The Scarred Soul: Understanding & Ending Self-Inflicted Violence ($11.16) by Tracy Alderman

The Scarred Soul explores the reasons behind this behavior and shows how to overcome the psychological traps that lead to self-destructive acts. There are numerous activities designed to help you better understand and cope with this difficult issue. Therapists, friends and family members of people who engage in self-inflicted violence can also benefit from reading this book.

Buy It | Comment on the Book

Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation ($17.50) by Steven Levenkron

Cutting takes the reader through the psychological experience of the person who seeks relief from mental pain and anguish in self-inflicted physical pain. Steven Levenkron traces the components that predispose a personality to becoming a self-mutilator: genetics, family experience, childhood trauma, and parental behavior. Written for the self-mutilator, parents, friends, and therapists, Levenkron explains why the disorder manifests in self-harming behaviors and, most of all, describes how the self-mutilator can be helped.

Buy It | Comment on the Book

Bodily Harm : The Breakthrough Treatment Program for Self-Injurers ($17.47) by Karen Conterio

Written by the directors of S.A.F.E. Alternatives, a self-injury treatment program, "Bodily Harm" is an authoritative examination of this alarming syndrome, offering a comprehensive treatment regimen. One reader exclaims "this is the first book that doesn't make the self injurer a victim. It empowers with accurate information as to the why's and wherefors of self-injury, and then the complete process used in the SAFE program for healing. The assignments in the book are difficult, but well worth the work. By processing through the emotoins brought up in these assingments, self-injury can become a thing of the past, and has for many individuals."

Buy It | Comment on the Book

back to top

A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain ($17.47) by Marilee Strong

It is a compulsion that, while shocking and bewildering to most people, affects 2 million or more Americans and countless others around the globe. Rejecting the classic psychiatric wisdom that views self-mutilation as a species of suicidal behavior, Strong links the phenomenon instead to the will to live--often in the face of such overwhelming childhood abuse that the resulting dissociative behaviors are something akin to posttraumatic stress disorder.

Through interviews with dozens of psychiatrists, doctors, researchers, clinicians, and cutters around the country, Marilee Strong discovers what factors most often lead to cutting, how feelings of rage and self- punishment are played out, and how cutters use the physical pain of cutting to blot out emotional pain locked inside. Strong reveals what people with the affliction and those close to them can do to start a process of healing.

Buy It | Comment on the Book

back to top

When the Body Is the Target : Self-Harm, Pain, and Traumatic Attachments ($48.00) by Sharon K. Farber, Ph.D.

Farber, a clinical social worker, offers insights for the mental health professional struggling to understand self-harm and its origins. Using attachment theory to explain how addictive connections to pain and suffering develop, she discusses many kinds of behavior and explores the language of self-harm and the translation of that language and its psychic functions in the therapeutic setting. She includes rich clinical material in providing a practical approach to the diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of such patients, and shows how the attachment relationship formed in treatment can serve as the cornerstone of therapeutic change.

From a reader: This book is an academic exploration of some pretty heady topics, and although I have no experience in psychoanalysis, I found it to be a real page-turner. The writing is perfectly descriptive but Farber uses fascinating examples in order to avoid alienating the layperson. She is interested in what is so ordinary about certain impulses, and the cases in her book are not monsters. If you are interested in the mind and what makes us human, read this book.

Buy It | Comment on the Book

Looking for a book, video, music?
Check out Amazon.com