It’s really common when you have mental health problems to use self harm as a crutch. For me it’s also a form of expression. As I’ve said before in this blog I find it hard to open up verbally and emotionally so self harm, for me has been a way of silently screaming.
I started cutting at 16. I’d just been badly sexually assaulted and no one I told cared. I don’t mean that in a dramatic way, I mean in a very literal way – my twin actually said “I don’t care”.
I was only 16 and I expected my family to do something. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I told someone (my mother) as soon as I could and the response I got was “You must be mistaken”. She went out afterwards and came back with KY jelly, a sexual lubricant.
I was a teenager and I was slowly realising that the people around me I expected to care and protect me just didn’t, I’d gone from person to person asking for help and I got nothing but excuses from “He’s your husband, that’s his right you just have to get used to it” to “It’s a test from God to help you become a truly faithful person, ask God for help and you will get it”
I gave up and withdrew I became incredibly depressed and spent most of my time in bed barely speaking to anyone and would get up in the middle of the night to watch reality TV shows until the early hours of the morning.
I had never felt so alone and I couldn’t help wondering what was wrong with me that no one ever, even considered helping me.
I decided that I was too fat and that made me disgusting and worthless and so I began to diet.None of these diets were healthy. Instead of eating less I stopped eating altogether. It made me feel in control and it gave my mind a distraction – I weighed out my food I counted calories obsessively. At one point I went two weeks without a single piece of food I had nothing but 1 cup of tea at 84cal and 2 cups of orange juice at 45cal each.
I felt proud that I had such will-power but I was still a teenager living at home. My mother started to notice my change in eating habits and started to act suspiciously – she constantly offered me food – not unusual for most mothers but my mother had put me on a diet since I was 7 and constantly criticised everything I ate so actually offering me food was very unusual.
I made excuse after excuse but she kept upping the ante with offers of my favourite meals and I decided that if I ate a meal in front of her she’d lose interest and I could wait until she was occupied and throw up to ‘get rid’ of it.
Later that night I couldn’t sleep. I heard a constant voice telling me how gross and disgusting I was, that I deserved nothing and that now I needed to prove how committed I was to losing weight by punishing myself for eating.
I went downstairs and found an old kitchen knife, then went back upstairs and cut myself. I never felt so relieved in my life – it felt like all the stress in my body washed away. The negative voice stopped and I suddenly felt relaxed enough to sleep.
I started self harming every time I ate and soon it was a daily ritual – it felt freeing like my body was filled with poison and cutting was a way of letting out the poison.
For a few years no one noticed but one day I took things too far. I won’t go into what happened now – lets just say I broke my toe and I ended up admitting this to my mother.
She didn’t care, she just made fun of me – much later she forced me to get blood-letting, I really didn’t want to and when I said cautiously “It sounds painful” she replied “Not as painful as breaking your own toe”. That was the only thing she said about my self harm. Ever.
At one point my mother told me I had been cursed by “the Evil Eye” and made me go see an exorcist – I didn’t want to go but I was bundled into a car and forced, I had to go through some silly ‘test’ and was told I was possessed and then made to drink blessed water with bits of paper in it several times a day for weeks.
Shockingly this had absolutely no effect on me at all.
To hide the scars and the fresh cuts I wore long sleeves, cardigans, boleros for over a decade in all weather – no one ever found out, not friends, or co-workers or family and I didn’t tell anyone until my mid twenties.
It didn’t occur to me to seek medical help as I didn’t see it as a problem and I didn’t want to stop.In all honestly I still self harm I’ve been doing it for so long it’s just second nature BUT I have had some help from therapy for my self harm and I do now see why it’s a bad thing.
Self harm doesn’t fix the problems in your life its just a way of mentally running away from those problems. No one deserves to be injured for any reason, neither do you!
I know it’s so easy and addictive but take a step back and honestly look at yourself you’ll see it’s not actually making you feel better it’s at best hiding the problems – your pain isn’t any better.
Once you feel better about yourself, happier – you’ll notice you self harm less and less – what used to be a daily occurrence is now a rarity in my life I haven’t cut in months because I don’t feel as bad I as did.
I know how annoying it is to be told ‘it’ll get better’ from anyone let alone a stranger so I won’t tell you that because it doesn’t, I’m still haunted by it – and it’s been well over a decade for me – but realistically time does pass and other things happen and that mere passage of time makes the trauma feel more distant and it does fade. Now I’m left with hundreds, if not thousands of lifelong scars all over my body and far from helping me they’re just constant reminders of an ugly past and now I can’t forget it.
Self harming won’t help you in the long run, after a while it’s the only way you know how to cope with anything and so you never try to learn a different method of coping.
Life continues whether it feels like it does or not and one day you realise you’re a fully grown adult, paying the bills, working, living life in general but you have no idea how to stop hurting yourself.
Stay away from self harm – do as I say not as I do!!
Survivng Life 