It's just not worth trusting people
‘I used to dream of going to live with another family but that's just impossible, because no one could like or care for me. It's pretty hard believing anyone any more. I'm always let down. That's why I hardly ever take chances.’ When you have been used, let down and betrayed by someone close to you, you expect other people to behave in a similar way. Having been badly hurt, it is really natural to try and protect yourself from ever being hurt again. It is likely you do this by not letting people get close to you. You may achieve this by being ‘a tough kid’. The more fragile and hurt you feel on the inside the tougher you will behave on the outside. You may be distant with people – polite but cool.You may keep yourself to yourself.
You will have trouble when people touch you – especially some people.
Mistrusting people can work as a protection. It can also mean you miss out on fun, warmth, closeness and caring.
No one in the world believes me.
‘I feel so angry, there is this screaming going on inside me, but it can’t get out because my mouth has been so tightly shut for years, nothing can escape.’Keeping even a little secret is a hard thing to do. Keeping a big secret, like being sexually abused, is an enormous task. It often feels like a huge weight that you have to carry around with you all the time. Although that is an enormous strain when you have carried it for years, you may get so used to it being there, that it feels normal.
Trying to share the load is a scary thing to do because you can never be really sure what will happen. For this reason, you may have tried to give out hints rather than come right out and say it. That way you can always take it back again if you have to. The trouble with doing it this way is that people don’t always pick up on the hints and you don’t get any reward for the risks that you’ve taken, but instead feel as if nobody thought what you were saying was worthwhile.
Coming right out and saying can start you on the road to recovery if the person you tell believes you and does the right thing. If this doesn’t happen though, you can feel even worse than before. When families don’t want to hear something that might damage them, they often behave like a Venus flytrap plant that’s been poked – closing so tightly that it becomes stifling inside. People often behave angrily when they feel threatened. To be angry with the person who abused you would mean they would have to believe it was true. That might just be too threatening so they may get angry with you instead.
Another way families behave when they feel threatened is to pretend it is not true. In order to really believe this they have to work at keeping on saying it – things like:
‘How could you say such things?’
‘It's all in your mind.’
Alone in the world
‘I feel like a freak. I must be the only one in the world this has happened to.’"Your imagination runs away with you."
"Don’t be stupid."
When this is said to you often enough, you really start to wonder whether you did imagine it. Even though the abuse is continuing and you know it is real, when you are flooded with doubts from your family it becomes difficult to distinguish what is real and what isn’t.
Telling someone outside your family can be just as difficult, particularly when people know the person who is abusing you is a ‘good bloke’, or an elder at church, or manager of a company or even a celebrity. People may find it hard to believe that someone they know and like would behave this way.
Something else that may happen when you tell is that people believe you but may act like it really isn’t that important. The say things like:
● ‘Don’t make such a big deal out of it’
● ‘You should be over it by now’
● ‘You’re making a fuss about nothing’
● ‘We don’t want the family pride to be destroyed by this so you will just have to forget it’
● ‘It was wrong of him but you have just got to put it behind you’
Or they do things like:
● Your mother continues to sleep with him even though she knows.
● Your mother still decides to marry him even though she knows.
● Social Services know but leave your sister living with him alone.
● The teachers know and send you to a counsellor who sees you once a week but doesn’t even ask to see your family, so you end up feeling even more as if there is something wrong with you.
Reactions like this are extremely confusing because people are saying that they believe you but are acting as if they don’t.
If you have already tried to tell and this has happened, you will know what it is like. If you haven’t told though, it is important to remember that this doesn’t have to happen. Make sure you read the tips about ‘telling’.
Having to carry the secret of the sexual abuse around is going to make you feel cut off from others. You have been given responsibility for something that most teenagers aren’t, and this is going to make you feel different. Also, because you may be feeling guilty, responsible, and bad about yourself and about being raped and abused it is not the sort of thing that is going to be easy to talk about to others. More often than not, others probably haven’t wanted to know. They might find the thought of adult men having sex with children or teenagers too shocking to consider – or perhaps they don’t want to know because it reminds them of something painful from their own childhood.
