Why Do Teens Cut Themselves?

Do you have a teenager who cuts themselves, and you feel scared and unsure of how to handle the situation? 

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If so, you likely wonder why do teens cut themselves. 

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Knowing that your child is harming themselves on purpose alarms parents who want to help but don’t know how to gain an understanding of what’s prompting their children to behave that way. 

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Learn more about our teen self-harm treatment or verify your insurance now.

What is Self-Injury? 

Before addressing the question, “Why do teens cut themselves?”, let’s talk about self-injury itself, also known as self-harming. 

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Self-injury is the act of purposely hurting one’s physical self because of difficult, frightening, or painful emotions and memories. 

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The person may use methods such as cutting, burning, biting, scratching, hair pulling, or damaging their bones. Many people start by hurting themselves once or twice, but go on to engage in the behavior regularly. 

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They often hide their wounds and injuries with long-sleeve shirts, coats, and pants. While self-injury is treatable, it must be done under the care of a licensed therapist or facility.

Why Do Teens Cut Themselves?

At the end of the day, any parent of a young person who self-harms wonders this: Why do teens cut themselves? 

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Cutting can be triggered by different things or a combination of one or more. The most common reasons for cutting include:

Emotional Coping Tool

Teenagers are often consumed by emotions that can be frightening, frustrating, confusing, and overwhelming. Some have trouble acknowledging or expressing them and end up cutting to help soothe how they feel and minimize emotions.

A Sign They Need Help

Teenagers who feel upset and aren’t sure how to put it into words may cut to try to signal to their parents and others that they are suffering. While it seems obvious to others that it’s easier just to speak up and ask for help, for a teen who cuts, it’s not that simple. They use their actions instead of words.

Signs of a Mental Health Disorder

Cutting is a possible symptom of several different types of mental health disorders. A teenager may engage in cutting, among other signs that they have a mental illness, because they don’t know how to stop. Attending therapy will help them improve their mental health and learn healthy alternatives, so cutting no longer feels like a necessary evil.

To Relieve Feelings of Numbness

At times, young people can feel completely overwhelmed by their lives and feel so numb that they cut themselves just to feel something. As counterintuitive as that seems to outsiders, the teen is trying to feel something to counter the numbness they feel. 

Peer Pressure

Teenagers who cut may gravitate toward one another because they crave someone who knows what they go through. Someone who is in a clique or has a few friends who harm themselves may feel pressure to join them, not unlike the pressure to smoke or drink. What may start as a one-time event can become a habit and need professional intervention.

Trauma-Based Experiences

A child who experiences trauma often ends up shutting down and feeling unable to communicate their emotions and thoughts to others. Adverse childhood experiences or recent traumatic events can leave teens feeling vulnerable and frightened. Often, it takes professional treatment for them to open up about what happened and begin healing. 

Is Cutting Really a Problem for Teens?

The rates of how many people engage in self-harm or non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) have increased dramatically over the past 15 years. 

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About one in six adolescents has self-harmed at least once, with most of them stopping after a few acts. However, many continue to use cutting and other self-harm behaviors over long periods. College students self-harm at a rate of about 15%. The average age at which a person begins self-harming is around 13 years old. 

How is Teenage Cutting Treated?

After answering the question, “Why do teens cut themselves?”, the next one is how is cutting treated? Teenagers will usually attend two or more types of therapy to help them get control of their behaviors. These include:

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• Clinical therapies
• Holistic therapies
• Family therapy
• Education services
• Independent living skills training
• Neurofeedback therapy
• Medication management
• Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)
• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

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Teens may also respond well to using prescription drugs that address mental illnesses that include cutting as a symptom, such as depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, PTSD, borderline personality disorder, and more.

Begin Treatment for Teenagers Who Cut at Horizon Recovery

Have you run out of options for helping your teenager stop cutting themselves, and want the professional help it takes them to recover from this mental health disorder?

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Horizon Recovery employs a talented staff of licensed and experienced therapists and other mental healthcare clinicians. We work in tandem with adolescents to understand why they feel the need to hurt themselves and how to overcome it. 

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We offer programs including teen residential treatment, Partial Hospitalization Programming (PHP), and Intensive Outpatient Programming (IOP)

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Contact us today to talk about how we can help your teenager eliminate the urge to cut. Let us show them the way to a more peaceful and productive path. 

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