Dr. Asad Rafi

Coupled with the fact that you can't even pick up with the bodily signals,

with the interception problems, you're never going to recognize that your body's going into shutdown until it's too late.

So you're on a hiding to nowhere with it, really, aren't you?

That can be significantly explosive and violent.

And that aggression can often be internalized.

And how that can manifest, and we see it a lot, is in terms of self-harming behavior, self-injury.

When we're asking people who engage in cutting or self-injury, they'll often say, my intention isn't to end my life.

It's not a suicidal gesture.

I said, tell me more about it.

What was the intention there?

Firstly, they'll often say it's impulsive.

And what we get, the ultimate explanation then that we reach is that it becomes a manifestation of trying to articulate internal emotion.

Feeling that physical pain is like a release of that emotion.

And often...

The intention isn't there to hurt themselves.

They come across that inadvertently and they see that release.

It almost has an addictive or compulsive quality to it.

And when it's described in that way, many people can relate to it.

Certainly those who engage in that.

The problem you have there is those types of behaviours