What happens when you feel so bad about yourself is that you start imagining other people are also thinking bad things about you. You think they are talking about you, criticising your appearance, and knowing what you are thinking even though you are trying to make your face completely blank. You probably think people know you have been sexually abuse just by looking at you.
Checking out whether this is real or not is often too scary. Although they are probably not thinking anything like you imagine they are thinking, there is always the chance you might be right. So what happens is that you go on thinking you know what they are thinking, until you are completely convinced you are right.
Whether it is one or all of these reasons, or others, probably what you are feeling is terribly alone. Perhaps that you must be the only one in the world that this has happened to, as if you are not normal. How could you know there are so many girls, women, boys, and men out there that have been used, abused, and raped by the very people who were supposed to take care of them and protect them?
These feelings of aloneness don’t just happen on Sundays or when there is no one around- but all the time and are to do with feeling alone from everyone. They are about not having a friend you can talk to about what is really going on inside you. And perhaps not having a family, a mother, or father, or sister you can really be together with. There are the endless days of sitting alone looking out of the window, watching things pass you by like pictures on a TV, part of a different reality, a different world.
Worth nothing to anyone
Feeling worthless, worth nothing to no one, is something that people who have been sexually abused say they often feel. They say that they feel as if they have been used and are now dirty and soiled – and how could anyone like them now?You might think: if he did this to me, and he was supposed to protect and care for me... I didn’t mean anything to him.
Maybe you have been thrown out of your family and if no one there, not even your mother, thought you were worth saving… then it is extremely hard to think of yourself as being worth much. So you feel used and abused. You feel all the good parts have been taken away, and there is nothing left that anyone could like. Only the rotten and dirty parts, the guilt, the shame, and the pain, and who would want those?
It is not surprising that you should have some of these feelings. After all, you have been abused and misused, and he has taken away a precious part of you that you didn’t want to give away.
Although you might feel battered inside and robbed of the good parts, there is still something valuable there. No one can take that away from you.
Shame
Shame is the feeling you have when you know you have a rotten part inside you and you would just want to die if anyone got to find out about it. It is like saying something stupid in class and being humiliated and ridiculed by your teacher in front of everyone, or wetting your pants in a public place, or being told that you have taken more than your fair share again, and now everyone else has to go without.It is the kind of feeling you have when you are naked in front of a group of people. You feel very exposed and you imagine everyone is staring at you and secretly smiling or thinking how awful you are or perhaps pitying you. It is the kind of feeling that makes you want to squirm.
Usually, really shameful things are not spoken about by anyone. Since sexual abuse is seldom talked about this makes it seem like something too shameful to expose to the light of day. Even though it is something that is done to you by someone else, the fact that you were there makes you feel like the shame belongs to you. You start telling yourself things like ‘I didn’t have to go round to his house’ or ‘I didn’t have to sit in his lap’ or ‘at my age I should have been able to stop it.’ Shameful feelings are often especially powerful if there have been aspects of the abuse that you enjoyed.
Children and teenagers, like all human beings, are designed to have pleasurable feelings from sex and to feel aroused by it. If your abuser is kind and gentle there may be aspects of the abuse that you enjoyed. This does not mean you are abnormal. Rather, you have been put in an abnormal situation whereby the abuser has exploited your normal sexual feelings. For some people, the abuser is the only person in the world who treats you as if you are special or beautiful or precious. It can be very difficult to resist these messages, even if you hate the abuse.
Having sexual experiences when you are young means you have a lot of knowledge that most other kids don’t have. This increases your chances of somehow saying or doing the wrong things with other kids and other adults. Right now, as you are reading this, you may remember times you have done this. That squirmy, ‘closing off’ feeling might be taking you over without your even inviting it to.
