Finding the Center

(caution: struggles with self-injury and mention of suicidal feelings)

My T and I arranged a short extra session just to talk about what to do about my sense of the importance of the symbol and his limits. He said he couldn't, professionally, let me cut myself. We talked about what might be allowable that would satisfy my feelings. Before the session I drew this picture: 4-12-99 .

In the next session I spent some time listening to all parts of myself to try to see what I needed to do. I felt very strongly that I was at a turning point but that I needed a ritual to make my acceptance of the childhood pain physically real so that I could hold on to it. I checked in with my anger, and my anger said that while it was better to hurt the bad guys that sometimes that wasn't possible and doing something to witness the pain was a statement of assertiveness too. I was actually very moved that I got that clear a response from the anger I usually can't reach. My child feelings wanted to know whether my T really would see and care, and he reassured them.

It was clear that the symbol was positive and powerful and so I moved into the ritual I had been thinking about. I scratched my arm with a small stone and said:

This wound stands for all the old wounds and for my believing and accepting them. Its healing stands for their healing.

It made the old wounds really real, and my T reached out and touched the scratch. He was very moved. The ritual was a way of bringing the past fully into the present; bringing those two worlds together, both believing in the remembered pain and being willing to feel it. The response of my child feelings afterwards was "You mean I can be real?" It was a very important statement of acceptance.

The idea of cutting has always had for me meanings of wanting people to see my pain and wanting to ease the emotional pain by replacing it with physical pain. It also sometimes has the meaning of wanting to punish myself and I have memories that suggest it connects to specific conditioning not to tell. In the process I have just been through what I did came to have other meanings. It came to be a symbol of my acceptance of the child pain (both in the sense of my believing it and my willingness to feel it and to say it is a real part of my present world). The image of Thomas touching Jesus's wounds was very powerfully involved. That isn't to say that the more dangerous meanings had disappeared. That was actually part of the power of the symbol, that it took something that had the meaning of punishment so that I would not tell and made it into a way of telling and sharing. I did still just want to hurt myself, but it became something much larger than that. I acknowledged that the symbol was not clean (it still had negative as well as positive meanings) but I prayed that the positive meanings could be effective.

The next day I took my kids to see my parents.When I was there and felt like I was being swallowed up by my family's reality I would touch the mark on my arm to remind me of my reality. Coming back from that trip I did feel some urge to cut--that is just part of my mental vocabulary for feeling pain. But those feelings quickly broke apart--what happened in the ritual was so powerful that it has taken over that image and given it different positive associations. It was so deep and so meaningful that it was a once and for all kind of thing.

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