“You’ll stop when it’s timeâ€
I wanted to share the wisest sentence I have heard about healing from SIV. This pure and simple sentence is the answer I use when I get asked “How can I make myself stop cutting, burning, punching myself?†I say the same when I am asked by friends and family of people who self-injure, or mental health or criminal justice professionals, how to “end self-mutilation.â€
Most people, even some who live with SIV, focus almost completely on making SIV go away, as if it were an evil to be eradicated, after which there would be peace for all. This attitude is understandable, yet it has caused incomprehensible suffering for many who have lived with SIV. When you only care about making a behavior stop you will do anything you feel you can to make it stop. So the mental health community, and the general public as well, have accepted the need to “force†people to stop SIV. What does this force look like? Simply stated, coercion is never pretty. Nor is it effective. Force, most often, replicates previous trauma that the person who is living with SIV is trying to cope with.
If you keep healing, you will reach a point where you no longer need SIV. That will be your time to live without it. In the meantime acknowledge that it serves as well as harms, and nurture compassion for yourself while you are on the journey. SIV does not need to be forcibly stopped. SIV often helps people cope when suicide seems the only possible solution (many people don’t understand this and equate SIV with suicide attempts). I think it is crucial that we find things to live for, whether we self-injure or not, as we struggle with the pain of our histories. Many of us go on for our children or other groups of people we care about. Some turn to the arts or nature. We can discover things we are passionate about to balance the pain and the fear that we live with. And we can find others who share the journey. It helps to have a safe place to discuss all this, and that is how I hope this blog feels – like a safe place. What is it that keeps you going?
December 8th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I write on SIV message boards. I offer words of compassion and comfort. So as people living with SIV find there way to the boards they will feel welcomed and understood. I cant heal others, but I can sit for a moment with them and hear/ witness their pain.
What I get in return is….healing to me. everytime I reach out to others, its like I’m reaching back in time and speaking to myself. Speaking the words I so despritely needed/wanted to hear being spoken to me.
Honestly I dont see a time when the language of red tears will no longer be a spoken language. I do rememeber when it was an unspoken language…and the shame/fear I felt in being alone in speaking it and haveing no translators that could hear the screams of my injuries.
I will keep translating for those who are not yet able to speak for themselves. I will keep educating those who stop and gawk at my scars. That is where I am in my healing. Helping others is what keeps me going.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:40 am
<>
At the moment it is my children and husband as well as those that I know who count on me that keep me going. As well as one Amazing woman that I have met (my crisis councilor).
I went through the period of hiding what I did, I fought it, I pretended that it didn’t really exist. Now I realize that it does serve a purpose and as strange as it seems I tend to only get the urge to carve into myself when the last carving heals. It is almost like each scar, each mark means something, it is a moment, a memory, a pain that I can see healing on the outside while I try to work it out on the inside. At the same time I look at myself and I feel less fake, like my outsides finally match my insides and as much as I mask myself to the outside world, there are things that I can’t hide. Like the scars on my arms, and if someone asks me why I tell them. Maybe in the pain I have survived through someone else can find the strength to go on too.
I have learned to hide what I do now from some, share it with others who won’t judge me so much or put me down for doing what I do and when the carving doesn’t help anymore I go to my other outlets like forgetting to eat and drink for days at a time. Or just eating till I am ready to pop, it is like exchanging one damaging action for another but all of it is to numb me just long enough to keep me going.
I don’t know if it will ever end, in all honesty I don’t know if I want it to. I don’t know if I would be me without these things since some of the damaging actions have been around since I was young. I have however learned to accept it and learned to live side by side with what I do to myself instead of fighting it. When I fight it I end up doing more mental damage to myself and right now I am trying to heal my past, I don’t want to have to heal my future too! Maybe one day everything will come back together and these scars will just be reminders of a world that I didn’t want to be in, of the pain that I overcame. If it doesn’t come together then it will still tell my story in the end. One that at the moment I am too weak to fully face, so I take it one cut at a time, one moment, one scar until I am either completely broken or standing on top of the hill and looking back down at the sadness I left behind.
January 26th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
I am not ready to stop. I know this for sure. I have never even tried to hide it, but no-one seems to notice. Not that I want them to. What I really think I need is to change what I do and where. I need to do it where it won’t cause scars for everyone to see. I currently wear my pain on my face, but considering my need for a job and social acceptance I think this has to change. I have no idea how though. It’s a ritual, a habit. I don’t know whether this is the right place to post this, but I need suggestions as to how to change, not to stop.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Some days I am not sure what it is that keeps me going. The pain becomes overwhelming and I want to run away, but I cannot run away from myself. I confess that I do think about suicide, but could not do it because of the pain it would cause to my family. My children are what keep me connected to this world, however painful it may be. When the pain inside gets too much, I cut. When I feel too numb to be real, I cut. Lately, I have been working on cutting less, but find that I replace it with a different coping skill, such as banging and bruising myself. I do hide the evidence of my SIV, or I create convincing cover stories, as it would negatively affect my job and could also scare my husband away. The only person who sees the evidence and knows the real stories is my therapist. I don’t trust my friends not to run screaming if they knew. I hope to someday understand what it is inside of me that makes me want to hurt myself. I would like to heal from the inside out, both physically and emotionally. I do not want medications, I want understanding, as medications only dull the pain. For those who continue to struggle with SIV, I suggest writing. It may not stop you from cutting, but it gives you an avenue to explain it to the world.
April 19th, 2009 at 4:25 am
I came to this website because I love my niece. I was hoping that I had found a place for her to speak freely, gain understanding and not feel alone with her struggles with SIV. She has other addictions which have landed her in mental health court, an alternative to a harsher prison sentence. Where mental health court doctors perscribe med after med with ever increasing doses and mental health court physicians diagnosed her, a 22 yr. old with bipolar and borderline disorders. She is currently in lock up because she relapsed. Mandatory Behavioral health classes are a joke. Most of the time they are cancelled, basically because the therapist didn’t want to come in. She has no choice in therapy in this system just as she had no choice as a child for the abuse she was given. I am a nurse and yet I cannot help her. Please tell me that this website is still functional for those looking for help. We are in need of a lifeline.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Everyone needs to believe that they can stop in order to be successful. You can only do it for yourself. Go to myspace.com/you.are.not.alone for support