When feelings of shame take over a big part of you, you have to start to work very hard at avoiding people so you don’t have to cope with the feeling of being exposed. If they get too close they might see right inside you and know about the rotten bits. There are numerous ways you might stop this happening:
● Never looking people in the eye or alternatively looking so hard that you force them to walk away. Either way there is no eye contact.
● Avoiding people altogether by crossing the road, hiding behind the clothes racks in shops, or staying at home so you can’t be seen at all.
● Starting to imagine what people are thinking, getting the awful squirmy feeling, and becoming immobilised and completely blank and numb.
● Becoming increasingly anxious, maybe blushing, biting your nails, pulling your hair, sitting on the edge of your chair, talking a lot or not talking at all.
● Getting angry or hostile to keep people from coming any closer.
● Keeping yourself under perfect control so they (and you) won’t be able to get past the perfection and really see ‘inside’.
● Developing ways of doing things which you feel will help keep you safe, and getting very stressed if you aren’t able to do it that way.
You have possibly become very good at whole lot of these and the more successful you get the less able you will be to find out what others are really thinking. It may well be that people aren’t thinking awful things about you, or sniggering behind your back, but when you feel shame, imagining that they are is something you do to yourself all the time. What you are really doing is turning your eyes inward and watching yourself.
Each time you do this you start giving yourself the messages that have been given to you – ‘I’m bad, I’m stupid, I’m selfish, I’m hopeless, I’m dirty’.
A lot of messages though, haven’t been given to you in words and there are no words to describe the feelings you have – the awful squirmy feeling blocks everything else out.
The combination of it and the abusive messages you give yourself eventually make you believe that this is the way you really are.
Anxiety
This is the feeling of being constantly on edge, a sense of impending danger or disaster about to envelop you. You may have a tight feeling in your chest, difficulty being able to focus or concentrate, a sense of spiralling out of control, and sometimes, the feeling of watching yourself from above.Anxiety can manifest in panic attacks, which seem to come out of nowhere. This can be truly terrifying. Your heart is pounding, you’re sweating and shaking, you struggle to breathe and you fear you’re going to die.
Anxiety can be very difficult to manage because it is so hard to identify what is causing the feeling. When you can’t identify the cause, it’s tricky to have a strategy to manage it.
Panic attacks are particularly difficult because you may attribute the attack to what you were doing at the time. For example, if your attack happened on a bus, you may start to believe you can’t travel on buses, and this sets up a whole new complication in your life. People often develop sets of rituals to help them manage the anxiety.
‘I need to sit next to the door to the classroom so I can get out if I have to’.
‘I have to get my homework ready, pack my sports gear and make my lunch in that order, so I can keep things under control and manage my anxiety’.
Sexual abuse creates huge anxiety in people - when it will happen next? What do I have to look out for? What if someone finds out? whilst at the same time, trying not to think about the abuse. This is hard work for your brain because two opposite things are happening at once and your brain solves this by disconnecting. When that happens, it can seem like thoughts and emotions don’t belong to you.
"I feel like I have to keep this rage inside me forever."
You may feel puzzled reading this heading. Often people who have been sexually abused say they don’t feel angry. There are several reason for this.If you have been unsure of how much people in your family love you, you have probably tried to do things to show them how loveable you are. If you have spent years putting on a pleasant front and burying angry feelings, it is likely that you have got so good at it that even you don’t know you are angry.
Often loving and hating feelings are really mixed up. The person who abused you may also be the only person who showed you any love. How could you hate they only person who loved you?
It may be that it has been really unsafe for you to be angry. In some families, arguments or expressions of anger, always end up in violence. Standing up to people, answering back, letting them know how you feel, may have meant that you have got hurt. You may have been threatened that if you told about the abuse, awful things would happen to you.
If you hang around for ages waiting for your best friend to turn up as you had arranged and discover they have forgotten, or you discover they have been telling things about you, it is likely you will feel very angry.
