So yet another of my son’s friends has been found to be a cutter. This is the first boy. 15, bright, bored, emo and proud of it. The youngest was a girl of 12 or so, clinically depressed. Most of them have been 13-14 and without diagnosable mental illness. I think this kid makes the fifth or sixth…in fact, I think now my son (16) might be the only one of his closest social group who hasn’t cut.
What’s the deal? I have some half-assed theories, but mostly I’m just lost and confused and want to know how to help these kids I love. I don’t get it.
I’ve had it explained to me that people cut because the perceived pain in their lives is unbearable. Cutting gives them actual pain which they can control, and through that, they attempt to gain control over the other pain. That explanation sounded reasonable to me.
I personally don’t buy that explanation. I’m sure for some kids this is the case, but the number of cutters has sort of exploded in recent years. It strikes me as…attention-whoring to the nth. There I said it. Flame away.
The prevalence of “cutting” strikes me as a fairly recent phenomenon. I’m sure there are various motivations, but the fact that it’s now apparently so widespread suggests to me a faddish or attention-seeking element to it. (If all five or six kids were discovered to be cutting, they can’t have been hiding it too well…)
I tend to agree. It’s probably happened secretly to a small number of kids for decades. Now it’s more well-known, and is a great way for a kid who’s hurting to seek attention. When I was in high school, it seemed like there was a rise in half-assed attempts at suicide (that were never meant to succeed) as a way of calling attention to their pain without saying “Help me.” I suspect that those same kids would be cutting today.
So I’d say: Don’t dismiss it. It’s a symptom of something, not the problem. It’s like teen drinking, illegal racing, huffing paint, etcetera. It’s ways kids find to feel better and escape the pain of growing up.
Nope. Not going to flame. I would tend to agree with you. And Vinyl Turnip. While I’ve just spent about 5 minutes googling to see if I could find anything to support it, I wasn’t able to find too much that was cite worthy so this is just my assumption.
From what I’ve seen, cutting has become closely tied to emo culture (enough so that I recently saw a humor t-shirt that reads “I wish my lawn was emo so it would cut itself”)
Since kids in their early teens are usually still trying to figure out who they are, they usually try to emulate what they consider to be the ideal member of the culture they’ve decided to identify with. So if they’ve decided they’re emo, they’ll shop at Hot Topic, wear lots of eyeliner, get a proper emo haircut (complete with cutesy barettes for the girls), write really sad emotional poetry on their MySpace page, and there’s a very very good chance that they’ll try cutting, because that’s what they think an emo kid is supposed to do.
That’s not to say that the behaviour should be ignored, because cutting is still serious and could be a sign of greater problems than just trying to fit in… but I don’t think it’s necessarily as scary a warning sign as it once was if the kid is otherwise smart and well-adjusted.
I am interested and confused too. The one I know who cuts is almost 40 and has one sweet little kid - if a bit spoiled - and another one on the way. Marital issues galore, some self-esteem issues, and some other stuff - but damn, man, what are you going to say when your little girl asks you, “Daddy, what are all those scars on your arms?” It’s really fucking disturbing and upsetting and I have no idea even what to think about it.
I have heard that. I’ve also heard the exact opposite, that cutters are emotionally and physically numb, and cut so they can feel something, anything at all.
Well, how does one hide it, really? The cuts or scars are visible for days or weeks or forever, and most parents do eventually see all the extremities that are easy cutting targets.
However, I think you’re right that there some element of faddishness going on. When I was in high school, there were a few kids who cut or, more commonly, burnt themselves with cigarettes or hot lighters, but it was a really tiny few, and they were, to be blunt, the real freakazoids. Now cutting seems mainstream, or nearly so, and that’s a change.
But behavior which freaks out the grownups, and especially behavior which seems much more dangerous than it is, is nothing new. I wonder if (hope that) cutting is more like underage drinking, standing in the back of a moving pick up truck (or clutching the hood of a moving car, even) or even drug use was to my generation: an adrenaline rush that shocked the elders. Or, to put it in pshrink terms, a method of differentiating from and individualizing away from our parents. In other words, kids being kids.
And I wonder if it comes in the form of pain seeking because, ironically enough, these are the generation of kids raised in bubble wrap who never got to feel much in the way of physical pain growing up. They didn’t have merry-go-rounds at the playground, or even playgrounds built on concrete, or Jarts or unsupervised play time in which to break your arm falling out of a tree. Most of their experiences with physical pain are very minor. (Which could be one reason my son hasn’t joined in - he’s got scars to put them all to shame and experienced excruciating physical pain from spinal fusion surgery at age 11.) Maybe they’re simply exploring what pain feels like because it’s a sensation that’s pretty new to them?
Thing is, cutting looks so much like the more dangerous cutting that goes with suicide that one hates to brush it off as harmless adrenaline seeking and be wrong, ya know?
Plus, I’m not one to ignore “attention seeking” behaviors. If what they’re seeking is attention, maybe they need attention! But I don’t want to reward the cutting, either…
sigh Man, toilet training was a snap compared to parenting teens!
