In another thread, you mentioned that you also suffer have trichotillomania. I had to look that one up, but it certainly seems to be a type of self-injury. The Wikipedia entry suggests that there is some dispute as to whether it’s actually self-injury or OCD. What is your opinion?
Thank you. I’m braver than I give myself credit for, maybe, but I’m doing this to help me more than anyone else.
I can’t really remember the very first time. I think it was one time I was upset after a bad day at school, and I just grabbed a knife from the kitchen (the chef’s) and took it to the bathroom to cut my arm. I remember not going very deep, but seeing the blood come out surprised me. I forgot about my bad day and that was that.
The most serious is on my ankle, about three inches long, an inch thick. It most definitely needed stitches, but I didn’t realize that at the time and hid it for a week before showing my father and telling him I fell climbing a tree. By then it was too late for stitches, as it was already healing. I did it with a piece of glass, because it was handy. I’d tried cutting lighter, but I wasn’t seeing enough blood, so I just sliced as hard as I could. It took a second to well with blood, and I remember wondering why my skin was white inside.
I cut the inside of my throat once so severely that I could hardly eat for a week. It was painful to swallow, to simply breathe hard.
I use an exacto knife that I bought specifically for cutting, or a knife if I feel I want to use it. I used to use razor blades, but they were too hard to buy and store.
I’m sure drugs and therapy help some people, but I’m not one of them. I don’t like to take drugs for fear I’ll become dependent on them. I was in therapy for self-mutilation when I was 16, but it only helped by relieving the situation at home that was causing the majority of my stress. It didn’t help me to cognitively work my way out of problems, nor with coping skills.
I’ve known one other person who’s admitted to harming himself although it was with burning more than cutting. We didn’t talk much about it; he stopped because it bothered his wife very much. I don’t know when he started or stopped, but he’s only a few years older than me.
The only other contact I’ve had with a self-mutilator was as I was leaving a dressing room in a store and another woman walked to it. Well, a girl, really. Teenager. As she put her hand out to catch the door, I saw cuts all over her arm. I wanted to say something to her, wanted to approach her, but had no idea how she’d take it. If it’d been me, most likely I would have coldly told her to fuck off. So I finished shopping and left.
All the reading I’ve done on self-injury says that the majority of cutters are younger and female, but there are exceptions. I know that being a teenager is a rough time, and you have to find ways to cope that work for you. I’m sure there’s a bit of the shock value that’s appealing too…like, “look how tough I am - I cut, bruise and burn myself”
My upbringing was both good and bad. I was physically abused as a child, and emotionally abused until the day I left after graduating high school, but I also had family members that loved me unequivocally, were there for me in every aspect, and did everything they could to help me and let me know I was loved. I’ve spent the past 7 years with them around, and it’s made a big difference in my life.
Again, I don’t know how or why it occurred to me that harming myself was a solution…I’m sure something influenced me, but it was nothing that sticks out in my mind. There was no family memeber or friend or TV show or book where I saw someone do it. Maybe the influence came from my alcoholic mother, who drank my entire life. I really don’t know.
When I cut, I don’t show anyone. I don’t tell anyone. I told one girl in high school because I thought she was a close friend, but when I saw her look at me in disgust and confusion as she asked me why would I want to kill myself - when it wasn’t anywhere near suicide - I never offered it up again. My family only found out after I had a breakdown and was taken to a hospital. One very close friend knows now, and an ex-boyfriend, but that’s it. (Well, now all you Dopers know, too)
I don’t call that a cry for help, or a way to gain attention. It’s not something I’m proud of, not something I wish to share with people. “Hey, look at how weak I am, I can’t cope with everyday life so I have injure myself to deal with it!”
As for dealing…I’m on no meds. I’m not in therapy. I have to rely on myself to get through the bad times, and just know that I am strong enough to overcome whatever’s thrown my way. I have close family and friends; they are my support system.
I’ll get depressed again, I know. That’s life. When that happens, I’ll just do my best to be strong.
I’m male and I cut myself a few times. It’s not like punching a wall. Punching walls is triggered by rage coupled with frustration. For me, cutting was triggered by absolute despair coupled with frustration. The only real similarities are that you have to do something and you feel better afterwards.
It is so hard to explain. I think it was the need to take control back of myself. Wasn’t a cry for help. In fact, I think it was more about a need to be the one dealing with it myself.
I wish you well, LunaV.
