Cut it Out! (My Experience of Self Injury)

Member Name: lily7star

Product:	My Experience of Self Injury
Date:	28/02/01 (348 review reads)
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Sara sits in the playground watching the blood run down her leg. She puts down the broken glass she is holding and finds a teacher. " I fell down."

The teacher has stopped believing her, so she is yelled at for being stupid enough to do something so dangerous. A few days later in class, she is given a razor blade to cut paper. She cuts her hand and is angrily lectured that this kind of behaviour will cause her to bleed to death.

Terrified, the cutting stops, but on frequent occasions over the next months, Sara arrives at school in bandages underneath which are elaborate "pretend" injuries. She is dismissed as " attention seeking". She is ignored and the behaviour eventually stops.

27 years later Sara has achieved success academically. In addition she has been given a prestigious international award for initiative and unique achievement in her field of work. She has a husband and children and lives in a beautiful house. What people don't see is the abuse, fear and violence which goes on behind its closed doors.

One day she attends a training day during which Womens Aid perform a role play about domestic violence. Suddenly everything falls apart and the only way she can remain functional is by cutting herself. Somehow it helps. Terrified she calls a helpline. They tell her not to do it but to "go and do something nice instead!"

If only it was that easy.

This is hard. When I wrote my original opinion on self injury it was a deliberately objective, informative piece of writing. Suddenly the category heading changed and my op ended up in a "My Experience of...." category.

I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to write about "My Experience of Self Injury" at all. In fact I *know* I that I *definitely* didn't when I wrote the original version. There's a big "BUT" though. If I'm attempting to challenge any prejudice and sh
ame around this behaviour, could I perhaps owe it to people to find the courage to speak up? Was I being hypocritical to expect people to change their attitudes towards self injurers without daring to say "this is me!"?

If you don't know me, and most of you don't, you could and may well just dismiss me as crazy. Heaven knows, I've labelled myself that way enough times. Will what I say make the slightest difference in the way that self injurers are viewed, or will it only add to the prejudice? Is it really worth the personal risk to speak out?

My history of self-injuring is something I'm not even slightly "out" about. Like I said in the original opinion, it's a behaviour which is 99.9% of the time secret and hidden. I have a very good professional reputation which means a lot to me, and I've no desire to lay that on the line. Thinking about this issue has challenged me though. If I really do believe that self-injurers should not be stigmatised, is it time to speak more honestly? Is my silence just perpetuating the myths?

For me, I think self injury belongs in the past. This doesn't mean that I am 100% sure that I'll never again use it as a coping mechanism, but it does mean that I am learning to tolerate previously intolerable feelings and to use more constructive methods of coping with emotional pain. From having been unable to get through more than a day or so without self-injuring a few years ago, I have now only had a couple of intense but short-lived episodes in the past year, and I'm pretty confident that this year will be better still.

The thing which finally gave me strength to make this decision to talk about what for me has been completely hidden for a very long time, is the fact that I know that I personally gained strength from listening to people who were winning this particular battle. It helped me believe that winning was possible on the days when I thought it
wasn't. It made me realise that I didn't have to accept a lifetime of self injury, and most importantly, those people who talked openly and with courage about how they had left self injury behind gave me hope. If I can give even a bit of that hope to anyone reading this then it will be worth any risks I might be taking.

If you want to skip the rest of the "my experience" bit and get to the practical info and more objective opinion which I originally wrote, feel free to just scroll to the bottom. I will leave it as it was. Writing a very personal opinion here is a totally new thing for me. Like I said, please just skip this bit if you think I'm wasting your time. The bit at the bottom is a VU op. This bit I'm much less confident about. Oh, and it will in all likelihood be long. Sorry!

Being totally honest, writing about this scares me. I'm very good at not talking about myself and a world expert at hiding. Experiences as a child and adult have taught me to be like that, and they are defences which have served me well but which I'm learning to dismantle little bit by little bit.

For me as a child self injury was a means of communication. I was 8 years old. Younger than my youngest child is now, and I was being abused. This was the only way I could find to communicate with the adults in my world, and like more normal forms of communication, it too failed.

When I began self-injuring again as an adult it was for different reasons. As I said in my original op, it is thought to release endorphins, but whatever, it was the only thing I knew how to do which would keep me sane. How sane you think it is to be cutting yourself is another matter, but it kept me able to function and I was able to hide what I was doing simply because it was something no-one ever imagined I would ever do. I could be in desperation, take a blade to my arms and then 5 minutes later be the perfect hostess as long as I wore long-slee
ved clothes. Like an alcoholic with alcohol, this got me through.

It's a terrible way to live though, always careful to cover your arms, always seeming fine and in control on the surface but to be constantly battling an urge to completely self-destruct. I knew I would never actually take my own life because of my children, but as memories of childhood abuse surfaced for the first time as unutterably terrifying flashbacks, I also knew that I would do whatever it took to stay some kind of functional for my own kids.

Thankfully it's been a while since I had a bad flashback. (For those who don't know what they are, they're like black pits you can fall into in your mind where you're quite literally reliving a traumatic experience which your mind has never successfully processed)I've been working hard in therapy and if things feel too unbearable (which they do less often these days) I have better strategies for coping. I'm learning that despite what I learnt through my upbringing, feelings do not destroy you, and it's possible to survive feeling the most intense and terrifying emotions without resorting to deadening them in some way.

