental death (Hawton, Harriss, & Zahl, 2006) and suicide (Hawton et al, 2015a). It is therefore important to understand how adolescents manage their self-harm in ways that reduce such risks.…”

The personal is social: Four sociological approaches to nonsuicidal self‐injury

“…For example, Steggals, Lawler and Graham studied the relational and communicative dimension of self‐injury (2020a, 2020b); and Amy Chandler and her colleagues Caroline King, Christopher Burton and Steve Platt studied how general medical practitioners make sense of self‐injury and negotiate the multiple challenges it presents. Other recent work includes Kesherie Gurung's (2018) paper on self‐injury as a form of meaningful ‘bodywork’ that confronts and transforms pain; David Le Breton's (2018) paper on self‐injury as a technique of adolescent identity formation; Chandler's collaboration with Zoi Simopoulou (2021) employing an arts‐based methodology to explore the binary ‘cuts’ between male/female, violence/vulnerability and inside/outside; and the Swedish social work researcher Nina Veetnisha Gunnarsson's searching analysis of self‐injury in terms of the sociology of shame (2021a, 2021b, 2021c; Gunnarsson & Lönnberg, 2021).…”

“…Given this, some, particularly in the psychiatric survivors' movement, have argued that self-injury should be de-medicalised (Pembroke, 1996; see also Gurung, 2018). Cresswell (2005aCresswell ( , 2005bCresswell & Brock, 2017) has analysed the testimonies of those who have received psychiatric treatment for self-injury, and the ways in which these personal testimonies (of both self-injury and medical treatment) function as a form of political practice which frames psychiatric discourse as an obstacle to self-understanding, and psychiatric practice as an obstacle to selfdetermination.…”

“…In fact, despite its epidemiological connection with suicide (Bates, 2005; Solomon & Farrand, 1996), self‐injury can be described in M.A. Simpson's phrasing as a kind of ‘antisuicide’ (1976): that is, far from being an attempt at self‐destruction, self‐injury represents, in complex and ambivalent ways, an attempt to survive, to manage suffering, and even to heal (Chandler & Simopoulou, 2020; Gurung, 2018; Le Breton, 2018). Nonetheless, just like suicide in Durkheim's day, self‐injury is commonly framed in both popular and professional discourse as a ‘wholly and claustrophobically personal crisis; something completely “inner” and therefore not “outer”, something individual and therefore not social and something private and therefore not interactional’ (Steggals et al., 2020a, p. 157).…”