”The worst that couldhappen is that i cut myself” : A thesis about young women´s self-harm behaviour

The aim of this study was to examine self-harming women’s own experiences. To try and raise understanding and awareness about how they themselves create their identity and meaning round the self-harming behaviour. Our three questions were; how do the young women conceive society’s reactions on their self-harming behaviour? Do the young women express an imposed or self-elected alienation? If so, in what way? In what way do the young self-harming women construe their own identity in relation to the self-harming behaviour? We have used a narrative approach when we have examined the blogs as life stories in the sense that all our lives and everything in them is a story by definition. We have examined the parts of the blogs we selected as whole units to begin with, we separated the different parts from each other first when we were familiar with the material. The analysis then had an interpersonal aim to find out the function and relation in what was written. That does not exclude the use of both form analysis or the analysis of content with we also have used side by side throughout our analysis. Our results show that this subject matter has several layers and so is a complex area that would benefit from more research with the young women´s perspective at hand. The young women describe several interesting interpretations on how their society comprehends them. They often feel judged and have to struggle with deciding if and when to show who they really are, both in regards to their bodies and inner self’s. This stigmatisation is apparent throughout all of our material. The young women also express that they feel forced into roles that they on the one hand have chosen but on the other hand don’t want to stay in. The women also express a desire to belong in the normal society like an equal. In addition the women express that they construct their identity both within themselves to make sense of their chaotic emotions, but they also experience that their society is a big part in their identity making process. Society’s expectations on them force them to take one of a few available routes in their identity making. In our results a few of these are visible the two most apparent is a dichotomy between victim and antagonist, these two positions don’t appear separately but is often visible in the same segments of the texts