(emphasis mine)
This is a great thing to believe, but not everyone is strong enough. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Be strong, by all means, but please don’t let it stop you from accepting, or even seeking help, if it gets that bad. And by “help,” I mean anything from a friend to confide in, to professional and/or medical help. I don’t know you except what I read here, and I say this only because one of my friends who was a cutter also ended up killing herself. 
Your words “shifting the tension and obsession” rang true with me. That’s exactly how it is with cutting. I feel like replacing one with the other; and the other, physical pain, is easier to handle than emotional pain.
I think it has elements of both. In me, it would probably be termed self-injury because I also harm myself. I don’t have any other compulsive behaviours. In someone who obssesively washes their hands or counts their cereal bowls, trichs would be termed an OCD problem.
Trichs is a more acceptable, less invasive form of self-harm for me. But, it’s very different from cutting. I definitely do it when I’m stressed, but I also do it when I’m bored. I know I shouldn’t, but something draws me back to it. I mostly pull my eyelashes, and the first thing I do upon getting out of the shower in the morning is pluck my eyebrows. I have to get every little hair - no matter how short or invisible it is. I will peck and peck at it until I get it, or I’ve spent way too much time and it’s getting late. When I was younger I’d collect them. Keep the lashes in a little container. The follicle on the end is friggen mesmerizing to me. I don’t get it.
It takes a lot of willpower not to pluck any grey hairs - I’ve had to talk to myself out loud to stop. Every now and then I’ll comb through my hair and pull out any abnormally thick strands. They feel different; I roll them through my fingers, I compare the length…it’s weird.
I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager and I’d never heard of it - didn’t even know there was a name for what I did - until I started reading about self-injury.
Thanks. I have a temper, and I’ve punched walls too. You’re absolutely right, it’s nothing like cutting or bruising myself. I actually feel when I’m angry, and it doesn’t go away after I punch or kick something. When I cut, I’m blank, thinking of nothing but the blood, the slice through skin. Whatever emotions were high before are gone…it takes effort to care.
I’m very sorry to hear about your friend. I can understand how unbearable life must seem if there’s no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel (darn clichés!). I at least had that.
To the other self-injurers out there; feel free to add your experiences, if you want. I don’t mean this thread to be all about me. Self-injury encompasses more than one person’s experiences. Being mainly a cutter, there’s a whole range of self-harm I have no idea about. **Jahdra ** mentioned biting…that’s something that never occurred to me.
Several other posters have added their experiences…that’s the best way to gain a full understanding of what self-injury is.
::waves::
It certainly appears (though that may be more a function of being comfortable talking about it than an actual gender difference) that I’m in the minority here.
My method is almost exclusively with nails. I’ve never drawn blood or left a permanent mark, which has the advantage of not leaving anything people might ask about.
Mostly, I do it to distract my mind from random thoughts that enter it. And by random, believe me do I mean random:) These are thoughts that have no rational basis for being considered in that tangle of gray cells. Those thoughts are essentially why I started. Think about it being a way to get your mind to think about something else–to get rid of that random thought you don’t want–and you’ll have a lot of why I do it.
Your remark and some remarks by LunaV are intreresting as they relate to the physical effects of enduring pain. I don’t self-injure or know anyone who does, but I have one tatoo that took a couple of hours to do, and it was really interesting to find that after it was done, I felt really great for about two days, physically and sexually. And I was really surprised at that. I’ve read that pain can release endorphins in your brain that make you feel good, and I think that was a case of that. And now I’m thinking that self-injuring may be a way that some of you bring on the endorphin effect.
Just my bit of theorizing, I hope you don’t mind. And thank you for sharing your experiences. It’s the kind of thing most people don’t hear about first-hand and therefore should know more about.
Thank you for posting this.
Please provide advice for a crisis line volunteer.
I have had opportunity to speak with many people who admit to cutting or burning (only women so far) and I’m sure there are plenty more to come.
Some call for other reasons and mention cutting during the conversation, but it is clear that the cutting does not have any part in their current distress – they may be considering taking their life, and by the way, they cut.
Some have just finished a bout of cutting and the call is focused on the event that triggered the cutting.
Some are about to cut and call in hopes of getting through the evening without doing so.
Please imagine yourself in either of these situations and tell me what you would want to hear from someone when you are reaching out for help. Better yet, how would you handle these situations if a person called you? I know that I can’t hope to find a single approach that works everywhere, but with each data point (including my prior conversations with people), I hope to learn better how to be a soothing voice in time of trouble.