Maybe I'm a little like an ex-alcoholic - I've heard that people talk about "recovering" alcoholics, well I guess I'm a "recovering" self injurer. It's not that I don't get tempted, but that I know I can manage without it now 99.99% of the time. Going back to it feels wrong because although it did serve a purpose for me and was sometimes all that could get me out of some of the flashbacks, it is no longer something I can't live without.

I hope one day I'll update this and say that I haven't self-injured for a whole year. It's amazing to me sometimes when I look back to how bad things were, that these days I am confident about the possibility of a future without self-injury.

*Update* My year is nearly up - I stil
l think about self injuring sometimes, but have pretty much learnt that there are better, less self-defeating ways of dealing with difficult feelings. A friend who was about the only person who knew what I did asked me today for the first time in a very long time, how I was doing with the cutting. I realised I couldn't remember the last episode, but that it was about a year ago now.

I remember believing I might never even get through a day without it. If you're struggling still, please believe that change is possible. I never used to believe it was either.

*update* 05/02 I'm much more out about my cutting than I ever was before, but of course that's easier now it really does feel like it's in the past for me. I've learnt that talking feelings out is better than cutting to make them go away - it's not been easy, and at times what I feel like I want *is* the quick fix that self injury gave me, but finally I've built enough strength in myself not to reach for something to hurt myself but to talk to someone or write about what I'm feeling.
I like my scars and they remind me that I've survived and have come a long way to be where I am now.

The original op is below.

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.....March 1st is National Self Injury Awareness Day - something I imagine most people will be unaware of, despite the high prevalence of self-injurers in this country - but which I'd like to mark with an opinion about this highly emotionally charged and misunderstood subject. This opinion is born out of personal experience as well as many hours spent listening to people struggling with self injury.

I toyed with writing this in the addiction category as self injury can definitely have some very addictive qualities, but as that comes under the section of "diseases" and I'm not at all keen to classify self injury (referre
d to as si from now on in this article!) as a "disease" I prefer to write about it here under the category for general health comments.

When I say si is not a disease, let me clarify - si is primarily a coping mechanism. A crude but, temporarily at least, an effective one. People who si are far less likely to commit suicide, and, to destroy that other favourite misconception, their self-destructive behaviour is usually used to get relief from intolerably difficult feelings rather than to get attention or to affect anyone else in some way.

So, let's start from the basics - what is self injury?

Self injury is the deliberate harming of your body in some way in order to affect your emotional state. It is not considered self-injury if the purposes are decorative or sexual. It is usually an act which is carried out repeatedly, and which can show addictive qualities. It works in many ways, but is believed to work principally by releasing the body's natural endorphins. Most self-injurers cut, but others burn or hit themselves or use a variety of other methods.

Who self injures?

Self injurers come from all walks of life. Rich or poor, male or female. They are school children, teachers, nurses, postgraduate students, civil servants, therapists, scientists, sports coaches, vets or teenagers. Some may be out of work and others holding down high-functioning jobs. They are people like you and me. Often self injury will both start and stop during the teenage years, but some children do it, as do some people as old as 60 or more.

It's difficult if not impossible to draw a profile of a "typical self injurer" but one thing they are likely to have in common is that they may have been chronically invalidated as children. Many also have been abused or neglected. They are not crazy, unhinged or dangerous, although the fear of being labelled in this way makes this behaviour very shameful and almost inva
riably secretive. Scars are hidden, and there seem to be a lot of VERY vicious cats around! In addition there is a very high correlation between eating disorders and self injury. Although eating disorders have been discussed more openly in recent years, sadly the silence and stigma surrounding self injury still remains.

What reasons do people give for self injuring?

These vary from expressing emotion, relieving distress, dealing with feelings of unreality/numbness, trying to end flashbacks to self-punishment.

What helps end self-injury?

Since most self-injurers do not self-injure for attention, denying appropriate attention, be that emotional or medical is totally inappropriate and more of a punishment than a treatment. Sadly many medical practitioners still do not understand self injury and it is not unheard of for a self-injurer to be denied anaesthetic if their wounds require stitching, told not to waste peoples' time or talked to as if they were nothing more than a nuisance. You may secretly agree with these sentiments, but compare for a minute the attention given to an overweight, sedentary patient who has just suffered a heart attack...

What does help is someone who can help enable the self-injurer to develop new coping strategies, and to learn to tolerate the apparently intolerably painful feelings. Sometimes medication can help, but more often useful is good therapy from someone who can tolerate their own feelings about their client's self injuring behaviour.

There are some helpful books available to self injurers now. I'd recommend Dr Tracy Alderman's self-help book, "The Scarred Soul" and Steven Levenkron's book "Cutting". Both of these are reviewed on dooyoo.

If you currently self injure and are looking for support, go check out the following site :

http://www.palace.net/~llama/psych/injury.html

This is the best site on the net on sel
f injury and is also the place from where you can sign up for a supportive mailing list, which is *extremely* high traffic, but an excellent place to gain the support you need in stopping your self-injury, or, if you're not yet at the point where you want to do that, in staying safe.

The following is also an excellent site for specifically UK resources:

www.selfinjury.freeserve.co.uk

The Basement Project based in Bristol have also produced some excellent booklets on self injury both for self injurers and for those working with them.


Self injury can seem strange and frightening. The isolation and stigma surrounding those who self-injure to survive will continue unless we learn to tolerate that strangeness and fear. A decade ago eating disorders were still shrouded in the same kind of uneasy silence, my hope is that one day people will talk as easily about self injury as they now do about anorexia. It's only people like you and me who will make that change possible.

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