{"id":7917,"date":"2023-08-23T09:37:32","date_gmt":"2023-08-23T13:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7917"},"modified":"2023-08-23T09:37:32","modified_gmt":"2023-08-23T13:37:32","slug":"1995-self-mutilation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7917","title":{"rendered":"1995: Self-Mutilation"},"content":{"rendered":"

So amazing to read this. I started cutting myself in California when a boyfriend left me for someone else. I did it for a number of years in my 20’s, and stopped, interestingly, when my brother said “Buddha says ‘life is suffering’.” When I read that self-mutilation could be a consequence of sexual abuse, I thought it explained why I couldn’t have sex with my husband. This is the story I told on stage in Journey Into Courage<\/a>. It wasn’t until years later, after our divorce, I discovered that I had been traumatized and that self-mutilation can easily be described as a result of trauma.\u00a0\u00a0Jacqueline Winspear<\/a> says of soldiers traumatized during World War I that “they would injure themselves as if to make visible the wounds to their souls.” This makes much more sense. I definitely felt that no one could see that I was in pain, though it was especially my parents who totally missed it.<\/p>\n

From my journal for September 29, 1995<\/p>\n

This is where I began the session with Karen, saying that I needed to let go of my hope\/expectation that I could somehow make up for all the years of not being creative by producing full blast in the time that is left to me, that I needed to mourn the works never completed (like the quilt) and that I had to let go of the illusion that my creativity could \u201cjust\u201d come alive again and everything would be fine.\u00a0 <\/span>Bringing my creativity back to life is turning out to be an unexpectedly, indescribably painful process, like trying to recover a limb after frostbite.\u00a0 <\/span>And I don\u2019t know whether it will really resurrect into full functioning, or if I will be a limping cripple all my days.\u00a0 <\/span>Better to be a limping cripple than a frozen corpse, I think, but I hope the pain will end, or release, or at least come and go.\u00a0 <\/span>At the moment I have pain alternating with numbness.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t understand why<\/span> it is so painful, perhaps I will see it some day with hindsight, I only know that it is enormously painful, that what I feel in my body is a sort of prickly discomfort, with sharp melting pains, as though I were trying to get into a new skin that was lined with many small sharp blades, or as though I was lined with many small sharp blades, or as though I was trying to push the ability to feel from my core to my skin through a barrage of tangled brambles.\u00a0 <\/span>That\u2019s the best I can do, and I understand better now the feelings behind the impulse to cut my skin with razor blades and write with the blood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This work to understand about my creativity will have a surprising result on the very day this was posted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So amazing to read this. I started cutting myself in California when a boyfriend left me for someone else. I did it for a number of years in my 20’s, and stopped, interestingly, when my brother said “Buddha says ‘life … 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":[8,9,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression","category-journal","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917","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=7917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}