When you have been sexually abused, you have been let down and cheated in a much bigger way. Cheated of your childhood and betrayed by one of the people who is closest to you. It is likely that you will feel so angry you will want to rage and smash and hurt and damage and kill.
Angry feelings this strong are really scary. People often feel like a boiling pressure-cooker. If they take off the lid off and let out even a little burst of anger, the rest will come pouring out and completely take them over. It isn’t surprising that people keep the lid on firmly.
Sometimes you can find ‘safe’ ways to let out little bursts – kicking the cat, slamming the door, sending a rude text, giving a ‘wimpy’ classmate a hard time.
Alternatively you may get back at the person it is really intended for, in safe ways – putting onion in his food when you know he hates onions, hiding his iPad or leaving a cupboard door open in the hope that he’ll hurt himself.
Keeping the lid on your anger can be hard work. You may have to consciously work at it. Sometimes your muscles get tense and sore. You get pins and needles and cramp, stomach aches and headaches.
When you are asleep, however, your body and mind can’t work so hard. Often anger appears in dreams in all kinds of ways.
The other important thing that happens when anger has no place to go is that you turn it towards yourself. ‘I’m hopeless, ugly, and stupid, I should have expressed myself better, I should have found a way to escape, I should have been able to stop him’ are all ways of giving yourself anger that is often intended for other people. Often people find it easier to be angry with people outside the family.
● ‘The police were really insensitive’
● ‘I tried to tell the teacher but she was too dumb to pick up the message’
● ‘That person stood there and watched him force me into the car’
● ‘Eighteen months in prison is nothing – the court is hopeless’
A lot of these angry feelings are justified. They are for people in authority, who have power and strength which could have been used to help, but wasn’t.
If you manage to find them, however, it is likely that the greatest angry feelings are for people inside your family. Your mother who didn’t manage to keep you safe and who maybe didn’t believe you, or maybe abused you in other ways.
Your sister who teased you for being pathetic when she didn’t realise you sacrificed yourself for her. Your brother who got off scot free and didn’t understand your suffering. And the person who is really responsible, the one who abused you. It is really normal to wish he were dead, to want to hurt, castrate, or kill him, or wish he stayed in prison for ever.
"Men – Yuck!"
Having a bad experience with one man may well have convinced you that all men are like that. Just being in the same room as a man can be very distressing. You may be aware of your heart pounding, your palms feeling sweaty, and shudders passing down your spine. Your body may shrink away or you may even feel you have to get right out of the room.Often something about a man you meet can remind you of the man who abused you.
At other times, you may wish that you could be close to a man because men often seem to be competent and powerful. Teenage years are a time when most people are really interested in boys or other relationships, and when you have been abused, getting close to a someone can be really difficult. After all, how can you tell whether or not a boy will abuse you?
● ‘Nice guys are more of a risk. They suck you in and then they let you down.’
● ‘I can’t ever call him by a name. It’s the same as my stepfather’s.’
● ‘I catch glimpses of men in town who remind me of my uncle, and I run into shops and hide.’
● ‘My skin crawls all over when Michael has his top shirt buttons undone and I can see his hairy chest’.
It is often hard to cope with the feelings of hatred toward men that well up inside you. One way people do this is to imagine all kinds of horrible things they would like to have happen to them, or things they would like them to do to them – giving them a taste of their own medicine so they would know what you feel like.
Sometimes though, having these feelings can be scary. You may worry you are giving out some signals about what you are thinking and if the man gets to know he may want to attack you.
● ‘It’s like dating two people – I can’t tell which is my boyfriend and which is my father’
● ‘Boys come in two types – ones you can trust and ones you can’t, but how can you tell which is which.’
It is a bit like learning to swim in a river. If, during your childhood, you have lots of chances to practice, you get to know where it gets too deep or too swift, murky underfoot, or where the big rocks are. You learn which parts are safe and which parts to avoid. As you get older and better at swimming you know how to stay afloat and you can venture into deeper parts. You also learn ways to get yourself to the bank, even if you do get carried along by the current or caught up in the weeds.
