My Abuser, Myself: The struggle to stop self-injury
Self-injury affects people of all ages, genders, ethnicities and social classes. This is just one woman’s story. If you find my story triggering, please talk to someone you trust.
I last hit myself two weeks ago.
During a tiff with my partner about dinner (or dinner’s absence) I rained blows on my thighs and then my head. He tried to hold me, saying, ‘No, no, no, no. Please don’t do this.’ But I fought him off and smashed my head against the wall until the hallway clock fell down.
The painted timber walls in our house have stood for over a century. It’s possible they’ve seen worse. But right here, right now, I need to stop this.
I’ve been trying to quit for nearly a year; or in truth most of my life. Some years the quitting has been easier. This year, it’s the hardest it has ever been.
My doctor advised seeing both a psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist.
I skim-read the terse referral letter on her computer screen: mixed anxiety and depression, manipulative mother and ex-husband. I was aghast that someone would say my ex-husband was manipulative. Everybody says he’s a really nice guy. None nicer.
Obviously I don’t like him, and I divorced him, so my words are suspect.
I constantly reread the lightest novels on my shelves until the medication damped down my frantic misery and the terror of telling two more strangers that I self-injure.
The psychologist told me to note what happens before I hit myself. To find a point where I could intervene. The psychiatrist, who calls the hitting ‘self-soothing,’ increased my nightly dose of Quetiapine and told me to turn the hit into a kind and gentle stroke whenever I felt the compulsion.
Not long afterward, I hit my head with a ceramic casserole dish that I had been drying. My hand seemingly did this without any intention on my part. Intention came afterward, with an ecstatic desire to obliterate my entire body against a hard, unforgiving surface.
I’m not sure I own this intention. It comes from the same part of my brain that tells me I should cut a finger off with a kitchen knife and promises me that the force of the blade, the flow of blood will be exquisite, cathartic, an incredible moment of freedom.
I call this self-destructive part of my brain my abuser. I’ve lived with my abuser for decades now and I’ve never been shocked by what she has suggested. On the contrary, I have welcomed it.
The casserole dish, however, was another thing. I heard no prior intention from my abuser. My hand seemingly did the job by itself. It was unsettling.
The psychiatrist increased my dose of Quetiapine again.
My abuser comes and goes without me having to much to say to her. She does all the talking: you’re not sick, you’re just not trying hard enough; you’re making this all up; so you had a horrible mother, that’s nothing; you’re not a person, you’re just a list of character failings; everything’s your fault.
I’ve never noticed this before but my abuser talks like my ex-husband — a pastiche of when he was drunk and when he was sober. She used to sound more like my mother. She has been adding to her playbook.
Sometimes my abuser presents me with a noose and a chair. She says I could climb up and kick the chair away with all my pain and fear, and silent death will embrace me in soft warm arms.
It’s a comforting fantasy, but in all likelihood my body would die clawing at my throat in a desperate struggle to live. And whose side would I be on? My body’s or my abuser’s? I’m not certain enough to do it.
I still assess crossbeams, rafters and tree branches for their accessibility and load-bearing capacity. If I did it indoors, I would definitely put newspapers down. My abuser doesn’t think things through, which is probably how she got the casserole dish past me.
So where do I go from here? All I have is my past, my present and my future. That’s all any of us have and we have to make something of it.
But when I started looking inside the thing I should call myself, I found, instead of memories and plans, a mess of fleeting images, no joy, no desires, no voice. There was an awkward silence, save the ringing in my body’s ears. And a sneaking certainty that my abuser was right.
It wasn’t much but I’ve been working with it — to create a sense of self, to join my present to my past, to find a place where my abuser stops and I walk on without her.
You are welcome to join me.