I forgot about the eyelash/eyebrow pulling/plucking, mostly because I wasn’t conscious of actually doing it until about 6 months ago. I finally noticed that I had this little ritual of plucking out an eyelash or eyebrow hair, carefully inspecting it (**LunaV ** is right, the follicle is mesmerizing) and throwing it in the trash. I would only pull when I was near a trashcan. I couldn’t stand to throw the hairs on the floor, for whatever reason. At any rate, I would be in a trance while pulling the hairs and only “wake up” and stop for outside stimulus, for example, the phone ringing.
For me, I think self-harm was a way of escaping, zoning out when life got too intense. FTR, my parents were sadistic and violent and very abusive throughout my childhood and my mother probably continues to be (my father committed suicide 9 years ago), as far as I know, since I don’t have contact with her anymore. As I got older (I started S-I around 12, I think) I grew more proficient in spacing out or dissociating without self-injuring, so it had to be really, really bad for me to self-harm. Actually, I got so good at dissociating that most of 2004 and 2005 are gone. Just…gone. No memories, no nothing. Periodically, I would “wake up” and realize that 3 months had gone by and then zone out again. Poof! More time gone. I did a lot of self-destructive things then, I think, but I don’t really remember much, like I said. I think that probably falls under self-harm, too. It took 5 months on anti-psychotics to bring me back to Earth again.
On preview, minor7flat5, I think the most important thing is not to put undue attention on it, like OMG, you **cut ** yourself? Or, like my mother did when she found me cutting, express disgust and contempt. I’m sure that you don’t do that, but treating like any other symptom of distress is a start. For me, the thing that helped the most was a compassionate listener. I have a co-worker that just today, I told her how much it meant to me that she listened to me and didn’t judge me through out some very difficult times. Also, reiterating your concern for their continued well-being. If they’re calling you, they want to stop, and that is huge. I would reinforce that to them what a big step they are taking just by reaching out for help and how much courage that must take. For me, I was so isolated that just calling someone took almost all the courage I had. And to tell a perfect stranger what my own mother was disgusting? Very hard. Remind them that they have intrinsic value as human beings. It’s been my experience through multiple hospital stays that most suicidally depressed people have been treated as worthless for so long, they believe it. Just treating them like a human being with worth and value and talents is likely a huge difference from what they’re used to. Lastly, they may call back over and over. It takes time to overcome what has become an ingrained coping mechanism, especially if you are their only source of “therapy.” I recommend A Bright Red Scream, which is not nearly as condescending as some self-injury books.
One big reason I don’t tell many people is that the overreaction would not be fun to deal with. “OMG you do WHAT? That’s sick! How weird are you? What the hell is wrong with you?” … or “Dude, you seriously need help. You need, like, major help. That’s so messed up.” … or, more fun, “Why don’t you just deal with life like the rest of us do?” … or the well-meant but way too intense “Omigod I’m so sorry please tell me your entire life story and explain everything.”
I’m betting many people you talk to, especially for the first time, will not have told anyone else this about themselves. As is, a handful of people in person have any clue what I do, and that’s largely because I don’t want to have to deal with the histrionic, reactionary crowd, to say nothing of the “You’re different, and that makes you bad” crowd. So the first thing is to sound caring, but not “OMG tell me EVERYTHING” caring. You care about these folks, but maybe they just want to get it out there and then talk about something else.
Beyond responding in a controlled manner that lets the caller control (or at least think s/he is controlling) the conversation, I don’t have enough experience with enough of a variety of people who SI to know for sure what path to take. There are enough different reasons for SI (one friend of mine does it because nothing else works; another did it because she felt that she needed to punish herself) that any one approach, as you no doubt have discovered, is going to severely hinder what you can do.
The last thing I’d suggest is, if you think it’s wise, fostering an environment with your callers wherein you’re not talking just about SI. Yeah, I do it. I also do a lot of other things utterly unrelated, and sometimes there’s just not anything more I want to say about it. Think about it like anyone else asking for help: yeah, you want to talk about your situation, but you also want to remind yourself, and be reminded by someone else, that that’s only one part of your existence.
