Spoiler! :
Letter to the rest of the world: from those of us caught up in the addiction of cutting
Dear world,
we know you don’t understand us. The pain we’ve gone through, the thoughts that pass through our heads when we do something as seemingly unthinkable as hurting ourselves. And yes, we see those looks you give us. The ones that convey your disgust, confusion, horror.
We know you don’t understand the deep, intense emotional pain that drives us to commit these acts, or the fact that, to us, any type of physical pain is far preferable to emotions. Did you know that nearly half of us have been physically or sexually abused, and almost all of us struggle with depression, anger, or low self-esteem?
And despite what you may have heard, no, we’re not crazy, suicidal, or desperate for attention. The truth is, we’re dealing with trauma, not mental health problems. We’re just trying to deal with our problems in the only way we know how. We aren’t suicidal either; people die from cutting by accident. Though there are exceptions, self harmers don’t want to die. In fact, we cut to cope, to regain control of pain and go on living.
Furthermore, self injury is not a cry for attention. People who cut generally try to hide it, keep it a secret, rather than draw attention to it. This is because we are ashamed and afraid of what you will think of us. What you don’t realize is that all those probing questions and demands for us to stop aren’t helping! In fact, they’re making it worse.
When you try to force us to talk about things we don’t feel comfortable talking about, or tell us to just stop, you just leave us feeling more alienated, alone, isolated, and wanting to hide it more. Nevertheless, there are things you can do. Asking us how long we’ve been injuring ourselves, with what, how often, what you can do --these are helpful questions.
But don’t make us show you our injuries, tell us to stop, tell us how we’re so awful and disgusting, or try to impose limits on us. Now, we understand how you might have questions. Why? Why do we do this to ourselves? How could cutting possibly help? What made us do this anyway?
There are a lot of different reasons people cut. The point of cutting is ultimately to cover deep emotional pain, far beyond the scars we are hiding. It gives us a “high” of sorts so that we don’t have to feel emotional pain. We’ve learned that physical pain is nothing compared to emotional, so we distract ourselves from our emotions by cutting; we put one pain in front of the other so that we have something else to focus on.
Please understand: cutting is just a cruel symptom of something much deeper and more painful going on inside us. The physical pain often has a calming effect on our more agonizing emotional hurt. Cutting is basically the treating of one pain with another. It can be how we regulate strong emotions, temporarily calming our nerves when we are stressed. It can be a way of controlling our bodies since we can’t control anything else in our lives.
It can be a way of releasing anxiety, as the emotional pain slips away into the physical pain. It can distract from emotional “numbness” by forcing us into feeling something. Cutting can express things that cannot be put into words, can be the only way we know how to display what we are feeling.
It can also punish or express self hatred. Sometimes we feel really guilty about things in our past; self harm is a way of punishing ourselves for those things. Often those of us who were abused blame ourselves, and punish ourselves by cutting. Sometimes we are so overcome by self-blame and self-loathing that cutting is the only way to feel anything else. It can be the only way we express how we feel like we just want to tear ourselves apart.
The one thing that stays the same, no matter how much our reasons for cutting vary, is that we always cut for some type of relief. Whether it be to release anger without hurting others, to deal with abandonment or loneliness, or to deal with a traumatic experience, we are always looking for a way out, an exit from our emotions.
Those of us in painful or abusive relationships feel stuck, imprisoned, powerless. Our rage and fear scream out at us to be released, and cutting is how we do that. When we feel alone or isolated, cutting gives us a sense of purpose and something to make us feel better about our isolation or rejection from others.
Some cutters have been through a traumatic experience. We become emotionally numb, shutting down our emotions so we don’t have to relive the pain. Cutting helps to make us feel alive, to wake us from this emotional “death” we imposed upon ourselves. It’s as if we’ve got no more tears to cry, so cutting does it for us.
Now, one of the biggest things you may be wondering is what could have possibly caused all this emotional pain, so deep for us to do something like hurting ourselves. Most cutters’ ability to cope with life is overwhelmed by powerful emotions or extreme pressure which seem too intense to bear. When these emotions are not dealt with, they build tension, and cutting is our way of releasing that tension. It’s our escape from reality, no matter how temporary. It’s how we express deep distress and cope with painful memories.
Many self harmers grow up in families where emotions are not allowed, where we are discouraged from showing anger or sadness, and therefore unsure of what to do with strong emotions. A lot of us also have a limited support network, due to either family breakdown or dysfunctionality, or shame about our habits. Many of us also struggle with OCD, depression, eating disorders, or substance abuse, and these can often lead to or coincide with cutting.
The most important thing we need you to understand about cutting is that it is an addiction, one of the cruelest and most difficult to break. It is extremely accessible: after all we already have our body and the tools we need to do the damage; cutting doesn’t cost anything. We already have everything we need to get the calm euphoria cutting offers us. The very reason this habit is so accessible is the same reason it is so hard to break.
There is nothing quite like it, short of suicide. Most of us never intend to become addicted. For us, cutting is worse than drugs because we want it all the time. We don’t care where we are—it’s almost as if we can’t go on without it. It can easily become compulsive, meaning the more we do it, the more we need it. The urge to cut can be too hard to resist.
Eventually we build up a tolerance to it until we have to cut deeper and/or more often, or more cuts at one time to get the same effect as before. Cutting is a dangerous thing to fall into, and though many of us want to stop, we just don’t know how to begin. We desperately need your understanding and reassurance; we just want to be loved, not judged.
Sincerely,
just normal people who want to be loved, even if we do happen to be cutters too
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