WARNING: Mature, potentially triggering content. Reader discretion advised.
This friday, October 12, 2012, marks exactly three years since I was raped. October 5th has come and gone, but marks a full year since my surgery resulting in the loss of a small spark of life that I still grieve deeply for. With these two dates of such defining and traumatising significance to me so close together, it is perhaps understandable that I am prone to annual bouts of depressive episodes.
To debunk the common misconceptions of mental health in general is a feat that I will undertake another day. Instead, I'm honing in on one specific aspect that has never truly been respected for what it is and what it means. The majority of the people who have stood by me after what I have been through have enhanced their knowledge on mental health disorders and the stigmas surrounding them by leaps and bounds, but this particular subject stands out to me as something that is still misunderstood.
I am writing today to discuss self-harm/self-mutilation, and what it means to me.
Here we land on the taboo subject of self-injury/harm, in an attempt to debunk the common yet serious misconceptions about the motivations and state-of-mind of a self-harmer. This task may, in the end, be a futile one; to truly understand the motivations of a cutter, one must be a cutter. The majority, non-cutters, will likely always look upon the act of self-mutilation and harm with a sort of awful horror. It is a very personal thing that differs from person to person, with no two stories the same. However, this is a task that must be undertaken in order for the flow of this blog to continue. This is a really touchy subject for me, as a self-harmer, as I take the unpopular approach in defending a cutter's right to cut in peace. If this post allows a single fellow self-harmer a moment of rest in a situation brimming with guilt and blame, well, I will count this post a success.
The definition of self-harming/disfigurement/mutilation tendencies should, in my opinion, cover a broad range of definitions to suit the broad range of expression through self-harm. Not only should this blanket cover the traditional 'cutting', but burning, bruising, scratching, hair-cutting, and more should be considered as well. From my own observations and volunteer work with people seeking advice on their mental health issues, I have come to understand that self-harm tendencies are rampantly apparent in pre-teen youth. The 'official' average age that one starts self-harming has been stated to be between the ages of 14 and 16. However, in my own uncontrolled, unofficial, imprecise data, the numbers can appear to be quite a bit lower than even that. After combing through the emails of people I have helped with their self-harming habits and through observation of a mental health forum that I frequent, I have found that a staggering 73% of what I have observed admitted to starting self-harm between the ages of 10 to 13, with over half of that percentage specifically being the age of 11. While this data may not be by any means reliable, the pairing of these numbers with my own experience with self-harm may be alarming for some who are not familiar with the concept of child mental health. This data was important to me because, as someone who was once 11 years old, snipping my wrist with a pair of scissors, I have, after all of these years, felt incredibly alone in that. It is an observation of mine that I dearly wish had more awareness, for the sake of the other 11 year olds who are inevitably out there, hurting.
Misconceptions and stereotypes on the self-harmer stems from the misunderstanding of the why. One such misconception is that all self-harmers are seeking negative attention through their self-harm. While it is true that there are individuals who use self-harm as a method of seeking attention, rather than being the negative attention that is the misconception, it is, instead, often a cry for help. Yes, some of these harmers may be looking for your attention — they may be reaching out to you by displaying their harm to you in order to get the appropriate help for their inner turmoil. To dismiss a harmer who is reaching out for help can be a dangerous move, which makes this particular misconception in definite need of awareness.
While I was a very private individual at 11-years-old, my self-harm was a bit of a cry for help when I first began. I had been sexually molested at 8-years-old up until I turned 11 and have experienced anxiety since before I can remember, and depression since my early pubescent years. I began to have suicidal thoughts at 10-years-old. Being 11, I was overwhelmed by emotions that very few adults could cope with, let alone a child, and I turned towards self-harm as a method of expressing the pain within myself that I had troubles coming to terms with, even defining. Unfortunately, when my mother discovered that I had been cutting my wrists, she handled the situation quite poorly. The reason for why I was self-harming was demanded from me, not coached out of me gently. I was yelled at, and made to feel ashamed for what I had done, without any real regard for why I had done that in the first place. More importantly, I was simply told to stop, and I was dismissed as going through a phase that would eventually come to a close. Preferably right then and there.
This does not appear to be an isolated incident. Over and over again, I am seeing stories of sufferers who have been rejected and dismissed by family members for their chosen method of expression. The concept of teenager phases is a dangerous one — there is often a reason for perceived 'fads' within teens that stems from a serious underlying issue that should be addressed right away. Had I been coaxed gently into therapy at that tender age of 11, much of what I later go through may have been prevented. Instead, therapy was brought up and used as a threat, rather than a solution to the problem; in that heated moment where my mother lost her temper over what I had done to myself, she had me convinced that going to therapy would be a horrible and abnormal thing.
From my mother's reaction, a few things happened: 1. I internalised my depression completely. 2. I moved my self-harm to another, more private location. 3. I stopped reaching out for help altogether.
As one could probably discern from this situation, ignoring this cry for help can have dangerous consequences. I was no closer to developing the skills required in order to handle my traumas in a healthier way, and yet I felt impressionable as a child by my mother's reaction to hide all symptoms of having trauma in the first place.
