‘I couldn’t say the words’: communicative bodies and spaces in parents’ encounters with nonsuicidal self-injury

Abstract

There is a growing recognition that nonsuicidal self-injury commonly incorporates communicative and interactional dimensions. But regardless of whether we approach self-injury within the terms of deliberate interpersonal communication, it is undeniably something that conveys a significant impact into the social and communicative field between people. As such, it is something that can be approached and analysed as communicative in this more general sense. In this paper, we draw on 13 in-depth qualitative interviews with the parents of people who self-injure, conducted for a larger pilot study, to explore some of these more general communicative processes, spaces and impacts associated with self-injury. By providing a phenomenologically informed examination of parents' experiences, we argue that self-injury is in fact a richly communicative phenomenon, albeit one that cannot be adequately mapped using the traditional sender-receiver communication paradigm. To provide a more nuanced mapping, we look beyond this paradigm to include more subtle, ambiguous, pre-reflexive and bodily forms of communication. Indeed, self-injury offers a particularly powerful case study with which to think through a more complex model of communication, one that connects the interpersonal, intersubjective and intercorporeal levels, and that, as such, is more appropriate to the sociologies of everyday life and embodiment.

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

“…6 As well as recapping much of the previous decade's developments, the symposium and special issue also reported on some new avenues of self‐injury research. 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).…”

“…There is a growing body of evidence that self‐injury involves ‘a subtle and complex underlay of social and communicative, relational and interactional functions’ (Steggals et al., 2020a, p. 161). Certainly, self‐injury ‘is undeniably something that significantly impacts on the social and communicative field that exists between people’ (Steggals et al., 2020b, p. 271), and, as such, it affects personal relationships and spaces, such as the family home, regardless of whether it is intentionally communicative or relational in essence. But, more than this, Nock and Prinstein (2004, 2005) have argued that self‐injury may represent a strategy for eliciting responses from others and for managing the social environment.…”

“…In fact, they argue that ambiguity and ambivalence are critical to how self‐injury is understood and undertaken. Taking note of the characteristic ambiguity accompanying the disclosure of self‐injury to others (e.g., when a consistent pattern of concealing scars is otherwise inexplicably abandoned to go sunbathing in the family garden wearing a revealing top, see Steggals et al., 2020a, p. 166), they argue that this ambiguity is a key part of how such behaviour can constitute a kind of communicative action, by ‘short‐circuiting the weight and implications of more normative, obviously deliberate communication’ (Steggals et al., 2020b, p. 277).…”

“…For Steggals, Lawler and Graham, the tendency to conflate relational approaches to self‐injury with ‘attention‐seeking’ is rooted in an overly individualistic, and ultimately inadequate, model of subjectivity which rigidly emphasises the binary distinctions of inner/outer, individual/social, private/public, and intentional/unintentional. Against this model, self‐injury ‘works across and between the borders’ of these binaries (Steggals et al., 2020b) and so cannot be understood outside of a thoroughly relational conceptualisation of the subject (Crossley, 2011). They suggest that the idea of the ‘communicative body’ (Frank, 1991; O’Neil, 1989; Steggals et al., 2020a) and a ‘(co‐)embodied phenomenology’ that emphasises forms of intersubjective and intercorporeal communication alongside interpersonal communication (Steggals et al., 2020b), offers a way forward in this re‐conceptualisation.…”

“…Against this model, self‐injury ‘works across and between the borders’ of these binaries (Steggals et al., 2020b) and so cannot be understood outside of a thoroughly relational conceptualisation of the subject (Crossley, 2011). They suggest that the idea of the ‘communicative body’ (Frank, 1991; O’Neil, 1989; Steggals et al., 2020a) and a ‘(co‐)embodied phenomenology’ that emphasises forms of intersubjective and intercorporeal communication alongside interpersonal communication (Steggals et al., 2020b), offers a way forward in this re‐conceptualisation. As for the binaries, these are to be ‘reframed as patterns of enacted and embodied values rather than as ontological givens’ (Steggals et al., 2020a, p. 168).…”