 Hello and welcome back. Today I'm talking about self-harm and in particular I'm going to address three common myths and misconceptions about self-harm that I hear all the time so I'm going to try and set the record straight. Number one is that self-harm is a tension seeking. Now a tension seeking is a phrase that is so heavily loaded and really negatively kind of considered and so I suggest instead that we just flip the phrase slightly and say that maybe someone who is self-harming might be attention-needing or attachment seeking. So this might be someone who actually needs a bit of input or someone who doesn't have a secure attachment and they're looking to find support and that their self-harm might be a method for doing that. In other cases of course self-harm can be completely hidden so there's no way that we can make the suggestion that that's in any way attention seeking. Loads of people go to great lengths to hide their self-harm so yeah try not to use the phrase attention seeking it's just so negative and it can make it really hard for people to come forward and ask for help if they are struggling with self-harm. Number two is that self-harm is a teenage thing so there's this idea that self-harm is a new phenomenon and that it only affects teenagers. It's not true self-harm has been around for years and years and years and years it goes back like literally hundreds of years but we have seen a huge increase recently and we do know that it is particularly prevalent amongst teenagers however we do see self-harm in different forms in younger children and also we see it right through the different age ranges too so whilst we might see the kind of greatest age of onset is during the teenage years actually this can affect anyone at any age and one of the things that can make it hard for people to get the support they need is the stigma that is attached with self-harm in adulthood for example and this idea that it's just a teenage thing and people grow out of it can be really tough. The other thing is obviously that some people might first start harming themselves when they are a teenager or younger but this might carry on for many years it's not something that you just grow out of unless you are supported in putting the right strategies in place to cope more healthily with the things that are distressing you. Number three is the idea that the bigger the wound the bigger the problem again generally not true so some people might have very superficial looking injuries but when you actually begin to talk to them you discover that what they are managing in terms of their experience or their thoughts or their feelings might be very severe but conversely you might come across someone who has very severe looking injuries but when you talk to them and find out what it is that they are responding to why it is that they're self-harming it might seem that the level of distress they're experiencing is disproportionate to the size of the injury and that can be for different reasons partly it's just that some of us are more resilient than others sometimes it might be that someone has been harming for a long time and they might need to harm themselves more and more seriously in order to get the same kind of physiological response that they once got so you might see quite a severe injury just to manage sort of normal day-to-day ups and downs for example and the the other thing is that sometimes self-harm is kind of a means of communication and we can sometimes get the idea that the only way that we can make ourselves heard is to hurt ourselves and so someone might hurt themselves in a relatively minor way in order just to be able to open that conversation up. One thing I would say though is that if you are working with the same person over time and you're seeing change in their injury that sometimes the change in the severity of the injury or in how much they care for that injury can reflect the kind of ups and downs in their ability to manage and so it can be worth exploring with them what's going on if things are changing. So there we go three common myths and misconceptions about self-harm I'd love to hear your thoughts on them too leave comments below if you've got others that you think we should be exploring. Okay thanks bye bye