When Emotional Pain Becomes Physical: Exploring My Self-Injury Behavior

"A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step." -- Chinese Proverb, via QuotesBlog

A quick glance here and you will no doubt realize that this is a long post. It’s four pages on my word processor at home. I haven’t really tried to make it sound organized; it’s been mostly an outpouring of my heart. Just so you know, it’s a pretty heavy post. Note: the text in this post may contain graphic descriptions of self-injury. Please use caution when reading. Read on, if you so desire. It does get better at the end. Here we go...

I’ve been reading through this book entitled Cutting: Understanding & Overcoming Self-Mutilation by Steven Levenkron. It’s causing me to think about my own behavior: where it comes from and how I can overcome it. Actually, that’s the reason why I checked the book out from the library: to help me to overcome the self-mutilation.

I keep trying to remember when I started to self-injure. I think the first time I saw it was when I was about six or seven years old. I was sitting on the front porch with a girl in the neighborhood. I think her parents, or maybe just her mom, was inside with my mom. I saw her pick at a scab on her arm. I don’t remember anything else about that moment. I felt a little bit of respect for her because she was older than I.

My mom and dad were separated when I was six years old. My sister and I would hear them argue, and I remember that it hurt me deeply to see Mom and Dad so mad at each other. I remember, some time later, actually seeing my Dad throw my Mom down the stairs. She wound up wearing a neck brace for some time after that.

A young child hasn’t the ability to cope with his parents’ fallibility. I sure wasn’t. My entire feelings of security were threatened by this separation and the ensuing divorce. My Dad was an alcoholic and my Mom was yet undiagnosed with bipolar disorder. Mom came to rely on me for emotional support, as I grew older.

I know now that it’s not supposed to happen that way. Children are supposed to get a sense of protection and security from the authority that parents have. I don’t recall having that from either my mom or dad. Mom always tried so hard not to disparage Dad in front of my sister and me. We lived with her, and we would visit Dad on the weekends.

I guess I naturally began to hate what was going on. I envied friends whose parents were still together, longing for the family I didn’t have. Yet in my mind, I felt that Mom and Dad could do no wrong. After all, they’re Mom and Dad.

I guess that’s when I started to turn my anger inward. I have always had a hard time expressing anger outwardly.

When I was 15 years old, my sister and I spent the summer in Texas with my Mom. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but somehow I got into such a heated argument with my mom that I ran away for a little while. I was so upset with her, and I didn’t know how to handle my feelings, so I walked out of her house.

I wound up in a Catholic church building near the neighborhood. I was praying about what was going on, and I resolved to head back home. Mom sat me down, and I tried so hard to stay angry with her, yet as she laid into me verbally, I saw that what she was saying was right. Since that time, Mom and I have been close.

Yet I know that there are moments with her and also with Dad that I don’t feel comfortable expressing anger. In a way, I suppose that I have no right to be angry. I guess that’s how it feels. And so I turn inward.

I remember one incident, as a teenager, living with my Dad and stepmother. I’d been studying, and I suppose that I’d gotten frustrated at something with it. I started scratching my face. I don’t really remember why. It started to feel “good,” and I continued to scratch. Eventually, I used all the fingers on both hands, and I scratched my face until I’d broken skin.

My room was downstairs, and I had a separate bathroom, too. I remember going to the bathroom to wash my face off, to try to hide what I’d just done. Yet, as I went to the dinner table, it was obvious. I don’t really remember what I told Dad and June.

The next day at school, people were asking me, joking with me, that I’d lost a fight with a cat. I went along with it; too ashamed to tell them what really happened.

I guess that’s a big thing about the self-mutilating behavior, too: shame. I’d have to say I feel a lot of shame right now for the recent behavior. I’ve often had a hard time seeing my faults, but maybe it was just a way of not having to deal with the pain of my own fallibility.

What I’m trying to say is this: I eventually came to realize that I had to fend for myself. I couldn’t really trust my parents and stepparents enough to really talk with them about how I was feeling. I found self-worth in things I knew I could do well; namely, schoolwork and, later on, playing the saxophone. I was pretty confident that I could do these things well and get praise for it, so I began to rely on my own strength. And as others saw me do these things well, I felt good, too.

I would take any criticism really hard; so hard, that, pretty soon people stopped trying to relate to me. They felt that they had to handle me with “kid gloves,” which only made me feel worse.

At no time did it occur to anyone that I needed help. On the outside everything looked normal. I was, after all, a clean-cut, high-achieving student. “Stay the way you are and you’ll go far” was a common phrase other classmates would write in my yearbooks.

After my first year of college, the time came for me to get a co-op job with a company who did work related to my field of study. I saw this as a great opportunity for me to move away from home for a little while, and I found such a job.

I had never been out on my own before, so my natural instincts took over. I did a pretty good job taking care of myself. Yet when I received a letter from my stepmother during that time that basically told me that I was going to need to find a place of my own when it was time for me to head back to school, I felt crushed. I felt like they didn’t want me around. Looking back, I can see that in general it was a good thing. At the time I felt abandoned, however.

So I continued to trust in my own abilities to fend for myself, and I got frustrated with myself when I failed. I took the frustrations out on myself. I had such high personal standards that when I didn’t reach them, I felt more and more inadequate.

I can see that this is how the perfectionism exhibited itself. It was prevalent long before I moved out on my own, however. I think it started when I was much younger, after my folks had gotten divorced.

As I see these written words, I cannot help but feel grateful to God. He has shown me through his word that I don’t need to be perfect. He doesn’t expect me to be perfect. He knows how I’m made; he knows me better than anyone else. Jesus was perfect, and his perfection is all I need.

I am realizing how important God’s grace to me is. Words like “lavished”, “freely-given”, “overflowing” mean so much to me in this context. I need help remembering all of this.

I realized this morning that it’s Satan who wants me to stay mired in the feelings of inadequacy. It’s Satan who’s been telling me all these lies about myself. I’ve found myself wanting to believe them.

If there could be one single thing I could ask for, spiritually, it would be this: to be able to trust God and others.

I struggle with trust. I’m afraid of opening myself up to others because I don’t want to be hurt. I resort to self-mutilating behavior because of the hurts I’ve experienced in the past from trusting others.

I’ve written these things here mainly to help myself, but I realize I’m not writing this in a vacuum. It helps for others to know me a little better, and perhaps it will help someone else, too. With that in mind, I’d like to find a support group of others who deal with the same things as I.

This passage from 1 John 1:5-10 (emphasis added) also helps:

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.

These are some of the many promises of God for me to hold onto.