It is important to carefully consider your values for several reasons:

(1) they could guide your life minute by minute towards noble goals, rather than your life being controlled by self-serving motives, customs, accidental occurrences, bad habits, impulses, or emotions. You have to know where you are going before you can get there.

(2) Values and morals can not only guide but inspire and motivate you, giving you energy and a zest for living and for doing something meaningful.

In the kinds of self-injury cases I am concerned with here, there frequently is some very hurtful and disturbing condition in which the tendency to self-injure develops. You don't usually start with a method to hurt yourself; you start off with horrible circumstances and psychologically painful thoughts.

Our feelings or emotions are a major part of our inner lives. Our feelings involve both our emotions and our urges to act certain ways. Thus, emotions determine if we are happy or unhappy, if we want to approach something or run away from it, if we are exuberant or frozen, etc.

Certain parenting practices may cause excessive feelings of inferiority: over-critical, over-demanding, over-protective, over-controlling and probably others. Anyone with a negative self-concept based on these childhood experiences needs to start afresh honestly re-evaluating themselves.

If you get about what you expected, i.e. accomplishments equal expectations, you will be happy. But the formula also suggests that unhappiness may result in two ways: (l) failing to reach reasonable goals (accomplishments) or (2) setting unreasonable, impossible goals (expectations). The latter is a complex problem. Our society encourages aiming high--"try to be the best."

Humans are motivated by many things--psychological needs, physiological drives, survival, urges, emotions, hurts, impulses, fears, threats, rewards (money, friendship, status...), possessions, wishes, intentions, values, mastery, freedom, intrinsic satisfaction, self-satisfaction, interests, pleasure, dislikes, established habits, goals, ambitions and so on. All at the same time.