GenQ - For the not so straight individual

Reading a recent article on generationq.net Australia (http://www.generationq.net/articles/Cutting-00001.html) on the topic of cutting got me thinking. The anger portrayed in this email, the defiance indicates a burning issue that people remain ignorant to.

Cutting, more commonly and respectfully known as self harm or self injury is not just about isolation, nor is it for attention, nor simply because the people who engage in the act are suicidal but can’t quite make it there. There are so many varied and undisclosed reasons for people developing a coping method that involves harming the outside of the body.

I started self harming before I knew what it was, before there was information about it available and before I knew that I was a lesbian. I don’t represent everyone else who self harms, in fact, from personal experience everyone has a different reason, everyone self harms differently. There are so many hidden gradients and completely opposing concepts such as doing it for self care vs. self harming for punishment. My self harm is not linked to my coming out story except in terms of the stress that surrounded a very confusing part of my life because I couldn’t vocalise it adequately.

A common misconception about self harming is that people want the pain, the physical pain to mask the emotional turmoil that is inside. Whilst this may be true for some, personally I felt no pain and I would not self harm if there was any physical pain. This is often termed dissociating, where the person is not totally aware of bodily sensations, place or sound etc. Thus, obviously self harm was about something different for me, if I didn’t feel the pain, then it couldn’t mask the emotional pain. Instead, self harm to me enabled the world to stop, it gave me peace, it gave me space to just be without everything spinning out of control.

As I sit here and read this, it sounds like I am pro everyone partaking in this. Quite the opposite, I’ve not self harmed in over two years because it is a mechanism that is destructive. It is not something healthy, even if it enabled me to survive for months at a time. Anything that destroys the body or the soul in order to get through the emotion of the day is not healthy psychologically, such as self harming, drinking, drugs and eating disorders. I would not advocate anyone doing this, I would try my hardest to let people know that they aren’t alone in the pain inside and that the scars don’t have to be on the outside.

The article on generationq.net brings up the concept of the ‘perfect’ people making this person feel like a freak, feel crazy. My heart goes out to those people that do feel that; that feel like no one will listen and that the label of self harm makes them somehow different. However I would be cautious because it is unhealthy, because ultimately it doesn’t help the person, it hinders their development.

So maybe instead of blaming all the ‘perfect’ people or all those that don’t understand we need to change their views and also ours. To understand one perspective is not enough to understand the other. It needs to be accepted that self harm is not a healthy way of coping but also that self harm at some point in many peoples lives is the only option. That everyone has scars on the inside but some people have them on the outside too.