If you go to a different river you may have to be careful at first, but you have the skills to be able to check out how safe it is, and how far to venture in.
However, if during your childhood every time you got taken to the river you got thrown in out of your depth and kept there by an adult until he decided to fish you out, the only thing you would learn is that rivers are scary and dangerous.
All teenagers have to use their testing out skills if they want to get close to a another person, but for people who have been sexually abused, this is extremely difficult. It is very scary to try even paddling, when you haven’t learnt any water skills, because as soon as you put your feet in, you may hit a rock, or get swept away or entangled in the weed.
Staying on the bank may be lonely, but it’s safer. Boys and young men who have been abused have to use their water skills too. But the difficulty isn’t so much a problem getting close to girls and women, as it is to do with men. Having had the experience of having sex with a man, the question might be ‘am I gay or am I straight?’ and ‘will other men know and want to have sex with me as well?’
A lot of teenagers want to have friends of the opposite sex, but don’t want a sexual relationship. Being constantly on guard for anything that may lead towards sex, or even any kind of closeness, however, can mean that even being friends is difficult.
● ‘As soon as he asked me things about myself I joke, and change the subject’
● ‘Dancing is fine until he wants to hold me close. Then I say I need to get a drink’
Other teenage girls would like a sexual relationship, but find it impossible.
● ‘When he kisses me I want to throw up’
● ‘I would like to have sex with him but as soon as we begin I get images of huge, horrible, hard penises.
● ‘My uncle was always so violent when he had sex with me. John isn’t, but I keep waiting for it’. Often boyfriends behave like men who abuse.
● ‘Boys want only one thing. He told me he’d dump me if I didn’t have sex with him’.
This attitude can often make you feel pressured into doing something you don’t want, so you don’t lose your boyfriend. Even if you make it over the hurdle and get into a relationship with a boy, knowing whether or not to tell him about what has happened to you is often another huge hurdle.
● ‘If I tell he will know I am damaged goods and he might feel it is all right to do with me again – like being recycled’.
● ‘He might feel revolted, not able to handle it, and then he would leave me, but if I don’t tell he won’t be able to make allowances for me.’
Surviving teenage years can be tricky at the best of times. For a heterosexual girl, becoming a teenager involves developing relationships with males. If you have been abused, this is extremely difficult because it is males who have abused you.
Getting involved with them brings back all kinds of painful memories and feelings and means you run the risk of it happening again. Not getting involved means not being like other teenagers and that is painful too.
For a heterosexual boy, becoming a teenager involves developing relationships with girls. Getting involved may feel strange, and mean you still keep wondering if you are homosexual. This may mean you feel you have to work very hard to have sex often enough, with enough girls, to convince yourself you are not.
For a homosexual boy or lesbian girl, developing relationships may feel very confusing. You may doubt your sexuality, wondering whether you are really gay or whether you’re just confused because of the abuse.
"I feel I have lost everything, even myself"
Fires, floods and burglaries all cause people to suffer losses in their lives – often the loss of things that are hard to replace.What usually makes it easier to cope is that friends, neighbours and family all come running to offer support and comfort.
People who have been sexually abused often suffer losses that make fires look like a lit match, and floods like a big puddle. Unlike victims of fire and flood, friends, neighbours and family seldom come running. Usually they don’t know, and when they do they often don’t believe.
The first big loss is that of childhood. If you were being sexually abused, you would have felt very different from your classmates. It is likely that carefree children’s games often seemed impossible, concentration on school work difficult, and inviting classmates home an ordeal. This meant making friends was really difficult.
The second big loss is to do with your family. When you tell on him, this almost always means a disruption in the family. At worst, it means you will lose them by having to move out. At best, it means the loss of the person who has been abusing you and the loss of the way the family was before.
