Self-Mutilating From The Media

Amy Gretzinger
Ms. Okusko
English Composition-4
May 25, 2011
Self Mutilating Self mutilation is a subject hard to understand. The boys and girls, men and women who self mutilate often do not understand their actions themselves. Self mutilating is their coping method. The way this method is learned is usually from the media. When searching for self mutilation related results the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and the video based website YouTube bring up many sites, and videos. When innocent minds who are going through a rough time in life seeing one video, and the relief that the self injurer in the video gets while committing the act could alter their thoughts to think they could self mutilate and get relief from the pain. Self
The profile self-injurer is usually a female, this does not mean that men do not self mutilate, but that a higher percentage of women commit self injury. This statistic may be because many women think negatively about their bodies, and that the ideal women should be tall, thin, and beautiful (Pomere 28). As teens men and women equally injure themselves but later on in life when boys reach adulthood they grow out of it (31). As a self injurer their body becomes their opponent. Also a self-injurer does not want to kill themselves but they want to or need to relieve the stress with pain. Many people who self injure have been through the following experiences; Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse during childhood, parental alcoholism or abuse by other drugs by parents, neglect or abandonment by parent, loss of a parent through death or divorce, tense or abusive relationship between parents, or pressure at school among peers (44). Most self injury victims share a multitude of personality traits, these traits would be; constant aim for perfection, dislike of one’s body, inability to cope with strong emotions, inability to release or express emotions to others, and frequent mood swings (45). The emotions triggering the act of self mutilation are anger, rejection, failure, loss of abandonment, or helplessness (45). A self injurer wants two things out of there self mutilating acts; one is to keep the self mutilation a secret, another is to remain in control of him or herself (45). Another reason many people self mutilate by branding, cutting, scarring, and piercing are because they are in a tribe. For thousands of years people have cut their bodies to produce scars (Williams 56). This cutting is usually for a rite-of-passage within their tribe. In Papua New Guinea, it was common to initiate girls at puberty with markings on the abdomen. The first menstrual period was a time for cutting her under the breast and on the