Marilee Strong QUOTES

21 " The physiological and psychological dysregulation caused by trauma has a lot to do with how traumatic memories are stored and processed in the brain. Heightened emotional arousal and dissociation at the time of trauma cause memory to fragment, with some or all of the experience stored outside conscious awareness. Unlike normal memories, which compose a cohesive, dispassionate verbal narrative, traumatic memories usually are recalled as vivid momentary sensations—smells, sounds, sudden waves of intense fear—with all their original emotional intensity. Despite the continual intrusion of elements of the trauma into consciousness through nightmares and flashbacks, it is not unusual for traumatized people to be unaware of what happened to them. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

22 " The sheer intensity of a child's feelings means they cannot be repressed without severe consequences. The thicker the prison wall grow, says Miller, the more future emotional development is impeded. When that wall is especially impenetrable, and the pain behind it is overwhelming, cutting is the strategy some use to try to break through and achieve some sense of control. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

23 " We are shaped, in a way, by our earliest primitive memories and sensations that come through the skin. Later in life, the skin becomes not only the receptor of rich and constant sensory input, it also serves as a kind of organ of communication through which we both experience and express tenderness and pleasure and, alternatively, hurtfulness and pain. And in a thousand different societies—ancient and modern, technological and preliterate—the skin has been manipulated, decorated, scarred, revealed, hidden, tattooed, cut, and branded to communicate standing, prestige, status as a warrior or wife or slave, and attainment of adulthood. Skin communicates. Skin signals. Skin tells a story. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

24 " Scars are especially useful as historical markers when one's own memory and consciousness cannot be trusted. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

25 " Dissociation in its more serious forms is a psychological defense mechanism that keeps traumatic memories, sensations, and feelings out of conscious awareness. It is a key defense used by abused children. In the face of overwhelming danger from which there is no physical escape, it is an ingenious bit of mental gymnastics—in the words of therapist Eliana Gil "a life-saving, pain-sparing survival strategy". Mind and body separate. Pain is anesthetized. The individual feels depersonalized: numb, unreal, outside oneself, a dispassionate observer rather than an anguished participant. For example, a sexually abused girl may feel as if she is leaving her body, floating up to the ceiling, and watching the abuse—as if it is happening to somebody else—from a safe and detached spectator's distance. She can't remove her body from danger, but she can leave it emotionally. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

26 " Why is sexual abuse so devastating to the developing psyche? Recurrent sexual trauma, especially at the hands of a parent or other trusted loved one, is emotional terrorism of the highest order—so psychologically annihilating it has been called "soul murder." The overwhelming fear, pain, and excitement it engenders can cause serious and lasting damage to the child's emotional, neurological, and physiological development. The child's immature brain and central nervous system simply cannot process such repeated overstimulation, so the body's whole emotional-response system gets thrown out of whack—which can lead to problems with impulse control and self-mutilation. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

27 " Sexual abuse is the ultimate boundary violation. The rape of a child is an intrusive, violent act that disrupts the integrity of the body and creates a very real and frightening sense of fragmentation and disintegration. The body comes to feel as unreal as a phantom, the physical and psychic boundaries as porous as a veil. "The one thing that is really ours and that we have boundaries on is our body," says SAFE's Wendy Lader. "When we talk about sexual abuse that is debilitating, we don't mean a woman who was raped when she was twenty years old. We're talking about a child abused by someone who is known, someone who is a caretaker. That results in very conflicted feelings about who you are, who an other is, what's okay, what's not okay. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

28 " Self-injury may allow abuse survivors to reclaim their bodies in the same way refusing to eat gives anorexics a feeling of control. They may want to make their bodies unattractive so the abuser will no longer desire them. The wounds may also serve as a badge of proof, a concrete marker to punish an abusing parent—and make the other parent, who may not have abused the child but failed to protect her, take notice. In that sense, the cuts and bruises are a symbolic cry for help or a manifesto of resistance, even if inflicted long after the actual abuse. "It's a reliance on a much more primitive system of communication, like saying 'I've been torn open, intruded upon, broken into' in a very literal way," says Michael Wagner. Through this "body language" of blood and scars, they can communicate much more directly and forcefully than they can speak in words. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

29 " Another reason incest is so "murderous" to the soul is because it is like a form of psychological captivity from which there is no escape. An abused child lives in a perpetual state of fear but can neither fight nor flee an incestuous parent. "There is no stranger to run from, no home to run to," writes therapist Susan Forward in her 1988 book "Betrayal of Innocence." "The child cannot feel safe in his or her own bed. The victim must learn to live with incest; it flavors the child's entire world." The only recourse is psychic defenses—denial, self-blame, dissociation, repression—to blunt the overwhelming horror of the experience and feel some sense of control. This can lead to a fragmenting of the psyche into an outer "impostor" self, a sometimes quite successful front presented to the public, and a secretive, shame-filled inner self compulsively reenacting the trauma in a futile attempt to master it. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

30 " Dissociation, while useful in surviving the actual traumatic experience, exacts a high psychological price when it becomes a chronic, automatic response to even minor stressors reminiscent of past trauma, to painful or forbidden emotions like anger, even to intimacy itself. While these "out of body" flights were once comforting and adaptive, chronically dissociative people grow to feel inhuman, like robots. Reality cannot be trusted. At any moment the afflicted might go totally blank and not remember what was said or done. They may observe their actions without any sense of control over what they are doing as if watching a movie. Or they may face the sanity-threatening experience of feeling their mind slip into freefall, shattering into bits and pieces. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

