{"id":185,"date":"2010-03-15T18:17:57","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T18:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=185"},"modified":"2013-09-14T15:32:05","modified_gmt":"2013-09-14T19:32:05","slug":"mean-mothers-and-bodily-harm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=185","title":{"rendered":"Mean Mothers and Bodily Harm"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading a book called Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt<\/a> by Peg Streep.\u00a0 She quotes the authors of Bodily Harm: The Breakthrough Healing Program for Self-Injurers<\/a>: \u201cSelf-injury represents a frantic attempt by someone with low coping skills to \u2018mother herself.\u2019 Operating without a paradigm of parental care, she feels alone and terrified, with no hope that a soothing presence will come \u2018make it all better.\u2019 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.\u201d Streep goes on to say that when you can\u2019t trust your mother \u201ccutting may be a way of putting the pain in the control of someone you can trust: yourself.\u201d (Mean Mothers pp 145-146)\u00a0 (Quote from Bodily Harm, by Karen Conterio and Wendy Lader, p 20)<\/p>\n

I started cutting myself when I was in California in the 60s, after the latest of too many rejections by men.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I realize now that Deborah must have been dissociated.\u00a0 Interestingly I wrote and painted with the blood.\u00a0 I think this was the artist in me desperately trying to get out.\u00a0 I only did it for a few years, until I found a spiritual practice.\u00a0 I started doing zazen, Buddhist sitting meditation.\u00a0 I never told anybody about the cutting, and remained puzzled about why I had done it.<\/p>\n

Years later I read in The Courage to Heal<\/a>, by Ellen Bass, that cutting can be a response to sexual abuse.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t forgotten, and which seemed pretty minimal to me.\u00a0 When I finally learned about PTSD, that explained everything.\u00a0 Sexual arousal could trigger both fear and freeze which are not good precursors to successful sex.<\/p>\n

Cutting myself was the story I told on the stage in Journey Into Courage<\/a>, a theater piece written and performed by women survivors of domestic violence.\u00a0 I joined the group because I wanted to make the point that alcoholism of a parent IS domestic violence, even if there\u2019s no overt physical abuse.\u00a0 In creating my monologue, I remembered that I had cut myself during the time of the Vietnam War.\u00a0 I spoke of protesting the war and feeling helpless to stop it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I thought I was just dramatising myself as Mother was always telling me.\u00a0 I wrote a poem comparing soldiers to children in abusive families.<\/p>\n

Prisoners of War<\/strong>
\nThe 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.
\n<\/em>
\nWe are prisoners of war: trapped in a situation where we are
\nhelpless, where the people with the power of life and death
\nover us give us treats one day and explode into violence the
\nnext.\u00a0 They exploit our helplessness and make us pay for
\nfavors and humiliate us if we rebel.
\nBut these people are not our enemies, they are our family.
\nWe never know what will happen next, or when someone who
\nseemed to be on our side will suddenly abandon us.
\nLike the vietnam vets with post trauma stress syndrome,\u00a0 we
\ntoo enter a room with all our senses alert to possible dangers,
\nchecking for escape routes.\u00a0 We too do not trust the seeming
\ninnocence, the gifts that sometimes turn out to contain
\ngrenades, the destruction that comes without warning.
\nWe want to help, but our efforts to change things are
\nineffective, unrewarded, and unsupported by the larger
\ncommunity.
\nWe no longer know what our feelings are.\u00a0 All we know is
\nstress, anxiety, restlessness.\u00a0 We want to throw bombs too, to
\nend the tension, even if it means our death.
\nWe want to escape, to be free, but can no longer imagine any
\npathways by which we could get there:\u00a0 the world
\neverywhere is full of dangers, even when we go home it is no
\nlonger home, for our sense of safety has been robbed, our
\nsense of belonging has been broken, our power to create has
\nbeen lost in the dirt and blood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading a book called Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt by Peg Streep.\u00a0 She quotes the authors of Bodily Harm: The Breakthrough Healing Program for Self-Injurers: \u201cSelf-injury represents a frantic attempt by someone with low coping skills … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting-link","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}