A third loss, which is also really scary, is the feeling that you have lost yourself. You feel like there is a hole inside you and you can’t find the bits to fill it, you constantly doubt your own judgement, and you feel you don’t know yourself anymore. Sometimes you may fear you will really fall apart and maybe you will never be able to get pieces together again.
You may have been forced to take responsibility beyond your years:
● Taking responsibility for Mum’s peace of mind by keeping the secret
● Taking responsibility for making Dad/brother/uncle/stepdad feel good
● Taking responsibility for propping up parents who are struggling
● Being more responsible for younger brothers and sisters than you ought to be
This interferes, in a big way, with being a kid.
"I feel responsible"
● I should have...● I shouldn’t have...
● If I only had...
● If I hadn’t...
● I wish I had...
● It is my fault...
● I know it’s not my fault, but...
If you find you are beginning lots of sentences (either out loud or in your head) in these ways, you are probably expert at giving yourself a hard time. You may even be so good at it that you have convinced yourself that being sexually abused was your fault.
‘I shouldn’t have gone to him for cuddles’
‘I should have said I didn’t want his presents’
‘When I was little I didn’t know any better, but it’s my fault I let him continue’
‘If only I had made a fuss’
‘I know it’s not my fault, but then I think it must be, because he didn’t abuse my sister, only me’
Thinking it is your fault probably has a lot to do with the way you have been brought up. Everyone has positive and negative parts of them. If your parents never notice the positive ones, it would have been hard for you to grow up feeling good about yourself. Even worse, if they continually commented on the negative ones, you would grow up thinking that you were bad and that whatever went wrong must be because of you.
Giving yourself messages like the ones listed are ways of punishing yourself. If you have practised punishments to yourself over a long time, then, even if the abuse stops, you may not be able to.
‘If I hadn’t told, my family would still be together’.
‘It is my fault my mother feels so awful’.
If you tell, the person who abused you may get taken to court and be punished for his actions. This is society’s way of saying it is his responsibility, not yours. If you are really good at blaming yourself though, you may twist this all around, so you still end up giving yourself the responsibility.
‘It’s all my fault Dad’s in prison’
‘Auntie Cheryl’s life is really miserable because I told about Uncle John’
You may have a list of excuses to try to get whoever abused you off the hook.
‘He didn’t realise what he was doing’
‘The trouble was he was depressed’
These are ways of keeping yourself responsible. The fact that he had a difficult childhood, you were rude to him, he had financial worries, or he didn’t understand the importance of what he was doing, may all be important reasons, but they do not excuse his actions. It was his problem, not yours.
Right now, you may be telling yourself this isn’t so, because in spite of what this book says, you know that you really were to blame. You know you are not like the majority of people described in this book, who have hated every minute of it. You, at the time it was happening, enjoyed it. If you ever admitted to that (which of course, you couldn’t bring yourself to do) then everyone would know you are just as responsible as he is.
It is a pretty convincing argument you have with yourself but there is an even better one. You may need to read this bit a number of times though, to try to let it sink in.
Feeling pleasure when your breasts, or clitoris, or vagina, or penis are being stroked and fondled is a normal way to respond. What wasn’t normal was who was doing it, and the age you were, but that doesn’t make feelings of enjoyment crazy, or make what happened your responsibility.
Another way of continuing to accept responsibility is to shield all important people from knowing.
‘I would die before I let my parents know’
‘It's Dad’s father who abused me. How can I tell him what his own father did?’
‘My mum thinks he's wonderful. She'd be devastated’
It is not a teenager’s job to protect parents in this way. You are not responsible for lots of things in your life but your parents are not one of them. It is your parents’ job to protect you.
The trouble though, with putting the responsibility where it really belongs, is that you have to acknowledge important people let you down. The really scary part of this is that it may mean they didn’t care enough about you.
Admitting that to yourself is enormously difficult, and it is often easier to keep accepting the responsibility yourself.
