Healing Self-Injury: A Compassionate Guide for Parents and Other Loved Ones

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.