On Preview: Thank you, Lionne, I will read that thread now.
I think for a lot of young people this is probably true.
However, the only cutter that I personally know is a woman of about 40 who’s been diagnosed with a plethora of mental illnesses including Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities). This woman is a mess - I honestly think in her case she’s cutting because it’s something she can control - everything else about her life is a shit-storm.
I know some people do it for relief from emotional pain, some people do it for attention, and some people do it because their life isn’t complete if it isn’t full of drama. I had a roommate who was constantly making up lies about everyone and everything to get people to pay attention to her (to the point that she told people that I raped her) and when I helped her get a better paying job and get set up with a shrink to get her life stable she started cutting and burning her inner thighs with cigarettes. She fed off of the emotional turmoil in her life and when people tried to help her level out she had to find new ways to fuck herself up.
I tried cutting, once. This was. . .er, seven-and-a-half years ago. Christ, I’m old. Anyway.
This was my freshman year of college. I had a friend who said that it helped. The way she explained it was very much like the initial explanation offered here–that it was about control, and was a way to express and relieve pain that otherwise is intangible.
So, I took out my handy-dandy boot knife (because I was a poor college student–no way was I gonna pay for anything new). Stared at it for a good ten minutes. Decided I didn’t have the stones to try to cut my arm. So I put my leg up on the bed, hiked up my jeans.
Something like, five half-assed tries later, I had something resembling a long cat scratch. This is when I determined the following.
1.) I still felt bad, but
2.) My leg now hurt.
3.) This was not an improvement.
4.) I felt like an idiot.
So, yeah. That never happened again. Odd thing is, though. . .I know people who don’t cut, but who do things like exercise through it. It’s not self-destructive, but it does provide for stress/pain/an external focus.
I’ve also heard the “physical expression of mental anguish” kind of thing. However,
a friend recently compared it to nervous habits, taken to a higher degree. For example, biting your nails, obsessively popping/picking at pimples, chewing on hangnails, etc, but times 2. It’s possibly just an extreme reaction to stress.
Okay, I’ve read your thread, Lionne, and it was somewhat helpful. The thing I keep tripping up on is that you, and others who shared their experiences in the thread, were, to be blunt again, messed up. You came from an abusive home, mnemosyne’s friend was “crazy and obsessive”, **YaWanna **has self described “serious ‘mother issues’”, lie not with dragons had an eating disorder, **rinni **cut while she was with an abusive boyfriend…only one poster (motomoon) claims that it was more or less for the hell of it (or, rather, to impress the other kids).
That’s the part that doesn’t fit for me. These are good kids, happy kids, indulged, even. None of them have been abused, none of them are in drama-filled relationships. While some of them have been to therapists for evaluations or short term counseling, there’s only the one who was diagnosable (and that was Moderate, not even Severe, Depression). There does not, in the community that I’m looking at, seem to be a correlation with mental illness or abuse and cutting. That’s the part I’m trying to figure out, I guess.
Of course, my kids also two decades younger than all those Dopers, so perhaps that’s more evidence of a generational motivation shift.
That’s what I feel. The man I know that cuts was the eldest male child of a huge Asian family. He was spoiled ROTTEN and given everything he wanted. He was always the apple of everyone’s eye, and everyone loved him to death.
But I think that has something to do with it. He’s all grown up now and no longer the special kid.
Also, there’s no reason there has to be a uniform distribution of cutters across the country. If the first person at that school that did it got a noticeable response, there’ll be a lot more copycats in his circle of friends than in some place where it’s less of an issue. I’m also guessing the people with real problems would self-select for talking about their experience online, and people who want attention would be less inclined to enter a measured discussion about motivations.
When I was a junior in high school (not that long ago, in the late 90s) I was surprised when two of my close friends separately told me that they occasionally cut themselves. One was a boy and one was a girl. They both came from middle or upper-middle-class families, their parents were married to each other, they didn’t have any history of abuse or particularly unhappy childhoods, and the girl in particular was quite close to her parents and was not otherwise prone to teenage angst. The boy had a more tense relationship with his parents, problems with his self-esteem and more emotional issues, though not (in my opinion) outside the normal range for teenagers. I can sort of understand the boy cutting himself - he had some slight self-destructive tendencies stemming from his low self-esteem, and later we dated and explored S&M together - but I’m still at a loss as to why my otherwise very normal and apparently well-adjusted girl-friend cut herself. I admit I did cut (well, it was hardly more than a scratch) myself once in college, but it was just because I wanted to see if I could.
That said, when I get really mad or frustrated and don’t have an outlet for those emotions, I make a fist and bite one of my knuckles until the pain in my finger overwhelms my rage and satisfies my urge to hurt someone. I hardly ever do it any more, but it was how I dealt with those emotions as a child and I still revert to it occasionally. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if cutting comes from a similar impulse.
I’m curious as to why the method of “cutting” is chosen as a way to inflict/control pain on ones self. Why not for example pin pricking, or pinching, or playing with the flame of a candle?