31 " The mind that employed depersonalization to escape pain is now in danger of disintegrating. "It's really a life-threatening situation to have that experience," says San Francisco psychologist Michael Wagner. "It's equivalent to feeling that you are no longer going to exist." Ironically, cutting provides a sense of reintegration, like a jolt of reality to the vanishing self. The sensation of pain and the sight of blood break through the deadening depersonalization and prove that the cutter is alive, human, whole. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

32 " The ability to regulate our emotions and behavior appropriate to the given situation is what gives us a sense of self control. People who have difficulty regulating their emotions develop problems controlling their behavior. A chronic feeling of being "out of control" is, for researchers like Frank Putnam, a signal that something may have happened in a person's childhood that disrupted the ability to care for oneself in an appropriate way. Based on his many years of research, Putnam believes that feelings of helplessness and lack of control are characteristics of trauma-related states of consciousness, in particular dissociation, which is commonly caused by childhood maltreatment. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

33 " The messages implicit in sexual abuse are as psychologically assaultive as the act itself. Abused children are taught at a very young age that they exist only to give pleasure to others. They are not recognized as beings in their own right, but simply as a tool of some other more powerful person's needs. So they shut down their own emotions, needs, and desires. They bury their feelings so deeply that to even imagine letting them out feels completely overwhelming, as if they would drown in their tears or erupt in anger so savage they would kill. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

34 " Emotional attachment makes a child feel connected and supported, not alone and helpless. One of the most important roles parents play is helping to regulate a child's level of arousal by providing a safe and appropriate balance of food, rest, play, comfort, and stimulation. Abused and neglected children never learn from their parents how to soothe themselves and cannot trust others to help them do so. So they may turn to cutting and other forms of self-injury as a means of self-soothing and reestablishing, at least temporarily, biological and psychological equilibrium. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

35 " Among self-injurers, at the root of dissociation and behind all of the symptoms of traumatic stress, from numbness to loss of control, is a range of painful childhood experiences, including emotional deprivation, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and childhood loss. Because the combination of pain, shame, and grief from these early experiences often remains unresolved, feelings of dread and emptiness can build up and quickly grow to unbearable proportions. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

36 " Sexual abuse can shatter a child's capacity for trust and intimacy. Abused children literally have no frame of reference for how to develop healthy relationships. How can anyone be trusted if the person who is supposed to love and protect you is hurting you? And if your caretaker doesn't protect you, how can you ever learn to keep yourself safe? At the same time, abused children internalize a sense of utter powerlessness and helplessness. They have no rights, no boundaries, no privacy, no dignity, and no control over their bodies, their desires, their feelings. The only way to survive an ongoing state of helpless victimization is to achieve some illusion of power and control. Ironically, blaming themselves for the abuse allows them to feel a measure of control. However painful, it is preferable to the overwhelming terror of believing they are completely at the mercy of an unpredictable force. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

37 " One of the most tragic legacies of child abuse is how some victims learn to equate pain with love. In a process akin to Stockholm syndrome—in which some hostages come to sympathize with their captors—abused children often identify with the aggressive parent. In their minds, it's better than identifying with the weak, powerless parent who did nothing to protect them. They may, in turn, hurt themselves in order to feel close to the abuser. As bad as the abuse was, it provided contact and attention. It may have been the only semblance of love the child has known. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

38 " Some incest survivors will do anything to maintain a connection, however false or feeble, with the offending parent. Pain and self-punishment, comforting in its familiarity, maintains the psychic relationship. Through cutting they can re-create the childhood drama but also control its outcome, meting out pain in safe, measured, manageable doses. They can play the parts of both abuser and victim, then assume the role of loving, protective caretaker—bandaging their wounds and watching them heal. They can take comfort in knowing that no one can hurt them as much as they can hurt themselves. Even if the only outward concern they receive is from therapists and emergency room doctors, it is proof that someone cares—perhaps the only proof they have. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

39 " Since children are totally dependent on their parents for their very survival, they cannot bear to believe that their parents are malevolent. Instead, they internalize their parents' "badness" as part of themselves. Many abusive parents directly tell their kids they are bad and responsible for the abuse they receive. Even if they don't children can't help but think "If my own parents hurt me, I must be unloveable." If they can maintain the illusion that their parents are good and loving and safe, then hope remains alive that one day they will be loved and cared for in the way they so desperately desire. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

40 " Children are especially dependent on their parents and caregivers to provide the stability and unconditional love that will help them establish a core of resiliency and a sense of self-efficacy to draw upon when faced with adversity later in life. Childhood events that can lead to PTSD and serious difficulties in regulating emotions, and are often linked in research to cutting, certainly include the most abject forms of abuse—physical, sexual, and emotional. But a child's emotional response system—which is controlled by the still developing brain, the sympathetic nervous system, and stress hormones—can be thrown off-kilter by a wide range of painful experiences, whether they are the result of intentionally abusive acts or purely accidental circumstances. Confusing and overwhelming feelings experienced as a result of adoption or abandonment, natural disasters (such as hurricanes or earthquakes,) deaths in the family, serious illness or disability, or witnessing or being the victim of an accident or violent crime can result in symptoms of posttraumatic stress. These kinds of taxing and traumatic events, as well as other societal stressors—from school bullying to identity struggles to perfectionism to body-image issues and the eating disorders often associated with them—have been linked to cutting in various populations. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain