Customer Reviews

Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-Mutilation

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

this book, while sometimes helpful, is for the most part a series of anecdotes that merely show off levenkron's success as a therapist. it may well have useful aspects for the therapist seeking help on how to treat a patient, but even some of those are a little scary from a patient's perspective. it seems that although levenkron states things like "it took five years of therapy to get this patient through this journey" or what have you, he glosses over the length and concentrates on the many miraculous breakthroughs he makes.

if you are a teenage "cutter" or "self-mutilator" or whatever you want to call it, it may be more helpful than someone who is 29 and therefore out of his age group. i don't fit into any of his categories - i had a wonderful upbringing, was never abused and didn't start self-mutilating until i was 22. perhaps this is why the book seems so far-fetched to me. however, i do think his data-tracking skills are suspect.

i highly recommend marilee strong's "a bright red scream" instead of this book.

This was the first book on self-injury that I got. I know that it isn't as good as A Bright Red Scream and Bodies Under Siege, which you must get if you cut or do other SI.

This book, however, is a good starter book. It is written by a therapist, Steven Levenkron, who has had to deal with patients who've done self-injury for many years.

He describes SI as the Anorexia of this generation. (He's written several books on Anorexia, too.)

This book has the basics of the whole SI world and is definitely worth the money you pay for it. So, I recommend all cutters and people who need basic information on self-injury get this book!

What I found helpful about this book was the way Levinkron described how a patient should get help. It never occured to me that I should ask if a therapist/counselor/psychiatrist has had experience with self-mutilation or the importance of their medical knowledge and ability to treat a wound. Also helpful was his approach to how the cutter should heal. Levinkron understands that it is unrealistic to ask a cutter to stop cold turkey. Yet, I have never had a shrink who didn't ask me to. After reading Levinkron's book, I think I have a better understanding of how a cutter heals, and the importance of finding a good therapist/psychiatrist who can do that for me.

However, what disturbed me most about this book was the focus on female cutters. While I am well aware that statistics show most self-mutilators are female, I couldn't help feeling a little more lonely and isolated reading this book. It's really kind of a catch 22: Statistics show that most cutters are girls, so most therapists/writers don't worry so much about the guys. But many men won't come forward with their disorder, thus changing the statistics, because they don't feel there is an understanding of male cutters. I think this is an important issue, and that if somebody took the time to address it, many more males would be coming forth and getting help with their disorder.

That said, Cutting does have two (I believe) incidents of male cutters. But their stories are not developed and their scenarios are, at best, stereotypical and shovanist.

If anyone knows of any literature or anything else that addresses the male cutter, I would love to know about it. Thanks.

I self-injured for many years as a teen and young adult. Only recently have I found books that have helped open a window into the question of "why?" Unfortunately, this book wasn't so compelling. I found the explanations trite and condescending... Unlike other books, the author seemed to have a hidden contempt for people who self-injure. Do you recall what it was like to have your mother or father speak to a neighbor about you- even though you were right there in the room? That is exactly how it felt to read this book.

This book provided some good information, a few things I could identify with, but overall wasn't what I was hoping to find. As a person with a long-time cutting problem, I was hoping to find guidance to help me stop. The author seems to primarily focus on one segment of cutters; teenage girls who come from dysfunctional families. I'm not a teenage (I'm much older), and I'd like for my family to be able to read something also, to help them understand my problem, but this wouldn't be appropriate, since the author seems to at every opportunity blame the young self-injurers problems on her family.

I'm still looking for the right book for me, this definitely wasn't it.

After reading reviews that said Steven Levenkron was "arrogant," I had doubts about buying this book. However, I didn't find him arrogant at all - rather, he was calm, clear, concise, and very knowledgable on the subject. The book is rich with case studies, which I found very helpful to use as examples, as well as interesting on their own. Being a former cutter myself, I think he hit the nail right on the head when he described the reasons people cut, why people can't stop, and why it is so difficult to open up about it. Levenkron emphasizes that cutting is not a disease in itself: rather, it is a symptom of something larger, and that "something" must be addressed in order for the patient to be cured. Cutting is not necessarily a symptom of Borderline Personality Disorder, as was previously believed. It can coincide with an eating disorder, depression, anxiety, trauma, etc.

Another thing I found extremely helpful about this book was the section on helping people who cut. I bought this book to help someone I know who injures herself, and after reading this chapter in particular I feel much better equipped to approach her.

I thought Levenkron had a very gentle approach, and never placed blame on the patient or pushed them against the wall (so to speak) to force them to admit their problems. He is someone who I would have liked to see as a patient when I went through years of self-injury. I highly recommend this book to cutters, former cutters, people who want to know more about cutting and why it is done, and ESPECIALLY people who want to help a loved one who injures him or herself.

I disagree with previous reviewers who took exception to Levenkron's alliteration that all cutters come from dysfunctional families. I feel that these reviewers are in denial about themselves and their family structures. Frankly, I don't think there's such a thing as a perfectly functional family, and extremely subtle family dysfunction combined with a sensitive child and hereditary or chemical imbalances can produce a severely disturbed person. Many of Levenkron's examples involved very subtle dysfunction, as in a father that was overly respectful of the church and thus his daughter didn't tell him when a minister raped her. The dysfunction may be slight. But a perfect family doesn't produce ill children. Cutting doesn't appear out of nowhere, and recovery can't be achieved without focusing on the root.
I got a couple of scraps of good information out of this book, like the motivations for the behavior, but aside from that I found it immensely irritating on several fronts:

1. Levonkron makes lots of references to how cutters are viewed as being sick or wacko or repugnant, engendering fear, anger, and revulsion in "normal" people. It never really occured to me before reading his book that anybody would see these actions as being anything other than sad. I'd never seen anybody react to discussion of this disorder with anything other than concern and compassion. Over the course of his constant references to how nauseating cutting is I actually ended up feeling like he had convinced me that I SHOULD view cutting as revolting. A cutter reading this book would no doubt feel that they are viewed as a freak of nature by outsiders and feel even less inclined to disclose to anybody about their illness.

2. Oh geez, the arrogance! I find it hard to believe that every patient experience he was recounting really involved some teenage girl saying "How could you know this about me? Nobody knows this about me!" and then weeping in relief at his incredible insightfulness. Half the time these patients ended up expounding on how he was so much better than the previous shrinks or otherwise complimenting his prowess. There were even a couple of accounts where women took their clothes off to try to seduce him. I'm not calling him a liar, I'm just saying his memory might be colored by his own gradiose opinion of himself.

3. The tinge of sexism. Many times when he was referring to the therapist/patient relationship he made the assumption that the patient was female and the therapist was male. I could not help thinking of Freud, of the patriarchal and patronizing male therapist reining in the hysterical feminine tendencies of a frazzled female patient. It was a subtle thing, but I'm not the only reader who caught it.

4. The guide to recovery went nowhere and was very vague, leaving me with the assumption that he's not quite sure how he gets his patients to recovery. Indeed, several times he talked about particular patients as being essentially hopeless. The cure, he said, was a trusting connection with the therapist, who was to take on a parenting role and who was also supposed to be extremely overconfident. This is apparently the ONLY way out, and friends/family members are only supposed to take a secondary role. There's a couple of problems with this, namely that therapists are human and frequently mess up, and often mess up very, very badly. Many cutters have been through several therapists that have thoroughly bombed (I've known countless therapists who have said and done unbelievably stupid or cruel things in therapy and who were no more educated than any layman.) If the cutter's only profound connection is the one with the therapist, then it leaves her little recourse if the therapist blows it.
5. He didn't deal with gender issues. Is it a coincidence that this is primarily a female affliction? I think the fact that women are expected to be less aggressive and be nurturers causes them to circumvent their feelings of anger or frustration inward instead of outward, so women are more inclined to hurt themselves than others. For example, a boy beaten by his drunk father will likely grow up and beat his children (thus turning his anger outward), whereas a girl beaten by her drunk father will grow up into a meek woman with self-destructive habits, or marry a man who will likewise beat her (thus turning her anger inward). There's no examination of such factors when applied to cutting.

