SOME REASONS for SELF HARM-INJURY

LEARNED BEHAVIOR 

Parent figures with self-harm-injury behavior patterns may inherently transmit behavior to infants, children or young people. Self-harm is a maladaptive and ineffectual way of dealing with stressors and emotion. Sometimes people use it to indirectly comfort self. Example: After the fracture, they feel comforted by the healing process.

The Parental Disapproval Syndrome is another major cause of fear and negative programming. The syndrome develops because of experiencing your parents’ disapproval and resentment of that disapproval. One needs to learn how to approve or disapprove of their self. (Ref Book:  Rebirthing in the New Age – Leonard Orr & Sondra Ray).

Self-pity can run very deep making it hard to isolate and may also be transmitted. One feels the agony of self and other defeat and sinks into pity. Self and other defeat work in tandem. (Ref Book: Self Realization and Self Defeat – Author - Samuel J Warner Ph.D.)

Of course, other traits and characteristics are also grist for the mill in the making of human beings. Much has been uncovered about dysfunctional system and families and the huge drawback and stumbling blocks it causes! (Ref: ACOA – Adult Children of Alcoholics & Other Addictions).

Erroneous thinking patterns seem deeply engraved in society. They warp our view of the world, create havoc with rational and inhibit the vital use or development of critical thinking skills. There are other thinking patterns and distortions that produce some real crazy making behavior as well. Frequently, developmental disabilities, or mental/emotional illnesses factor in the mix.

TEN DISTORTED THINKING PATTERNS(Cognitive Distortions):

1. All-Or-Nothing Thinking – You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Overgeneralization – You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental Filter – You pick out a single negative defeat and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.
4. Disqualifying the positive – You dismiss positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. Jumping to conclusions – You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
   A. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out.
   B. The fortune teller error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization– You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”
7. Emotional Reasoning – You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.
8. Should Statements – You try to motivate yourself with should’s and shouldnt’s, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders and lock us into low self-esteem. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
9. Labeling and Mislabeling – This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a nincompoop.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
10. Personalization – You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

HERE ARE THE TAKE-AWAYS:

• Know the patterns.  Familiarize yourself with the ten distorted thinking patterns.
• Recognize distorted thought patterns.  Once you know the patterns, you can start to recognize thought patterns that may not be serving you well.
• Challenge your own thinking.   See if the patterns resonate especially in situations where your thinking or feeling is not particularly effective.  For example, you might find that you have a habit of jumping to negative conclusions, without factual evidence, you might find that you let negative emotions get in the way of interpreting situations.

Use this list to challenge your thinking. In any scenario where your thinking starts to or seems particularly negative, it’s to do a sanity check against erroneous thinking patterns.


     


Dr. David D Burns - Feeling Good Book
 https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/self-help/feeling- good/