I’ve written on Munchausen’s, and have received letters from many asking how could someone hurt a child that way. The flip side of that is the person who hurts himself through self-harm, or as most psychiatrists refer to it, self-mutilation.
Let us start off by seeing what Webster’s dictionary has to say about a couple of words:
Mutilate: To injure or disfigure by removing or irreparably damaging parts; or, to deprive a person or animal of a limb or other essential part. Cutting: The act of a person or thing that cuts with a sharp-edged instrument; or, even penetration by a cut. Cut: To lacerate or wound, to carve out, to hollow out, striking oneself with the edge of a blade; to lower, diminish, reduce, dissolve, cease, discontinue; to shut off or shut out, to remove, to delete, to distress mentally. Cut can even mean to wound the feelings of someone severely as in being sarcastic. Finally, to cut can mean, “cutting a passage or channel (like a cut through the woods.)
Looking at some of these meanings can help you understand yet another piece of what can evolve from someone being severely depressed. If you take some of the above meanings and contemplate deeply upon them, you can begin to see and then understand how cutting on oneself can bring about the ability for them to get a strange form of relief. The fact is though that it is found to be a form of relief for people that are severely depressed.
“How could she actually do that?” Wilma’s mother was quick to ask the therapist when she visited with him. Wounding Wilma’ used razor blades and had been carving on her ankles for months. Her mother finally asked her daughter why her socks were always bloody looking. Wilma could only shake her head. She could not share the secret. One day her mother walked in Wilma’s bedroom and caught her scrapping her ankle with a small knife. She asked Wilma why she was doing that to herself. Wilma could only shake her head. So, Wilma’s mother made an appointment with Dr. Sherman and the process of recovery began for them.
A ‘cutter’ is a hard person to understand if you yourself cannot imagine harming your own body. Through RoseMeade’s Wellness Nook, I have divulged some private information about myself that some people would quite possibly have kept forever. My motives are duo-fold. One is to help my audience understand certain segments of depression from a patient’s viewpoint. As I am not a doctor or therapist, my sharing is only from experience and it is with this experience, that I hope to be able to empathize, understand and care for others who do live a painful lifestyle. It is my hope that through my sharing that people will move more towards a healthy state and move further away from depression.
Wounding Wilma spent her childhood as an incest victim keeping many secrets. Each time Wilma was penetrated by an abuser in one form or another, a scar was produced deep down inside of her emotionally, much less physically. These emotional scars are stored inside of Wilma’s mind and body. The wounds or scars need to be processed and closure needs to come to these scars. Like most cutters, Wilma lives a life containing a great deal of secrets. Secrets that started with the incest she could tell no one about. Now, at age 23, Wilma feels compelled on a daily basis to harm herself. She uses razor blades in the bedroom to scrap her ankles; she sits in her car and uses a knife that she carries in her purse to carve on her knees. Sometimes, at her desk at work, she uses a letter opener to stab herself in the stomach; and when nothing else seems available; Wilma uses paper clips to slice lines all over herself. These wounds, better described as small incisions or scraps, are not deep enough to kill her. However, suicide is not the issue here. The real issue is finding relief of obsessions and finding a channel for emotional tortures. But, “why does Wilma (or others for that matter) continue for long periods cutting themselves?
Just as Webster’s dictionary describes cutting as “to hollow out,” a cutter describes what they are doing as a form of hollowing out their emotional pains. Cutters attempt to diminish, dissolve, or carve a passage for their past to be tolerated. Even without knowing it, Wilma tries, by slicing into her ankles, to live with the fact that her uncle molested her and cut her youth away from her. Wounding Wilma (like me in the late 1980’s) wanted with all her might to reduce her emotional pain and she found relief by inflicting physical pain on herself. See, sometimes the emotional basket gets too full. This basket needs a channel in which to empty its debris. This channel for Wilma and for many others seems solved for a moment or two anyway by the cutting.
“How could this be happening?” asked Wilma’s mother of the therapist. Well, as soon as the skin receives a scrap or slice, the cutter’s mind becomes full of other thoughts. They think about the physical pain that comes quickly and their concentration moves to that area instead. A cutter, after cutting on their own body, has to concentrate upon the blood, the bandage, or even how they can cover up the fact that they have performed the cutting act. Sometimes hours, months, and years have been on emotional scars. The cut provides a strange relief. This relief (not the actual cutting) is what is desired and needed so greatly by the depressed individual.
Focus on emotional problems and secrets kept for years seem to be one of the causes of the obsessions one might have to cut their own bodies. Cutters will share how for them before they actually do the cutting, mutilating or slicing on their skin, that they have by that time spent many hours and even days thinking about harming their own body. Therefore, now you can see the other reason that the behavior continues is that the cutter believes it will cause their mind to stop contemplating the cutting action. The sad truth is that the relief from the mind is short lived. The cycle begins all over again and can continue until the cutter makes a decision to take a risk and begin to share with someone what his or her secrets might be. Once a cutter starts to share with a trusted listener about the things that has “cut” or scarred them in the past; their ‘Reality Recovery’ can begin.
A physician who truly cared about Wilma treated her wounds; and like me in 1990, she was placed in a caring and loving thirty-day treatment center. Real life finally began for her as it can for you too. When she checked into the hospital, the harmful items she brought with her (including the bobbie pins) were taken away. Wilma was placed on ‘watch’ for a couple of weeks while she shared about the horrors of her abuse. Daily she healed. Care and love channeled into her replacing the need to channel by the cutting acts. Understanding replaced the paranoia. Solution replaced Wilma’s obsessions to hurt her body. By the end of the thirty days (and now almost thirteen years later), Wilma has not had to harm herself one time. The cutting has ended.
Please remember tears do cleanse the soul, so have a good cry instead of picking up another blade today. Go one day and then two and then three and do not cut on yourself. You, too, if you will only begin to tell someone about your emotional scars, can have Reality Recovery. Begin today. If you feel there is no one you can trust, send me an email to [email protected]. I care and will write back and share with you how my life changed and I was able to stop harming myself.
Mutilation, cutting, cutter, slicing, self harm, depression, hypochondria, wounds, incest, secrets, abusers, abuse, cut, pain, emotional, scars, physical, recovery, reality, sadness