Basically, this is a long-winded way of saying, "Don't buy the book."

I skimmed this book in a bookstore because I would never lay out money to buy it, but I was curious to see if Levenkron was still writing in the same self-satisfying way. In my opinion, he is. I became so disgusted I put the book back. I read Best Little Girl and Kessa when I was an adolescent, and I didn't quite like the books, but I didn't understand why. Now I do. The characters are completely unbelievable and motivated by Levenkron's own theories and method of therapy, which I detest. He wants to be this all-knowing paternalist father-figure, as if having a "good" Dad would solve all our problems. I find it patronizing and full of his inflated male ego. So I am not surprised that I do not like his most recent books--this one, and the one about the skater who self-mutilates, I can't remember the name. So why do I read them? There aren't a lot of books on the topics. And I always think, I can't believe he is writing this! But this last book just blows the top and there won't be any more skimming for me. He calls himself an "expert" but I find his methods really questionable and not at all consistant with the latest research. But they are consistant with popular mythology about anorexics, like we want to be babies, children, and we need a strong father figure (i.e. the book Going Crazy based on the movie where an anorexic allows her male psychologist to cradle her in his arms and feed her with a baby bottle? Ugh!) Why do people want to believe this? I know about the latest research (which disproves these kinds of psychobabble theories) because I have been a part of it--as a patient. And if I had a psych like Levenkron, I would have given up long ago.

We suddenly found out this spring that our beautiful, wonderful daughter, a girl everyone seems to love, was cutting herself. She had mentioned to me two years ago that one of her friends did, and I thought it was the weirdest thing I ever heard. Maybe my reaction made her hide it from us?

Levenkron's book was not the first one I read, but I found it helpful mainly in getting inside the mind of a girl who does this, and in mechanisms she can use to help herself stop it. I also think he comes across as a kind, wise person. I wish we could consult him in person. I did not feel he was arrogant, as some readers did.

What was very much less than helpful, though, was the way Levenkron blames the family, saying that no cutter comes from a healthy family. Well, that is easy to say once someone is in your office, isn't it, Dr Levenkron? Certainly some girls who have been abused must do this. But look at it in reverse-- could you take any "normal" family and promise they were safe from cutting? The answer is no. I think that we are a normal, loving, intact family, and that something else is going on.

Genetic factors and non-family environmental factors certainly enter in. Otherwise, why would we find out that my daughter's paternal first cousin and aunt (who have always lived in a different country from us, and themselves have met perhaps six times in their lives) also cut themselves; or that on my side of the family there is autism (autistic people also often self-mutilate)? Can you explain why this practice spreads among classmates? And are you aware (you certainly should be) that a genetic link has been demonstrated for bulimia, which resembles cutting in many ways? It could be very important for a girl who cuts--I am not talking about girls who have really suffered abuse-- to know that she has an unusually terrible reaction to stress(rather than unusually terrible circumstances),partly because of her genes and her environment.

I have enormous love and compassion for my daughter, but I don't think it would help her get better to believe that her family caused her cutting. This book still helped me understand her better--especially her perfectionism and inability to get angry. I am also grateful to have learned more about other girls who do this-- the problem is a lot more common than I would ever have dreamed, and needs to be treated with love and not prejudice. So thank you, Dr Levenkron, but think twice about blaming families and remember Bruno Bettelheim.

As someone who suffers from self-mutilation I can say that this book is amazing. The stories were all so real and something that most self-mutilators have gone through. This book offers wonderful steps for recovery and offered hope to the hopeless. It is hard to find books and material on this subject, especially ones you can relate to and understand. Levenkron does a wonderful job at explaining the many types of "cutters" and situations that could potentially effect you and the people around you. Anyone who suffers from self-mutilation should read this book!