What the Bible says about self-harm on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of

Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

On this edition of the podcast, we're thankful to welcome Dr. Kevin Carson, who is the pastor at Sunrise Baptist Baptist Baptist Baptist Baptist Baptist Baptist Church in Ozark, Missouri, and is a professor of biblical counseling at Baptist Bible College and Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri.

He's here to talk to us about the important issue of self-harm. And this, Kevin, is an issue

that I think a lot of people are confused about. It's probably an issue that a lot of people

don't even know or think about. So when we talk about the issue of self-harm, what are we

really talking about? Well, when you talk about self-harm,

there's a number of individuals. They say up to 1% of the United States population who consistently

harm themselves and one way or the other. And self-harm is a broad topic. It could include anything

from cutting to hitting to picking and those where you would just pick at your skin,

you'd create a spot, and you just constantly keep it fresh and let it bleed some.

And it would be a constant thing that produces pain.

It could be breaking bones, pulling hair, pulling eyelashes.

It's just a broad sense of what it includes. And so at that

point, people often are struggling with some kind of pain, usually emotional, some kind of guilt

or shame, something's going on in their past. And so at that point, physical pain seems easier

to deal with than what they're trying to think through.

So that's interesting because I think when people hear the descriptions that you're providing of

the kinds of things that people do, you know, you say if one percent of the population struggles with it,

then that leaves a whole big bunch of people, 99%, that don't struggle with it,

and are perplexed by that kind of behavior.

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