41
" No one should have to live in secret shame. The burning desire of every self-injuring person I've ever spoken with is simply to be seen as human and not as a freak or an attention seeker—despite their scars, despite the fact that, yes, cutting is self-inflicted. As we begin to see that people who self-harm can be found in nearly every neighborhood, school, college, house of worship, or school group, we must become better informed so that we can better understand their language of pain and help them find a way out of their suffering. The first step, however, takes no special training or sophisticated understanding of psychology or neurochemistry. It simply takes the effort to listen with compassion. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
43
" While guilt and self-blame, like dissociation, initially protects abused children from a sense of overwhelming helplessness, it long outlives its usefulness. Self-hatred becomes rooted at the very core of their being. They feel evil, dirty, worthless, unloveable—bad to the bone. Their sense of self becomes organized around a matrix of shame infinitely thick. The children come to believe that the abuse is their fault, that they asked for it, that they should have done something to stop it. They may feel especially complicit if the sexual contact felt good sometimes, they liked the attention, or it made them feel special. As they grow older they believe they have committed sins for which, in their minds, there is no salvation. Cutting can be viewed quite literally as a way to let the demons out, to expel "bad blood." As Gil puts it: "Abused children sometimes believe they are bad inside and out, they want to destroy their bodies and souls. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
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" The fact that cutting and eating disorders often coexist should not surprise us, as the two behaviors share many of the same roots and serve many of the same functions. Both syndromes are frequently driven by trauma, especially sexual abuse, and can serve as ways to symbolically reenact the trauma while exerting some control over the situation. Each uses the body to work out psychological conflicts, to obtain relief from overwhelming feelings of tension, anger, loneliness, emptiness, and self-hatred, and to physiologically manage such posttraumatic symptoms as dissociation, flashbacks, and hyperarousal. Both behaviors are impulsive, secretive, ritualistic, and ridden with shame and guilt. And they each involve attacks on the body, a disturbance in body image, and an attempt to control body boundaries. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
49
" A factor that plays an important role in both self-mutilation and eating disorders is a distorted body image. Although many women suffer from poor body image brought about by oppressive public attitudes and media images, societal pressure alone does not cause the kind of deep-seated mental and physiological disturbance that leads to serious and chronic self-mutilation or eating disorders. Cutting and burning, starving and stuffing, bingeing and purging all reflect both an extreme preoccupation with the body and an equally strong sense of alienation from it. The body is viewed as the enemy—an adversary that must be punished and controlled at all costs. At the same time, the body seems dead, unreal, separate from the soul. It's reality must constantly be proven. The root causes of this are much more closer to home. Like the skin ego, body image begins to form with the earliest skin contact between parent and infant. Whether a positive or negative body image ultimately develops as the child grows into adulthood depends on, among other things, the sense of power, control, and autonomy the child feels over her physical self. Inviolate body boundaries are essential to a healthy body image. Intrusive and neglectful caregiving results in poor body image and the compulsive need to artificially create and enforce body boundaries though behaviors like cutting and eating disorders. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
54
" Many self-mutilators, as well as anorexics and bulimics, come from families where physical appearance and prowess were stressed more than feelings and thoughts. Eating disorders are particularly rampant among female athletes, dancers, models, and others from whom approval is explicitly tied to their body. Like self-mutilators, anorexics and bulimics tend to be perfectionists who never feel good enough, despite their considerable achievements. Often they are the "good little girl"—the perfect, straight-A student, the quiet, conscientious one who never gave here parents any trouble—an identity they strenuously cling to in order to avoid conflict and abuse. But beneath the mask, they feel loathsome and defective, anything but special. They develop a rigidity of character and a right-or-wrong style of thinking that makes them acutely sensitive to criticism. Everything is either black or white, good or bad, success or failure, fat or thin. There is no in-between, no comfort in just being adequate. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
57
" New Haven psychologist Lisa Cross believes that it is no coincidence that these body-control syndromes occur more often in women than in men, and that they all tend to have their onset in adolescence. From birth to death, Cross argues, a female's experience of her body is far more confused and discontinuous than a male's: from her partially hidden genitals to the pain and mystery of menstruation to the abrupt and radical changes in body contours and function associated with puberty and childbearing to the symbiotic possession of her body by another life during pregnancy and breast-feeding. As a result, some women see their bodies as fragmented, foreign, unfamiliar, frightening, and out of control—as object, not subject, as Cross puts it. Add in social and cultural pressures—which lead teenage girls to define their bodies by their attractiveness, while boys define theirs by strength and function—and it is easy to understand what a perilous passage puberty can be for young women. In fact, it is puberty that first introduces bleeding and body fat into a girl's life, two very powerful symbols of the loss of control over her body. The psychological chasm between body and self widens when girls must negotiate these challenges in an environment fraught with the pain and terror of physical or sexual abuse or unempathetic parenting. "Self-cutting and eating disorders, as bizarre and self-destructive as they can appear, are nonetheless attempts to own the body, to perceive the body as self (not other), known (not uncharted and unpredictable), and impenetrable (not invaded or controlled from the outside)," Cross theorizes. "
― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain
