4
" A higher form of communication, verbal language, is also unavailable or inadequate to describe the intensity of a cutter's inner state. As kids, by and large, self-injurers were not allowed to have or express their own feelings—especially anger. Instead they were forced to carry the feelings of their parents and grew up feeling responsible for their parents' anger, frustration, and unhappiness. They were expected to fill their parents' need for love and gratification, rather than the parents satisfying their children's needs. When a child's feelings and perceptions are actively denied or minimized by her parents, the child's ability to develop a language of feelings is stunted, and she is left with a mute hopelessness about the possibility of communicating in a way that will help her to get critical needs met. Words then seem to take on terrifying proportions; they are both too powerful and completely useless. Emotions are so damned up that sadness seems annihilating, rage often feels murderous. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
6
" Comfort and consistent tactile experiences help the baby develop a sense of its body as a safe and consistent boundary. If the baby is not held and comforted, or is frequently dropped, or handled roughly, or neglected or abused—painful, disruptive experiences British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called impingements—the child will not grow to feel like a whole entity, sheltered and contained by her skin. The failure to master this first important developmental task makes it difficult to differentiate between self and others, inner and outer, thought and action, fantasy and reality. Later, the child or adult may use cutting to work out these conflicts in a concrete, literal way on the body, reverting back to the most primitive means of psychic organization the knows to test her own reality. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
14
" After any highly stressful event, such as an automobile accident, it is normal for memories, emotions, and sensations associated with the trauma to flood involuntarily into consciousness. In most cases, people replay these memories over and over again, and this "replay" mechanism actually helps defuse their emotional content and allows people to put the experience behind them. This kind of mental processing is healthy and does not lead to long-term problems. But events that are extremely traumatic—being caught in a hurricane, attacked in a war, being the victim of an assault or a rape, or having suffered severe abuse as a child—are not effectively processed by some people. When images or memories of the event return, they are not able to think about them analytically or dispassionately, but instead they reexperience the terror all over again. These intrusive thoughts do not fade with time but are persistent, and each time they occur they are newly traumatizing. Such people are haunted by nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of anxiety, fear, and foreboding that make them experience the trauma not as a painful event of the past but as a real, in-the-present, on-going threat. As a result, their entire stress-response system, in body and mind, becomes stuck in a state of constant alert, but the state tends to be unstable. Their emotions tend to swing from one extreme to its opposite. To cope with such emotional overload, these people organize their lives around avoiding any reminder of the trauma and the feelings it invokes. It is ultimately a futile struggle, however—like fighting an invisible enemy. The battle for control sets off a vicious cycle of intrusive thoughts that produce fear and anxiety followed by desperate attempts to achieve psychological numbing to reduce the anxiety. They progressively lose the ability to control or modulate their physiological response to any kind of stressor, and stimuli completely unrelated to the trauma may trigger intrusive memories. Lit up like a pinball machine, all their internal bells and whistles blaring, they cannot articulate how they feel because they cannot decipher the messages that their nervous system is sending them. Eventually, just having a feeling, any feeling, can seem enormously threatening. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
17
" Could a child in the comfort of her own home experience anything as overwhelming as the terror and stress of a soldier in combat? In fact, children who are chronically physically or sexually abused must endure precisely the kind of protracted and inescapable fear, unpredictability, and helplessness that results in posttraumatic stress disorder. What makes an experience traumatic, says van der Kolk, is not its objective reality but the subjective meaning the victim attaches to it. In general, the more terrified a victim feels and the more powerless she is over her fate, the more likely she is to develop PTSD. Factors that may compound the sense of trauma include the relationship between victim and perpetrator, feelings of shame or guilt over actions the victim did or did not take, lack of support after the trauma or blaming or rejecting the victim, and any symbolic or psychosexual interpretation overlaid onto the experience. All of these are factors that come into play in childhood abuse. In some ways, an abused child faces terror and uncertainty far worse than anything a soldier experiences on the field of battle. She lives in a world of continual and unpredictable danger and may, with good reason, fear for her life. Yet she has no gun to protect her, no squad to back her up, no training for her combat role. She is completely alone, completely powerless, completely at the mercy of her parents' will. She cannot fight back, cannot escape. She is trapped. Like Pavlov's dogs, she endures a punishment inescapable. Her experience may actually be more akin to that of a prisoner of war, but it is even more psychologically pernicious than that. Her captors are her own parents, the people who are supposed to love and nurture her, teach her right from wrong, and protect her from harm. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
18
" Feelings provoked by the sense of loss or abandonment—tension, anger, rage, fear, anxiety, panic—build to an overpowering crescendo. Cutters are unable to communicate their discomfort to others in order to draw support and have internalized no soothing image of a safe, loving caretaker to draw upon to nurture themselves, calm their fear and anger, and regain a sense of control. They are left feeling helpless, overwhelmed, and utterly alone. Because their emotions cannot be expressed or integrated, they have to be discharged in some other fashion. Strong feelings simply can't be dealt with on a mental level but seem instead to demand action. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