Self-harm is not the problem itself, and not a fad. Self-harm is the symptom of a deeper, more emotional problem; a problem waging a war of such violence within the individual that the individual expresses this internal violence on their self. Writing off self-harming tendencies as a phase is also a dangerous stereotype that will lead to more complicated problems later on in the sufferer's life. Consider just how disturbed a self-harmer must be feeling to not only have the urge to harm themselves, but to put themselves through an incredible amount of patience and resolve of inflicting that harm upon themselves. It is incredibly hard to purposely harm oneself. You feel the burning and the pain and your body will instinctively react by pulling you away, and sending signals for you to move away from the source of the pain. Self-harmers have an enormous amount of patience and will to dedicate themselves to actually harming their person. Self-harm is not a fad. It is not a phase. It is not something to turn your back on. As it is so difficult to harm oneself on a regular basis, for some people, self-harm may end up being the wrong option for them in being able to express their deeper hurts. Many people do walk away from self-harm after a while as they tire of the emotional toll that self-harming may inflict upon them, to discover other methods of coping — and then there are some who do not. It has nearly been 10 years since I first began cutting myself. 10 years is not a phase — it has become a primary coping strategy for me. It has become a last resort, after all these years of seeking other strategies that have helped me cope, but there are some feelings that artwork and breathing exercises cannot express.
Another misconception is the connection of self-harming tendencies with suicidal tendencies. It is the general belief that people who are self-harming are doing so as suicide attempts, or working their way up to attempting suicide. While the reason for self-harm differs from one individual to another, self-harm is almost never an actual suicide attempt. Consider this: probably one of the more common forms of self-harm is cutting. Individuals with a mental health illness that encourages suicide are usually victims of violence, and/or have a violent turbulence of emotion within them. There are many types of violence, and individuals who find the idea of suicide to be attractive have typically experienced some form or another of violence. For someone who is suicidal, the overwhelming emotions make suicide attractive in the hope that taking that way out would bring a peace upon the sufferer. Suicidal individuals are, for the most part, seeking peace and rest and relief, and it is important to them to shy away from such a violent end that wrist-cutting would involve. Let's be realistic: wrist-cutting is an extremely inefficient, painful, messy, and slow way to end one's life. Self-harm, on the other hand, is typically used as a coping method to prevent the individual from contemplating suicide. It is a method of survival. Self-harm and suicide attempts are two completely separate symptoms of a problem, where a sufferer may experience one symptom and not the other, or experience both, but with such difference that it makes the two symptoms simply incomparable. My self-harming habit was an act of survival, for me. When my suicidal thoughts overwhelmed me and I began to become terrified that my self-control was slipping in that regard, I would cut. Cutting myself when contemplating suicide allowed for me to lash out somewhere with the negative energy within me that was convincing myself to end my life. After cutting myself, I would experience a period of mournful peace, where the storm inside my head subsides into silence, and I could think and make decisions with some degree of rationality. Cutting helped ground me back into the world and allowed for me to drain my emotions into something less consuming and overwhelming. The mistake of my mother consistently trying to forcibly stop me from cutting myself throughout my teenaged years would have actually have ended tragically for me had she been able to succeed; without the extreme of cutting to balance my suicidal tendencies, I would not be here today. Indeed, when I finally began attending therapy sessions in Doctor Osuch's FEMAP program , the (wonderful) therapist that I was assigned to made it clear to me that she understood the dangers of forcing me to stop, and bade me to continue with the habit if that is the only coping strategy available to me. The contrast of my mother's overreaction and the understanding that I found with my professional therapist blew me away, and the latter helped me gain the footing that I had first began when I was 11 years old: asking for help.
Before going into my next point, I want to take this opportunity to explain my thought-process through self-harm throughout the years; more for my own benefit than anything else, though it certainly relates to the next bit. A warning that this paragraph will contain more gruesome and intimate details of my experience. As I stated before, I began cutting when I was 11 years old, shortly after the sexual abuse I had undergone that had started three years prior. Cutting began as a private thing (albeit a small reach towards help) of just cutting small chunks of my skin out with scissors. This use of scissors lasted for about two years for me, and the scars still mark my wrist to this day due to the harsh nature of scissors as a tool. After two years and the confrontation with my mother, I began to internalise quite a bit more and moved to more private locations. My thighs became the target with a knife, and continued to be targeted later with a razor blade. Cutting continued throughout my teenaged years as I struggled with what had happened to me as a child, and with my struggle of being raped repeatedly by my high school partner over the course of 3-4 years. The relationship had felt wrong for a long time, without my realising that coercion is defined as rape. After the final and more violent rape that this person committed against me, where he didn't even bother with coercion, I fell into a psychotic depression. Psychotically depressed is depression pushed to the limit to the point where the sufferer is hearing voices and hallucinating, and are six times more likely to commit suicide. Coupled with the growing need to survive against the odds of me inevitably attempting suicide and with my hatred of myself 'for getting raped' (read: rape culture), my cutting spiralled to the point where the skin on my legs remains permanently scarred. Because I had been sexually abused for the majority of my life up until this point, I targeted areas that had to do with my womanhood and my hatred of my body for 'luring' my attackers. (read: psychotically depressed. minimal rational thought. not actual current belief.) The amount of blame and guilt and loathing that I rested at my own feet for being the victim made my cutting of what defined me physically as a woman a sort of symbolism. I cut my thighs, my hips, my stomach, and my breasts. I cut because I blamed myself, and these parts of me. I cut to make myself and those parts of me undesirable, so that it would never happen again. I wanted to repulse and withdraw. This became a core theme for my self-harm: blaming myself for appearing pretty to others, feeling that I did not deserve to look this way, feeling that I needed to repulse. When I had undergone my surgery last year, the guilt and blame shook my mental state to the core in a way that I had never experienced before. It still has not disappeared.. It was worse than my rape, and affects me to a greater extent still. I felt like a murderer and I mutilated myself to a horrible extent after that. The privacy that I had withdrawn into exploded into a need to convince others that I was deserving of punishment, and my cutting traveled from my thighs and back to my wrists again. I chopped off most of my hair and purposely cut it in an unappealing fashion, barely an inch long, because I felt like I didn't deserve to have pretty hair and perhaps being undesirable would make me less of a target for being victimised again.
