I’ve been reading a book called Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt by Peg Streep. She quotes the authors of Bodily Harm: The Breakthrough Healing Program for Self-Injurers: “Self-injury represents a frantic attempt by someone with low coping skills to ‘mother herself.’ Operating without a paradigm of parental care, she feels alone and terrified, with no hope that a soothing presence will come ‘make it all better.’ Bodily care has been transformed into bodily harm; the razorblade becomes the wounding caregiver, a cold but available substitute for the embrace, kiss, or loving touch she truly desires.” Streep goes on to say that when you can’t trust your mother “cutting may be a way of putting the pain in the control of someone you can trust: yourself.” (Mean Mothers pp 145-146) (Quote from Bodily Harm, by Karen Conterio and Wendy Lader, p 20)
I started cutting myself when I was in California in the 60s, after the latest of too many rejections by men. My role model was Deborah in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and I was surprised at how much it hurt and how hard it was to cut skin. I realize now that Deborah must have been dissociated. Interestingly I wrote and painted with the blood. I think this was the artist in me desperately trying to get out. I only did it for a few years, until I found a spiritual practice. I started doing zazen, Buddhist sitting meditation. I never told anybody about the cutting, and remained puzzled about why I had done it.
Years later I read in The Courage to Heal, by Ellen Bass, that cutting can be a response to sexual abuse. This came during a time when I was finding it difficult to be sexual with my husband whom I really loved, and it seemed to be an answer. So I went into therapy to work on the issue, but was unable to remember anything more than one incident of my father molesting me which I hadn’t forgotten, and which seemed pretty minimal to me. When I finally learned about PTSD, that explained everything. Sexual arousal could trigger both fear and freeze which are not good precursors to successful sex.
Cutting myself was the story I told on the stage in Journey Into Courage, a theater piece written and performed by women survivors of domestic violence. I joined the group because I wanted to make the point that alcoholism of a parent IS domestic violence, even if there’s no overt physical abuse. In creating my monologue, I remembered that I had cut myself during the time of the Vietnam War. I spoke of protesting the war and feeling helpless to stop it. I had always identified with veterans of the war, especially the ones with PTSD, even though at the time I had no idea that I had been traumatized. I thought I was just dramatising myself as Mother was always telling me. I wrote a poem comparing soldiers to children in abusive families.
Prisoners of War
The experts are now saying that those of us who grew up in alcoholic and abusive families have lived with a level of stress that is equivalent to that of prisoner of war.
We are prisoners of war: trapped in a situation where we are
helpless, where the people with the power of life and death
over us give us treats one day and explode into violence the
next. They exploit our helplessness and make us pay for
favors and humiliate us if we rebel.
But these people are not our enemies, they are our family.
We never know what will happen next, or when someone who
seemed to be on our side will suddenly abandon us.
Like the vietnam vets with post trauma stress syndrome, we
too enter a room with all our senses alert to possible dangers,
checking for escape routes. We too do not trust the seeming
innocence, the gifts that sometimes turn out to contain
grenades, the destruction that comes without warning.
We want to help, but our efforts to change things are
ineffective, unrewarded, and unsupported by the larger
community.
We no longer know what our feelings are. All we know is
stress, anxiety, restlessness. We want to throw bombs too, to
end the tension, even if it means our death.
We want to escape, to be free, but can no longer imagine any
pathways by which we could get there: the world
everywhere is full of dangers, even when we go home it is no
longer home, for our sense of safety has been robbed, our
sense of belonging has been broken, our power to create has
been lost in the dirt and blood.