Why Your Cutting Might Be from Spd

Do you cut your skin until it bleeds or pull your hair until it comes out? At the same time, do you have low muscle tone that makes moving seem an effort?

If you answered yes to both, cutting or hair pulling may not be psychiatric but physical—a result of sensory processing disorder. SPD is a common condition in which you misperceive and misconstrue sensori-motor information and behave out of proportion to the messages coming from the environment.

what purpose does cutting or hair Pulling serve?

Cutting your skin or pulling out your hair is considered a psychiatric disorder whose purpose is to distract you from intense emotional pain. It does so by releasing endorphins, the body's natural painkillers, rapidly reducing tension. Some have described the feeling afterwards as a “calm, bad feeling.”

Cutting or pulling serves another purpose: it helps you get in touch with your body. For this reason, cutting is common with people with sensory processing disorder (SPD).

Self-Stimming Behavior

Those with SPD tend to either feel things too intensely and are hypersensitive to sensation, or they feel too little and are under-sensitive to sensation and experience sensory deprivation. Cutting, pulling, skin-picking etc. is basically a self-stimming behavior that calms the body by regulating internal sensory input.

Hands, scalp, and face have many nerve endings. In overload, the body goes into a state of numbness for protection – the same as it does when traumatized. A sudden wham of sensation where you have the most nerve endings will snap you out of the deadness.

Those with SPD who are under-sensitive to sensation are especially likely to use cutting etc. for self-stimming. Under-sensitivity typically goes hand in hand with having low muscle tone (think non-muscular, fleshy or floppy) and poor body awareness, which puts you at high risk for depression. Under severe emotional turmoil, you may feel emotionally frozen and cut off from your body. Cutting your skin or pulling out your hair provides intense skin sensation and pressure that helps you re-connect with your body and know you are alive and okay.

Need For Control

For those who feel out of control and powerless to change their circumstances or experiences—a common mindset of those with SPD and especially for those who have suffered the dysfunction for their whole lives—cutting or hair pulling provides an increased sense of mastery.

Getting In Touch With Your Body

Of course, there are better ways to get in touch with your body.

Deep pressure touch, as in a bear hug or massage increases body awareness

Heavy work—exercise that heavily engages the joints and muscles, like uphill biking, working out with weights, or carrying heavy groceries or your child.