by BARBARA J. KING
The book Embodied Resistance looked irresistible. I often write about gender issues and the chapter headings in this book grabbed my attention with subjects including beauty and sexuality, transgender identities and breastfeeding in public. It seemed to be a feast of ideas for reflection and blogging.
Then my gaze found chapter 12: “‘What I had to do to survive’: Self-injurers’ bodily emotion work,” by Margaret Leaf and Douglas P. Schrock. Instantly my mood of professional evaluation was swamped by the shock of memory, a visceral hit that hurled me back in time five years.
It was January 2007 and I was on a plane to Chicago, sitting next to my daughter, when I first saw them: long scratches on Sarah’s arms. The alarm bells that had for some months been clanging in my head suddenly coalesced into a certainty: My 13-year-old daughter was cutting.
The term self-injury or self-harm encompasses, as Leaf and Schrock report, everything from cutting the skin to hair-pulling, burning and bone-breaking. And it seems to be gender-related, as most self-harmers are adolescent females.
But Sarah isn’t a gender statistic, and her activity wasn’t generic. Our beautiful only child was carving into her skin with a razor blade. My husband and I felt confused and terrified. We felt ourselves to be a happy family — with the usual parent-teen tensions, sure, but basically in good shape. What weren’t we seeing? And was Sarah suicidal?
Immediately we found a good local therapist: some sessions were 1:1 and others involved all of us. I learned that cutting is better understood as an attempt to blunt emotional pain than a manifestation of mental illness or suicidal intention.
In Sarah’s case, the issues were largely about depression, intensified at a time when she struggled to fit into 8th-grade-girl culture. In addition to signaling emotional pain, though, cutting can be physically dangerous, especially if a blade goes too deep and hits an artery.
NPR for more
(Thanks to reader)