Pathological Self-Soothing

Are you overdoing the self-soothing?

The need to soothe distress is paramount in human experience. When we are overwhelmed with uncomfortable feelings brought about through various life stressors, we often turn to different things, substances, experiences or people for comfort. 

Some forms of self-soothing help to regulate our emotions, restoring our sense of calm and equilibrium in a healthy way. However, other forms of self-soothing behaviours are maladaptive and detrimental to our health in the long run and could propel us on to the slippery and painful downward slope towards addiction.

When a situation or problem arises which lies beyond our ability to cope with it, we sometimes ‘cope’ by diving headlong into a packet of chocolate biscuits and clearing the lot; zoning out into a zombie fog aimlessly cruising internet shopping sites, engaging in high octane risky behaviours such as extreme sports, dangerous sexual encounters, placing reckless sporting bets. We seek and extract temporary highs available from recreational drugs (and sometimes prescribed drugs). 

This is a game of snakes and ladders and as you experience the temporary buzz of scaling the ladder, the snake is always waiting for you and he appears to be getting longer and longer than the ladder you temporarily climbed—you might even slide off the board entirely as life becomes much too hard.

The urge to escape discontentment with our present state

Pathological self-soothing behaviours generally have an escapist quality to them. When our discomfort becomes too much for us to handle, we can ‘escape’ or ‘flee’ from the discomfort through overindulging in food (comfort eating), alcohol and drugs (self-medication), gambling, shopping, sex addiction (acting out). 

Often, these escapist behaviours are unconscious to us or barely conscious to us; it is only when we develop a more honest and deeper relationship with ourselves that we begin to recognise a destructive pattern. 

Sometimes the maladaptive nature of our self-soothing behaviours are so outside our awareness that it is other people such as our loved ones who attempt to bring these problematic behaviours to our attention.

As the ‘fleeing’ nature of the self soothing behaviour is an avoidance strategy, the underlying issues do not get addressed. 

Once self-soothing through ‘acting out’ or ‘self-medicating’ runs its course, we are back with a bang at the exact place where we began with the same painful feelings, but these feelings are becoming increasingly worse over time with each acting out or self-medicating cycle. 

A part of consciousness can emerge within us that knows at some level that what we are doing is self-sabotaging. This conscious part can compound the pain inside our internal world by heaping more guilt and shame upon us as we see ourselves failing to address—or even discover—the underlying issues.

Something is gnawing …

When we can no longer run away from ourselves

As the amount and intensity of our maladaptive self-soothing behaviours increase over time, they begin to take a toll on our physiology, our emotions  and our relationships. This is the time to reach out and seek help.

Healthy self soothing is the exact opposite of ‘fleeing’. It is a loving embrace of ‘self’ and a respectful empathy for our own vulnerabilities. 

Of course, when we don't like ourselves it is very difficult to do this. Why have we come to dislike and disrespect ourselves? Many psychological theories exist which attempt to answer this question. 

Part of self-development involves discovering what makes sense for us and what holds ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ for us. These are the deeper self-reflective questions, which cycles of maladaptive self-soothing keep us away from asking and exploring.

“Unhealthy self-soothing has an acting outwards energy and direction away from ‘self’. Healthy self-soothing has an exploration inwards direction towards ‘self’”

Some seemingly healthy behaviours such as attending meditation and yoga classes, gym workouts, spiritual practices can become maladaptive when we overdo them and they contribute to a decline in our relational qualities. We might find ourselves feeling superior to those who don't engage is such practices. Yoga, meditation and spirituality can become dogma.

Some spiritual seeking practices may represent a fleeing from one’s ‘self’ as a way to avoid the psychological discomfort with one’s ‘self’.

Sometimes we may experience an aura of anger from spiritual people. I know from my own experience growing up in a Catholic family, I experienced a pressure to move quickly towards forgiveness if I felt someone had wronged me. My anger towards the person was not processed and I was compelled into a rigid forgiveness space which really was not forgiveness at all—I was encouraged to ‘turn the other cheek’ when I was not ready to turn the other cheek.  Taking a ‘spiritual’ position can be an unconscious way to avoid a healthy processing of anger. 

Of course this also depends on how we define spiritualism. Is spiritualism a journey towards ‘self’, in the manner of unearthing our true or real ‘self’ by discovering a divine spiritual kernel within us, or is it a movement away from ‘self’—transcending our ‘self’ where we may see our ordinary or real ‘self’ as flawed, tainted and representative of original sin and egocentricity. 

All this falls into the realm of meaning and values, prisms through which we ultimately judge our own attempts at self soothing and self development.

This is not to say spiritualism, yoga and meditation do not hold incredible soothing and healing value for us. They do. We just need to be mindful of not taking things to extremes.

Dialoguing with ‘self’

That is why an intervention such as counselling or psychotherapy can help to open up this internal dialogue and change the fundamental relationship with ourselves. We can develop our meta-observer or ‘beholding eye’ by exercising our self-awareness muscles.

In psychotherapy, we get to ‘process’ our painful feelings (rather than flee from them), extrapolate vital messages from them, come to make sense of them and ultimately heal them. 

People usually get to this point when they realise running away from painful feelings no longer works for them.

Check out 5 Helpful Self Soothing Techniques

Also, if one of the intense feelings you are trying to soothe is anger, check out 11 self-exploration questions about your anger.