Description
- Provides a compassionate, accessible approach to the problem of self-injury in youth
- Helps parents identify causes of a child’s self-injury, develop skills for managing it, and recognize when to seek professional help
- Emphasizes the importance of healthy family communication, especially around emotions
Subtle scars disappearing up a shirt sleeve, unexplained bruises, burn marks. As many as one out of every four young people engage in non-suicidal self-injury, defined as the deliberate destruction of body tissue without suicidal intent. Parents who uncover this alarming behavior are gripped by uncertainty and flooded with questions–why is my child doing this? Is this a suicide attempt? What did I do wrong? What can I do to stop it? And yet basic educational resources for parents with self-injuring children are sorely lacking.
Healing Self-Injury provides desperately-needed guidance to parents and others who love a young person struggling with self-injury. First and foremost, adolescent psychologists Janis Whitlock and Elizabeth Lloyd-Richardson believe that parents must appreciate how important their role is in their child’s recovery; there is a lot that parents can do to support their self-injuring children. This book offers strategies for identifying and alleviating sources of distress in children’s lives, improving family communication (particularly around emotions), and seeking professional help. Importantly, it also provides compassionate advice to parents with personal challenges of their own, explaining how these can impact the entire family. The book will help parents partner with their children to identify, build, and use skills that will assist them in recovering from self-injury. Vivid anecdotes drawn from the authors’ extensive in-depth interviews with real families in recovery from self-injury put a human face on what for many families is a distressing and often isolating experience.
Healing Self-Injury is a must-have for parents who want to assist in their child’s recovery, as well as for anyone who lives with, works with, or cares about self-injuring youth and their families.
Table of Contents
Preface: Why you and why us?
Introduction.
Part 1: NSSI Background and Basics
Chapter 1. The Basics of Self-Injury
Chapter 2. The family experience of self-injury
Chapter 3. The Context of Self-Injury: Where did it come from?
Chapter 4. Where it starts and why it works
Part 2: Recovery, treatment, and growth
Chapter 5. Recovering from self-injury
Chapter 6. An Introduction to Therapy: Talking with your child about therapy and finding the right therapist
Chapter 7. Therapy for self-injury
Chapter 8. Beyond surviving: From Disorder to Growth & Discovery
Part 3: Parents as partners: Skills and tools for helping yourself and your child
Chapter 9. I have feelings too! Understanding mindfulness and the role of our own automatic thoughts and reactions
Chapter 10. Becoming a Mindful Parent: Strategies and skills for parenting a child that self-injures
Part 4: Practical Matters
Chapter 11. Positive communications during challenging times: Dealing with authority issues, power struggles, and staying calm when your child is not
Chapter 12. Establishing Guidelines and Expectations for Managing Self-Injury Behaviors
Chapter 13. Collaborations critical for recovery
