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Treating teen self-harm E-mail

Aim for long-term stability, not a quick solution

As a parent, you must come to terms with the importance of understanding why your troubled teen engages in self-harm. Knowing the reason why your teen self-injures can be the first step towards guiding your adolescent away from this detrimental coping method and help you lead him/her towards healthier means of coping with feelings. It is difficult to be the parent of a teenager engaging in self-harm. You know that your child’s physical well-being is at stake and because of this you want him/her to give up such harmful behavior as soon as possible. But trying to force wellness and rushing treatment of such a disorder can prove to be counter-productive. From here, a battle of forces can ensue between child and parent/therapist which may bring even more struggle to your teen’s table. Now, he/she must not only deal with inward struggle of the self but struggle with an outward force as well. This can feel like chaos for one suffering from self-harm.

Instead, it is vital to aim for long-term stability and not just the quickest path to what may be short-term wellness. Initially, the conceptualization of a treatment plan to combat an injurer’s impulses and be the foundation for future stability may be of significant help.

Dealing with the judgment of others

An important matter to consider is the physical wounds themselves which are inflicted by the self-injurer. A number of self-injurers do not get the proper medical care for their wounds because of their fear for the judgment of physicians or other medical staff. A female teen self-injurer recalls the look an attending physician gave her as he tended to her wounds—“The way he took a look at my wrists and then stared me back in the eye, just left me feeling like I wanted to curl up inside and hide.” Talk to your teen’s therapist about letting medical practitioners in the local scene know more about self-injury to avoid situations like these that may aggravate your teenager’s sensitive feelings further.

Address the deep-seated issues of the self-injurer

The key idea behind treatment of self-harm is showing the afflicted other ways that he/she may deal with stress in a healthy way. Whatever deep issues that may be laying beneath his/her everyday problems should be addressed in psychotherapy or guided talks with a parent. Because of these points, it may be more beneficial for a troubled teen if he is out facing reality, and not just hospitalized every time he/she acts up. A parent should look to hospitalization as one of the last options, used only when he/she is dealing with suicide attempts or acute self-injury.
 
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