How does one explain or begin to understand when a pre-teenager who comes from a loving and well off family, doing well in school and has no history of being violent starts hurting herself with just about anything she can get hold on to, including a pen? She could not explain why and she understands it is wrong, but she is suffering from a very deep sense of unexplainable sadness that was so overwhelming. Hurting herself or even taking her own life were the only things she could think of to cope.
It is not human nature to hurt oneself. We are born to survive and to preserve ourselves that we fight or flight for our lives. When a person starts cutting himself or even tries to kill himself, the negative emotion such as deep sadness, anger, guilt, fear, hatred or lack of self-worth must be already unbearable that hurting oneself is the only way to cope. Physical wounds can be cleaned, bandaged and even heal, and it temporarily distracts the mind from the agonizing emotional pain. However, when the root cause is not addressed, the emotional/mental agony comes back and the vicious cycle of hurting oneself continues.
Under hypnotherapy, we were able to trace her deep sense of sadness from the loss of a dear family member some time ago. She was actually grieving, something she has not been able to do as much as she wanted or needed to at that time.
In this day and age, we seem to be living in a world where we think we are always being judged. Showing emotion could be seen as a sign of weakness. When we feel pain or sadness, we are asked to “suck it up and move on.” When we watch a sad movie, we do not want to show others that we are crying. We get laughed out for being emotional. We want to look strong even when we are hurting inside. We teach boys to ‘tough it out’, to refrain from expressing their feelings – except perhaps for anger – and, above all, not to appear to be vulnerable. We end up bottling negative emotions but over time, these emotions will create cracks and will come out like lava from a dormant volcano usually in the form of ‘unexplainable or uncontrollable emotion or behaviour’.
Encourage your children to fully express themselves. We are humans and emotion is perhaps the biggest thing that differentiates us from robots. We are meant to experience the full range of emotions. Suppressing emotions do not serve long term as it will resurface later on in their lives. Ask them to cry if that makes them feel good. Once they have emptied themselves then they can move on and fill up themselves with positive emotions.
Lesly Juarez
Raj Eiamworakul
