What is Self Harm?
Self-harm is when you hurt yourself as a way of dealing with very difficult feelings, painful memories or overwhelming situations and experiences.
Some people have described self-harm as a way to:
Some people have described self-harm as a way to:
- express something that is hard to put into words
- turn invisible thoughts or feelings into something visible
- change emotional pain into physical pain
- reduce overwhelming emotional feelings or thoughts
- have a sense of being in control
- escape traumatic memories
- punish themselves for their feelings and experiences
- stop feeling numb, disconnected or dissociated
- create a reason to physically care for themselves
- express suicidal feelings and thoughts without taking their own life.
Self Harm in Art
Daniel Regan
There have been some periods in his life when Daniel hasn’t self-harmed at all. In others, he’s harmed himself intensely. He tries to take each day as it is, telling himself, “You haven’t done it for two weeks, so don’t do it now.”
Because of this struggle, he sees his behaviour as addictive. “The thought gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and so I get stuck in this cycle of responding to the thought, and then engaging in it, and then being embarrassed and ashamed.” It ends up with him getting stuck in a cycle.
|
Daniel Regan self-harmed at secondary school, at university and at times during his career as an artist. In his most recent artwork, he confronts this personal history.
In Threshold, his latest art project, he uncovers the stories behind them. Daniel began to self-harm at the age of 14. Self-harm is when people intentionally hurt themselves, usually to cope with difficult or painful emotion. It can take the form of hitting, burning or punching, but for Daniel it was cutting. As soon as he hurt himself for the first time, Daniel realised what he was doing wasn’t what most people would find normal. “I remember thinking from that moment onwards that I’d crossed over into a different world,” he says. “I thought that I wouldn’t be able to talk to my friends about this.”
|