Self-Harm: The Unhealthy Default Reality in Action
Seeing self-abusive habits as wakeup calls — and invitations to a better way of living.
Happy Sunday, friend. How are you doing?
I had a rather rough week (caused in part by some frustrating interactions with AI — a story for another time).
At one point, I found myself scrolling through all sorts of annoying ChatGPT and search results — finding places my work had been misattributed, co-opted, or straight-up plagiarized — and feeling increasingly disheartened.
I’d been enmeshed in that activity for at least 15 minutes when my dog came up, nose-nudged me, and looked at me piteously, like: Please quit whatever stupid human thing you are currently doing and take me for a walk.
Which I did.
The moment I stopped directing my frustration with our mixed-up world against myself — wounding my body-mind with a flood of toxic media and getting more inflamed by the minute — I felt quite a lot better.
This inspired me to go re-watch a little video snippet that I had recorded last year during a Live Session with my Healthy Deviant U (HDU) group. I later included the video in Lesson 4, titled “Break the Machine, Not Yourself.”
This exploration of self-harm and its underlying causes (themes I’ve touched on in my other recents posts) really landed with me this week. And I’ve heard from a lot of my students that it has landed powerfully with them, too.
So I decided to share it with you.
You can watch the 10-minute video here. 👇’
Self-harm, you see, has a great many faces.
Self-picking, cutting, hair pulling, and nail biting are observable habits, and they leave clear physical traces.
But there are many less obvious forms of self-harm in which most of us participate every day.
From the chemical poisons we ingest and slather on our bodies to the nasty, self-critical voices we allow to natter on in our heads.
From the limited time we allow ourselves outdoors to the excessive amounts of digital media we consume 24/7.
From constant rushing and striving and self-comparison with others to the terrifying absence of authentic connection we tolerate during the course of our everyday lives.
So what I’m suggesting here is a perspective shift.
Instead of seeing our inclinations toward self-harm as something pathologically “wrong with us,” what if we began seeing these behaviors for what they really are — stealth attacks by Unhealthy Default Reality in which we have unwittingly become handmaidens and hired guns?
What if we began experimenting with interventions aimed at that larger, shared problem, rather than putting an endless series of bandaids on our proliferating individual symptoms?
During my presentations on Healthy Deviance, I often ask audience members: “Are you breaking yourself?”
But the real question I’m asking is: "HOW are you breaking yourself?” Because there are very few people I know who can honestly, confidently say they are not.
We live in a society that sets us up to break ourselves, and we operate in a pain-driven economy that profits enormously when we do.
And that is why, according to research reported in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 97.3 percent of U.S. adults are unable to maintain even the most basic health behaviors required for their ongoing health and well-being.
That is why the trillions of dollars we spend each year on “wellness” don’t seem to be doing us much good.
If you’re interested in a different take on the problem and the solution, give this week’s short video a watch or listen. And then ask yourself:
Which of my daily habits or regular patterns result in self-harm?
What are the circumstances or influences that trigger these behaviors?
At what time of day do I become most vulnerable to self-harm or self-breakage?
What activities or tolerations tend to reduced my consciousness or resilience in ways that lead me to self-harming acts or mindsets?
What are the circumstances in which I am least likely to be vulnerable to self-harm or feel disinclined to participate in self-harm?
How many of my chronic health conditions could be considered the result of self-harm instigated by the influence of my unhealthy society (such as overwork, inadequate sleep, excessive drinking, too much sitting, junk-food addiction, etc.)?
Self-harm has become a big business.
As evidence of how normalized (and monetizable) self-harm has become in our culture, consider this Instagram ad I shared with my HDU community (similar to the “Call Out the Crazy” items I often share in my Healthy Deviant Digest posts).
In stressed-out animals, self-picking, self-licking, self-plucking, and self-starvation are recognized signs of unhealthy stress, attempts at self-soothing, cries for help.
In our consumer culture, they are seen as a business opportunity.
Simply observing your own self-harming tendencies — whether destructive attitudes and mindsets, binge-watching, binge-eating, doom-scrolling, or oblivion-seeking — and taking note of when and how they strike you can be be a powerful intervention.
Refusal to acknowledge those patterns, meanwhile, is itself a form of self-harm.
So even if you are unwilling or unable to untangle those tendencies right now, become willing to witness them as proxy-attacks by the Unhealthy Default Reality, and you will have already taken a powerful first step toward healing.
You might also want to complete the Weird-Symptom Checklist I reference in this week’s video. It can give you a good sense of the ways your body is currently crying out for help.
Can you see the forest for the trees?
At the end of this week’s video, I ask, rhetorically: “What’s wrong with you?”
Please note: That’s a reference to this duo of illustrations from my book, The Healthy Deviant, not an invitation to more self-criticism!
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Yeah. Oh my.
Here’s the thing: Until you look beyond the tree-screen of your own symptoms to perceive their historical and societal causes, the forest of the Unhealthy Default Reality will just keep on presenting you with new trees — new pain points which you will be encouraged to see as “your” problems.
And those trees will continue to block your view of the very real factors responsible for the dwindling vitality and increasing reactivity that almost all of us are now experiencing.
Healthy Deviance is about choosing a more empowering view of this situation, and redefining our relationship with our unhealthy society.
When you look at your own self-harming and self-critical tendencies through that lens, what can you see and feel that you could not before?
Got questions, thoughts, fist-waving rants to share? Let me know.
P.S. If you want to go deeper into this material, and try out some interventions designed to disrupt the self-harming patterns most of us have fallen into, I recommend signing yourself up for my 5-Day Healthy Deviant Un-Challenge (it’s normally $49, but if you use the code 5DAYFOR5, you’ll get it for just $5).
“I am really enjoying the lessons from the book, and from the 5-Day Un-Challenge. You know what they say about when the student is willing... I am sooo glad I found you and your wisdom!” — Laura L.
This is absolutely brilliant and so needed! Thank you Pilar for doing the work of thinking about this, and putting it down in words in ways that we can all digest and use!