And so we move on to the next point of this subject: the problems with the available 'alternatives' for self-harmers. These methods send a pain sensor to the brain without the physical marks, and they are 'supposed' to give the same sense of satisfaction that would be experienced with actual self-harm attempts. These methods range from snapping an elastic band against your wrist to feel the sting without a physical cut, to holding a bag of ice against your wrist until you get a burning sensation upon the skin, also without leaving a mark. I feel that these methods were pushed on me too readily without the suggester taking the time to analyse my particular reason for self-harm in the first place. Consider that my particular relationship with self-harm was to mutilate myself and make myself repulsive. I actually did not like the pain. I hated it, did not want it, and tried to experiment with tools that would give the best mark with minimal burn. My goal was to make myself ugly, and undesirable; to punish myself with gaping and bleeding wounds that would leave permanent and raised scarring. These methods, though I did try them, did not imitate my intimate connection with self-harm and the intensive symbolism that I had invested in it. Without careful diagnosis and consideration for the many variants of self-harm that are out there, unique to each and every person who indulges in the habit, careless advice such as this without follow-up can also have dire consequences. Again, this misconception of a 'quick fix' stems from the belief that self-harm is the problem, not the symptom. Without delving into the reason for the self-harm and the unique symbolism that each person assigns the self-harm to represent, there is no generic 'fix' for the issue. These alternatives ARE proven to be successful to a point, but to generalise that it should work for all self-harmers is a statement that such an activity should be easy to stop, or ease out of.
In this case, I had to help myself, and personalise a method of easing my self-harming tendencies while also targeting the self-esteem and self-loathing issues that the self-harm stems from. I'm going into this detail on the off-chance that this may help someone down the line.
As my habit stemmed from self-loathing issues, I used it as a venting method to channel my frustrations with myself and my life into a physical wound. After doing this, and draining myself of that violent energy, I would be left with a.. sort of fuzzy, hazy feeling; a clarity in my mind that made me rather receptive to compassion and personal thought. Post-cutting would place me in a state of quiet exhaustion. I took advantage of this state of mind and took painstaking measures to truly take care of my wounds. I will dab at them gently with water to clean away the blood, and then dab gently with hydrogen peroxide to sterilise, and keep pressure and bind the wounds. While I did this, I would feel a rare tenderness for myself; almost like how a nurturing mother would clean and bandage the scraped knee of her young child. After venting the negative energy contained within me that I held against myself, I was then nurturing and caring for myself; I took the opportunity to pity me and what I had been through, to mourn my wounds, and most importantly, my sense of self-worth improved greatly.
I suppose it's getting late, so I'm going to wrap this up. Abrupt, I know. I suck at paragraph transitions.
I haven't picked up the razor since that horrible time a year ago, which was coupled with the two-year mark of having been raped. My description is gruesome, but I feel like I would probably be shouldering a lot more self-blame at present if I had not cut; the cutting allowed for me to vent quite a bit of those unjustified feelings that typically surface whenever a person is victimised. Cutting stopped me from suicide. It kept me alive. I was suicidal, definitely so; I have attempted suicide and I have been hospitalised for my urges, but cutting was such a release for me that I was able to mostly curb my desire for my own death. Had I not self-harmed, I fear that my self-blame would have festered to the point where I would have succeeded in ceasing to exist.
I sit here, a year later, and I contemplate my habit yet again. My regrets are beginning to overwhelm me once more. But I'll pull through again, probably, maybe. It would just be nice if I could get a bit of acceptance with that. I hate that I have been made to feel ashamed for so long, because of this habit that has saved my life, and the marks that it has left behind. As cheesy as this sounds, if you find the sight of my legs to be shocking, try and take a look into my soul. I am merely trying to copy the marks on that onto my body, as visual proof. The scar tissue on my legs is nothing compared to the marks that others have made on me, within.
Cutting is definitely not a healthy coping strategy by any means.
But it sure as hell beats dying.
