Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation

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

"Cutting casts an eye on the emotional pains behind a dark adolescent practice."

Salon

"Levenkron understands the need for sharing basic information about this taboo subject as well as strategies for treatments. As a therapist who has worked with this problem for more than 20 years, he has much to offer. Levenkron is also a gifted writer, who, with this book, adds to the growing genre of creative nonfiction in which personal narratives...and engrossing stories provide information about a complex subject in a medical or scientific field."

New England Journal of Medicine

"The psychotherapist whose books (including the novel The Best Little Girl in the World) have illuminated the nature and treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anorexia nervosa and bulimia now shines the spotlight on another misunderstood behavioral disorder: self-mutilation. Levenkron begins by advising desensitization to the disturbing wounds, scars and blood-letting patients inflict upon themselves, redirecting focus toward the underlying issues. He likens cutting to OCD in that it is a compulsive act meant to relieve unbearable emotional pain, and to eating disorders in that it is a method of seizing control. Like anorexics, most cutters are girls, unable to express anger toward others, instead turning it against themselves. Levenkron is careful to explain that cutting is not the same as body piercing or tattooing, which reflect "adolescent trendiness," and that cutters are not suicidal, their wounds life-threatening only rarely and accidentally. Cutting is done secretly, "usually in a trancelike state," and "the act of creating pain... or drawing blood, is in itself the goal." Cutters then develop an "addiction" to this method of exchanging physical pain for emotional pain. With many examples from his practice, Levenkron provides clear and comprehensive information on the causes and effective treatments of this mysterious disorder, specific advice for therapists and an encouraging sense of hope for patients and their families."

Publishers Weekly