Healed scars from prior self harm - cuts on patient's arm

A new study offers a provocative explanation for why physical injury can temporarily ease psychological distress: for some people who self-harm, the boundary between emotional experience and bodily sensation may be unusually difficult to distinguish. The research does not frame self-harm as a simple choice or establish a single cause, but instead points toward how people intuitively understand their own minds and bodies.

The study, published October 22 in Scientific Reports, was led by Northeastern University psychologist Iris Berent with Chelsea Boccagno and Jill M. Hooley. It focuses on nonsuicidal self-injury, or NSSI: deliberately hurting the body without the intention of dying. The behavior can function as a short-term response to overwhelming distress, even though its relief is temporary and the consequences can be serious. The research connects that paradox to the way people perceive the mind-body relationship.

Most people show an intuitive leaning toward dualism, the idea that the mind and body are separate kinds of things. The researchers contrasted that tendency with physicalism, which treats mental and physical experiences as parts of one unified system. Participants with more frequent histories of self-injury were more likely to give physicalist responses, while those who had recently self-injured also had greater difficulty explaining what had prompted the behavior. Those findings suggest that the problem may not be only intense emotion, but trouble identifying and interpreting what that emotion is.

That distinction helps explain why physical pain might feel more accessible than psychological pain. A bodily sensation is immediate, concrete and difficult to ignore; an emotional state can be diffuse, confusing or impossible to name. The study’s authors suggest that when distress cannot be clearly recognized, a physical sensation may provide a more legible signal. Related clinical material notes that the body’s pain response can briefly produce chemicals associated with relief, though that effect does not last and can reinforce a harmful cycle. Clinical guidance describes this temporary relief as one reason self-harm can become a coping mechanism.

The Finnish figure Kivutar provides an unusually fitting cultural metaphor for the research. In traditional accounts, the “Lady of Pain” gathers suffering, contains it on a pain mountain or boils it down in a vessel, transforming something overwhelming into something that can be stored and managed. Older accounts portray Kivutar as a benevolent remover of pain, rather than simply a destructive force. That dual role mirrors the study’s central tension: an act that causes injury can still be experienced by the person performing it as an attempt to regulate suffering.

For now, the findings are an association, not proof that physicalist beliefs cause NSSI, and they do not show that changing someone’s mind-body beliefs would prevent self-injury. Their value is investigative: clinicians may gain another way to ask how a person experiences emotional pain, bodily sensation and the connection between them. The next step will be determining whether this pattern holds across larger and more diverse groups—and whether better emotional recognition can interrupt the need to translate distress into physical terms.

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Healed scars from prior self harm - cuts on patient's arm via Wikimedia Commons by James Heilman, MD with usage type - Creative Commons License. By James Heilman, MD - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57565072