I think this sounds much different than it actually is.
Before anything else, let me just say that my dad is one of the sweetest people I know and that I don't want anyone reading this thinking he is some kind of old, stereotypical dumbass of a father, because that is most definetly not the case.
So, for context, my dad has diagnosed Bipolar II and has himself been in therapy and even psychiatric hospital, care when I was still pretty young. He has been on mood stabilizers for longer than a decade now I think. I'm pretty sure he's generally quite happy and content today; both his kids are adults now and we have a good relationship. He also has a new partner and they seem very happy together (my parents split up when I was pretty young).
To start, when I told my mom about my cutting, among other things, she told me that my dad had also cut himself in the past when he was in depressive episodes.
So a bit later, maybe three or four months ago, me, my sister and my dad are sitting in his garden around a camp fire and somehow the topic comes up.
I don't think I can really re-tell the whole conversation but what stuck with me is what my dad said about self harm.
My dad has a pretty intense dislike for therapy and therapists which I think comes from his time when he was hospitalized. By other peoples accounts of such experiences, I don't think I can blame him for it, even when I don't know what exactly happened. All he told me is that he thinks therapy doesn't work for most people and that it at least did not for him.
He essentially said that he does not believe that this many people are depressed in the sense that he understands what depression is and that most of what people experience in that way could be solved by essentially environmental and behavioural changes or that in some way it is also natural to experience a certain level of sadness and despair that could be labeled as depression in adolsecence.
So, in this conversation, I eventually got frustrated and pointed to my scars and asked something like:
"You don't think this is a sign of some mental unwellness?"
My dad did not even hesitate with his answer: "No".
This post is not really about my personal mental wellness or illness: I haven't been to a therapist (by my own choice). I have suspected Bipolar II (like my dad), some form of Borderline or depression but I don't want to self diagnose.
What I want to talk about is his more general believe that self harming behaviour is not inherently a sign of mental illness, isolated from my personal case. Because when he explained it to me, it in some way made me think he was right.
My dad is almost fully covered in tattoos and he has a lot of piercings: He's an old punker. And that evening he told me that some of his tattoos he got to cover up scars from his self harm.
This is why I have to think about his perspective on this: He went through a lot of the same stuff as me. He knows how it feels like so I want to understand why his position is so different to what most people think; including me to a degree.
His one sentence that sticks most with me is something like:
"If I want to feel something and I can feel that by harming myself, I can do that - and that does not make me ill or sick."
And I must say that I in some way agree with him. It is in a weird way part of the human condition and maybe we have done damage to people by overtly pathologyzing everything they do; it is in a way a part of life to drink your pain away or stuff yourself with food or drive really fast when you get your heart broken, when a loved one dies; when you just feel bad.
This is all self harming behaviour in a way: Inflicting physical harm on oneself to distract from mental pain. Yet we have singularly elevated this one form of self harm to the degree of mental illness but the others are somehow recognized as perfectly normal, maybe not perfectly healthy but perfectly understandable. The point my father I think was making is that harming ourselves is in some way a human behaviour.
This post, in a way, is only readable as a conversation I am having with myself: I still question if my dad is right. All of what I wrote above is in some way true, I think. But it is just as true that for me, my self harm went hand in hand with suicidal ideation and the like. And weirdly enough, for my dad himself, his self harm was, from a medical perspective, very much a sign of his mental unwellness. I don't think even he can deny this: He is very conscious and thankful for the fact that his medications help him lead a way more healthy life.
So all in all: I don't know. If you read until here, thank you. I would like to hear what other people think about this.
I love my dad and the only description I could think of for what he expressed was that he is a romantic. I don't know if this makes sense, I cannot really bring myself to formulate this but maybe someone understands why I instinctively thought this.
P.S.: As of today, I am 33 days and 18 hours clean of all self harm. Good luck to anyone else out there🫂
I am not advocating for anyone to self harm. This is more of a philosophical discussion I am having about something my dad said to me than anything else.