Self-Harming is an affliction caused by acute mental stress. I am no psychologist and cannot even begin to explain the reasons why beyond a genuine and intuitive feeling, a kind of gut instinct that I have come to trust more and more as I get older.

 

.You've read my books for yourself so you can judge for yourselves how “in touch" I am (or not, whatever the case may be).

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If you want to try to climb inside the head of a self-harmer (I am not sure I like that appellation) think about something you might do. Have you ever watched an emotional movie and been determined not to cry. What do you do? Do you pinch yourself or dig your nails in so that the pain serves as a distraction or alternative form of pain to the emotion that is rising. While harmless if only done during a particularly emotional scene this is exactly the principle behind self-harming.

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Self-Harming often involves cutting, burning and picking at wounds (often caused by an earlier self-harming incident) and those who do so usually do it for four basic reasons.

• Pain – a desire to feel something, when life left them numb.

• Punishment – corresponds with a sense of guilt or lack of self-worth.

• Distraction – to provide an alternative to any distressing situations that are being experienced, including memories and flashback

• Regulation – to provide a temporary outlet for overwhelming emotions. Pain does something chemical – an endorphin release – which may provide a temporary release and even a kind of “high”. Sadly, it is often followed by feelings of guilt and shame which only serve to accelerate the cycle and lead to more situations.

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Within my novels we are presented with Ania who is actually emotionally very unstable and self-harms effectively for all four reasons. I will try to keep it down to a minimum so not to spoil things too much if you haven’t read the books yet.

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She has latched onto “I am Machine” by Three Days Grace – she calls it her anthem and one of the lines she strongly identifies with is 'I am machine, a part of me wishes I could just feel something.’ In her back story she goes through a period of excessive drinking, during her mid-teens (and much more), and while this in many ways is a normal phase of growing up, she does far more than her peers.

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Within the novel, we see this need to self-harm in moments when she wants to beat herself about the head, but more pointedly after her last occasion with Elwira when she goes off to the woods by herself. Even her extreme desire to humiliate herself before Dominika could be seen as a self-harming activity. Finally, and even more dramatically, it is laid bare in her last encounter in the hotel; an encounter that Dominika describes as “self-harming by proxy.”

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In writing about such an emotive theme, my aspiration is to bring my readers in touch with the reality of what can happen; to show those who do self-harm that they are not alone and most importantly – through Dominika – Ania has a way out. Secondly, my hope is to bring the majority of us who don’t self to a position of understanding in which we can draw closer to such people with the intention of providing support. Such identification of the issue can only help.