I don’t understand the mindset that causes people to be self destructive. I kind of understand it if we’re talking about suicide, because in addition to being the ultimate in self destructive options, the end result means that the person with the rope or bottle of pills isn’t going to be around to suffer the ensuing consequences.
But what I don’t understand is self destructive behavior that a person is going to live through, and then have to live with. It’s almost as if the person has some strange attraction to misery that compels them to knowingly behave in a manner that’s certain to create some variety of lingering personal unpleasantness.
I have to assume that there are three primary reasons for pernicious comportment. I wanted to call the behavior harmful stupidity, but although the harmful part of the phrase is accurate all of the time, the stupidity part is a little bit more complicated. I say that because it’s been my experience that self harm isn’t exclusively a trait of the unenlightened.
In fact, I’ve watched very aware people behave similarly to their less gifted counterparts, and to be candid I find it fascinating to witness. Also, I think it’s prudent to keep watch on intelligent people who dabble in self harm. I say that because the line between self harm and harm in general is a fine one, and so it’s best to look for warning signs for when and if that transition occurs.
One moment they’re a guy named Ted living a hermit’s existence in a cabin in the woods as some sort of punishing isolation, and the next moment they’re mailing bombs to revolt against a corrupt industrial technological society.
Anyway.
My three assumptive reasons for the behavior are attention, confusion and masochism. Masochism is an interesting affliction and the simplest of the three assumptions. Essentially a person enjoys pain and or humiliation, and often that person achieves some sort of sexual gratification from the process.
So there’s that.
Attention seeking and confusion are not entirely distinct from one another, and often the attention seeking is a result of confusion. A good example of this behavior is cutting. Psychologists postulate that this conduct is a way to turn the invisible into something visible. A substitution of emotional pain for physical pain. But no matter how many times I try to understand the logic behind that particular action choice I always conclude that the person in question was confused.
It’s similar to punching holes in the drywall when you’re pissed off, except drywall can be repaired and forgotten about for the most part. Scars not so much, and every time the weather is nice and your friends are headed to the beach, you get to deal with a visible reminder of your confusing moments with a utility knife.
It’s kind of fucked up, but so is masochism and so the majority of the self harm people choose methods that don’t require scars or a safe word. Cutters generally wear long sleeves and masochists tend to stay in makeshift basement dungeons, but the attention seekers are by their very nature public. They require an audience, because I think deep in their subconscious they hope that if they create enough of a spectacle that someone or some agency will notice, and help them to alleviate their confusion.
Sometimes family and friends notice and sometimes the police notice. It depends on how much attention is being sought, and whether the attention intention is to be shot. Although in America you don’t necessarily need the police to get shot. Depending on how aggressively a person behaves in their pursuit of attention, the actual trigger could be pulled by a family member or a bystander who felt threatened.
Speaking of triggers.
It’s odd how often a self harming situation will get triggered by an occurrence that’s not even remotely related to the underlying source of confusion. It’s truly weird how often a person will have a complete meltdown over something trivial, and then after an arrest or an appointment with a counsellor, will discover that the real meltdown motivation was hidden in a sea of confusion.
Sometimes the meltdown is a verbal tirade. Those situations are generally manageable if everyone just steps back and lets the orator run out of steam. But quite often the desire to cause harm to ones self takes control, and the melting party in question continues to escalate until they get a response that delivers the personal harm they were looking for.
There’s all kinds of escalation depending on the circumstances. Sometimes a nonsensical tirade over a fast food order turns into a racial slur aimed at the lady in the takeout window. Then it turns out that although the trigger was cold fries, the real reason for the outburst was something else entirely.
Like a fight with your significant other, or having just left the vet’s office after putting your dog down. But instead of dealing with the heartbreak of a deceased dog, the emotional confusion eventually leads to you becoming a viral sensation on YouTube that ensures you get fired from your realtors job.
I guess humiliation and unemployment kind of takes you mind off a pet passing.
At first I thought it was curious how often these emotional volcano’s erupt in front of people the erupted is fond of. But after some thought I concluded that if you’re looking to cause harm to yourself, then what better way to do it than to antagonize a person with the capacity to cause you the most harm.
Other than the police of course.
I can’t quite grasp the cause and effect part of relationships and emotionally induced self harm. Every day there are countless relationships destroyed by confused people misdirecting their anger and anxiety at the persons who happen to be nearest and dearest to them. I think that we all do it from time to time and some people do it all the time. In fact it seems to me that anyone with an enduring relationship has a stockpile of moments where they or their counterpart came unglued and the other person just took it like a man.
Or a woman.
But everyone has a line that if crossed causes damage that can’t be undone. Cross that line often enough and you find yourself throwing cold fries at the take out girl or punching holes in the drywall, because there’s no one left at home to unload your confusion onto.
And yet the pursuit of self harm see’s those lines crossed everywhere and all the time. I’m not absolutely certain but my best guess is that each and every relationship on the planet is held together with a tolerance factor built in. A factor that determines how many irrational freak outs a particular individual can tolerate.
That tolerance level has some qualifiers. For starters there’s the personality of the persons involved. Some people can take a lot of abuse and understand that the abuse is kind of random and not aimed at them specifically. So they can shrug it off as a quirk of their partner. Other people have a low tolerance level for being the target of someone elses angst, and not surprisingly those people tend to be single.
Because we’re only human and everyone snaps periodically. We’re emotional creatures and passion of any variety tends to drift into irrationality territory. Look no further than people that are passionate about their beliefs. Religion and politics are two good examples where passionate often means violent, and violence is pretty much a guarantee that some harm is coming your way. Because violence breeds more violence and eventually there’s going to be a proportional return of fire. But what we miss is that the return fire was of our own making. We created a self harm situation by initiating the firefight.
Actually.
Newtons third law doesn’t apply very well to people. I suppose that like all laws there has to be a mechanism for enforcement, and it’s a tough assignment to force people to respond proportionally to an action they feel has negatively impacted them in one way or another. So, no enforcement agency means people are free to respond as they see fit, and laws are kind of irrelevant if they’re open to that level of individual interpretation. In some instances we may see a people reaction to an action that is both opposite and equal, but I’m guessing it’s a rare occurrence.
We’re much better at opposite and unequal. Disproportional responses are much more to our liking.
Because we’re emotional creatures. So the point I’m trying to make is to examine your emotional motivations. Try and understand what’s behind the desire to create a situation that is going to cause you harm of any variety.
And then stop that shit. It’s in your own best interests.