"I don’t know how to feel."
● 'I feel so angry, but whenever I snap and yell, they tell me to control myself and not to be so unreasonable. They say being angry isn’t allowed but they fight all the time. I don’t know how I feel.''● 'Just when I am hating him so much he is really nice to me, says he is sorry, promises never to do it again, and gives me presents. I don’t know how I feel.''
● 'My father says this is what all fathers and daughters do, but I know it is wrong. I don’t know how I feel.'
● 'He told me I was his favourite but if that was true, how could he hurt me? I don’t know how I feel.''
● 'I pull away when my father comes close. He says I don’t love him. I don’t know how I feel.''
● 'I really want someone to love me and to hold me and make me feel I am special, but I hate having sex with him. I don’t know how I feel.''
● 'I try to talk to my family about what happened and they just look blank and say ‘what do you mean?’ I don’t know how I feel.''
● 'Whenever I say I want to leave home, they say I’m too young and I can’t look after myself. I’m not too young to have sex but I can’t look after myself. I don’t know how I feel.'
Hurting yourself – ‘the cut so deep’
At times you will probably feel the pain is just too much to bear any more and the only way to find peace and relief from that torment is to kill yourself.The desperation that you feel is like being the sole survivor after your boat has sunk in the middle of the ocean and you haven’t got a life-jacket. You battle to stay afloat.
First by kicking your legs, but they get tired. So you use your arms, but they get tired too. You try floating on your back, but that doesn’t work so you go back to kicking and everything gets tired.
Even if there is a shore to get to, it feels as if you don’t have enough energy to fight and stay afloat that long. Maybe it would be better to just let yourself sink and drown rather than to have to suffer the pain of knowing that it must eventually happen anyway. Just let the pain be taken away, let the nightmare end.
Quite often though, there is something that pushes you on to keep kicking, to keep breathing – the urge to stay alive. But staying alive means the pain continues.
Often what keeps you from killing yourself is other people. Maybe you feel that killing yourself would be hurtful to the people that are important for you, your family or friends. But staying alive for other people is a bit like only ever getting the left-overs from other people’s meals.
Sometimes attempting to kill yourself is a way of trying to make someone pay for the pain they have made you suffer: ‘If I kill myself he will be sorry he did it. And she will be sorry she never noticed!’
The trouble with this is that you can’t guarantee how they will feel. He probably hasn’t felt guilty in the past so he is unlikely to start now.
Hurting and injuring yourself is also a way of letting out some of the anger your feel toward other people. You probably don’t feel it is safe to get angry with the man who did this to you, but the anger is still there. Sometimes you can give it to other people to whom it might not belong, but who are safe (who won’t hurt you), or you can turn it around and give it to yourself, because that is really safe.
Hurting yourself is also a way of letting people know about the pain and injury inside by making it visible on the outside. Putting injuries on the outside shows people you need care.
Sometimes it is a way of reassuring yourself that despite the feelings of deadness inside, you are alive because you can feel physical pain. It can also be a way of punishing yourself. You might feel that it was your fault that it happened in the first place – or guilty for splitting up the family. There are many ways of deadening this pain:
● ‘They say sniffing glue is dangerous, but so what if I die, who cares anyway?’ - Vicki
● ‘I go out riding my motorbike when I can’t sleep at night. Sometimes I turn the lights out and see how far I can go’ - Paul
● ‘I took a whole heap of pills once and went to sleep. But my sister found me and I woke up in hospital. The next day, I just started feeling the same way all over again’ - Maria
● ‘When the pressure inside me builds up, I feel desperate. The only way I can relieve it is to cut myself.’ - Niru
Whatever the reason is for you, you have probably been or still are, so desperately unhappy that injuring or killing yourself is an option you have seriously considered.
The pain that will end the pain, the cut so deep.
It is completely normal to have feelings like this. There is a way for things to get easier. Click here to find a road map you can use.