Another one here. A long time ago as a teenager (I still have scars) I don’t remember why I did it but it was spontaneous in as much as I’d never heard of anyone else doing it. I only did it for a couple of weeks, I think I scared myself the last time I did it since I went right through the skin on my arm, I just stopped after that. I certainly never ritualised it or had a ‘kit’ it like Luna – just grab a stanly knife and slice ::winces::
The psychology of it is a complete blank to me, I can’t explain why it occurred to me, or what good it was supposed to do. Much later I heard about ‘self harm’ but even then it was something that girls did.
Looks like there’s a lot if it about.
FWIW this is the nearest I’ve come to telling anyone about it.
I guess I’ll chime in as the (counts…) fourth male self-injurer. I have done both the stereotypical “angry guy punching a wall” type and the cutting/burning more associated with female self injurers (and yes, I have both cut and burned.)
I’ll also agree that the two types are brought on by different reasons (well…different emotions. It was the same external triggers, but just how I was internalizing it at that time would result in me being more angry and frustrated, or mre depressed and helpless.) The first time I did it was my freshman year of college, end of the first semester (2000.) I cut on a few occasions, on my left forearm. To this day, only one of the cuts has left a scar. I only burned myself once, and it wasn’t with an actual flame. I heated up a spoon with a lighter and then just pressed it against my skin until it wasn’t hot anymore.
The worst for me, though, was the wall/door/window punching, at least in terms of visable/actual damage. I have a couple small scars on my right hand from when I punched a couple of windows, and the first knuckle of my middle finger on my right hand is now noticeably larger than the one on my left hand because of a few incidents where I punched my door a LOT.
I haven’t done any self-injuring since I left college, though, and don’t see myself doing it anymore.
Let’s suppose I was your friend.
Would you prefer I accept you as you are (including that you are a cutter or SI), not freak out, not hassle you about it, just treat it as normal? Or would attempts on my part to intervene, try to get you to talk about it, encourage you to get help, etc, be experienced by you as more caring?
(My inclination is more in the first direction, although that could change if you pulled out an X-acto and went to work on your forearm in my presence or something)
Any of you that are cutting yourselves or contemplating doing so, don’t be making threads about it, go see a phyisician or other qualified medical professional.
It’s more appropriate that you should seek attention and help in a medical setting rather than doing so here.
After some discussion with the rest of the staff, we have decided to reopen this thread.
If self-mutilation is a part of your life it would be more appropriate and perhaps more useful to get help rather than be futzing around here but that is your choice.
As always, the management is not responsible for your outcomes. Nothing you read or do here should ever take the place of consultation with qualified processionals.
Rather ominous slip there… :eek:
I’m glad the thread got reopened. While people are posting the way they have so far, I can imagine cutters getting something out of it and others being usefully informed about what must be a very difficult thing to talk about.
What are the positive coping skills you employ to avoid this?
Why did you stop therapy? (If it was because you didn’t bond with the therapist, I’m sure there were other out there)
I am happy to see it as well, and I hope people who had doubts and expressed them in the Pit thread will consider framing those doubts as questions and asking them here, as miamouse did.
Incidentally, and not to single you out, but there was a trend I noticed in the Pit thread that I’d like to try to stop. You’ll notice that the thread title is “Ask the Self-Injurer,” not ask the cutter. The phrase used to refer to people who SI, by those in the mental health field and those who engage in SI, is SI because not everyone cuts. I, for example, have never cut. At my most desperate (and those days are, from everything I can tell, behind me), I have never drawn blood, in part because I don’t cut. A friend of mine who used to cut went to bruising herself for a time when she lost her knife. Another friend burned herself (we’re talking singing hairs, not self-immolation or anything like Burning Man). My understanding (anecdotally) is that a lot of SIers do cut, but not all do.
Mostly, distraction. What I do is a form of distraction (although I recognize that may seem to some like rationalizing). It’s meant largely to distract me, not to hurt me. When I get one of those discomforting thoughts, SI is not my first reaction. Focusing on something to ignore the thought is. After the fact, that the thought was not welcome is something I focus on for a bit, and then I usually just go from there.
I never went. I had been covered by my mother’s health insurance plan until last October, but that was last October:) Because of all the volunteer work I do and the courseloads I’ve been taking for most of the past year, getting a good enough job to get insurance (or even just using money from the job) to help offset the cost of therapy or drugs hasn’t been a feasible strategy until very recently. Of late, I’ve been trying to get one (although not primilarily for that reason).
Glad this is reopened, thanks Tuba.
Is the pain a necessary part of SI? I’m guessing that people don’t get any SI relief from accidental cuts or abbraisons, tell me if that guess is wrong.