Marilee Strong > Quotes

“You don't feel like you're hurting yourself when you're cutting. You feel like this is the only way to take care of yourself.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“When they hurt themselves, they become the literal embodiment of all the people who have abused and hurt them—who have crushed their spirits and murdered their souls. They cling to cutting because they believe it is the only way they can be in control of their lives and their feelings. Yet, it is more symbolic of the absence of control. They are carrying on a devastating legacy, yielding the control to their abuses, letting them win.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“In addition to being a life-sustaining and sanity-maintaining way of managing inner states, cutting is a primitive yet powerful form of communication for people unable to adequately verbalize their feelings. Self-mutilation provides concrete expression for the pain they feel inside—a language written on the body, through blood, wounds, and scars.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Cutting is not attention seeking. It's not manipulation. It's a coping mechanism—a punitive, unpleasant, potentially dangerous one—but it works. It helps me cope with strong emotions that I don't know how to deal with. Don't tell me I'm sick, don't tell me to stop. Don't try to make me feel guilty, that how I feel already. Listen to me, support me, help me.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Cutting redefines the body's boundaries, differentiating self from others. Blood flowing from the wound proves there is life inside the body instead of nothingness. On a subconscious level, according to psychoanalytic theory, stimulation of the skin through self-mutilation helps reintegrate the splintered sense of self by reactivating the body ego—perhaps by re-creating a tactile experience that, at least to cutters, is pleasurable and soothing. This fracturing of the sense of self is not the result of minor or accidental insults. "At some point every baby is going to roll off of the changing table, and it's met with great alarm and she gets scooped up and taken care of," says Scott Lines. "What we're talking about with cutters are impingements that happen so frequently that they become not only expected but the child believes that they are brought on by herself." Children in this situation begin to blame themselves for being abused or mistreated. Lines thinks it is no accident that the skin is the cutter's site of attack. He also wonders if it is no coincidence that the arms are the most common target, perhaps a symbolic attack on the mother's arms that did not adequately hold the child and keep her safe.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Sexual abuse can shatter a child's capacity for trust and intimacy. Abused children literally have no frame of reference for how to develop healthy relationships. How can anyone be trusted if the person who is supposed to love and protect you is hurting you? And if your caretaker doesn't protect you, how can you ever learn to keep yourself safe? At the same time, abused children internalize a sense of utter powerlessness and helplessness. They have no rights, no boundaries, no privacy, no dignity, and no control over their bodies, their desires, their feelings. The only way to survive an ongoing state of helpless victimization is to achieve some illusion of power and control. Ironically, blaming themselves for the abuse allows them to feel a measure of control. However painful, it is preferable to the overwhelming terror of believing they are completely at the mercy of an unpredictable force.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“The study of self-injury makes clear that the mind and body are inextricably linked, each feedings from the other's nourishment or starving from the other's neglect. The body is, indeed, the temple of the soul. Cutters are living proof that when the body is ravaged, the soul cries out. And when the soul is trampled upon, the body bleeds.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“It is as if time stops at the moment of trauma," Judith Lewis Herman asserts. The child becomes "fixated," or developmentally arrested at the age at which the trauma occurred, and even as an adult is stuck in a time warp of childlike helplessness. She continues to process emotions with a child's intensity and mobilizes only those defenses that were available to her at the time of the trauma. Rather than blame others for her problems, she views her pain through the magical thinking of childhood, convinced that she is responsible not only for what happened to her as a kid but all the subsequent problems that have befallen her. "Repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of the personality already formed, but repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality," writes Herman in her 1992 book "Trauma and Recovery".”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“The mind that employed depersonalization to escape pain is now in danger of disintegrating. "It's really a life-threatening situation to have that experience," says San Francisco psychologist Michael Wagner. "It's equivalent to feeling that you are no longer going to exist." Ironically, cutting provides a sense of reintegration, like a jolt of reality to the vanishing self. The sensation of pain and the sight of blood break through the deadening depersonalization and prove that the cutter is alive, human, whole.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“A higher form of communication, verbal language, is also unavailable or inadequate to describe the intensity of a cutter's inner state. As kids, by and large, self-injurers were not allowed to have or express their own feelings—especially anger. Instead they were forced to carry the feelings of their parents and grew up feeling responsible for their parents' anger, frustration, and unhappiness. They were expected to fill their parents' need for love and gratification, rather than the parents satisfying their children's needs. When a child's feelings and perceptions are actively denied or minimized by her parents, the child's ability to develop a language of feelings is stunted, and she is left with a mute hopelessness about the possibility of communicating in a way that will help her to get critical needs met. Words then seem to take on terrifying proportions; they are both too powerful and completely useless. Emotions are so damned up that sadness seems annihilating, rage often feels murderous.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Adolescence is a stressful passage for even the most well-adjusted teenagers. It is the stage at which we must come to terms with our sexual bodies and all the anxieties and responsibilities of becoming an adult. This task is especially difficult for children who have been sexually abused, who feel ashamed and disgusted by their bodies and fear that becoming more sexually desirable will only put them at greater risk of victimization.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Dissociation, while useful in surviving the actual traumatic experience, exacts a high psychological price when it becomes a chronic, automatic response to even minor stressors reminiscent of past trauma, to painful or forbidden emotions like anger, even to intimacy itself. While these "out of body" flights were once comforting and adaptive, chronically dissociative people grow to feel inhuman, like robots. Reality cannot be trusted. At any moment the afflicted might go totally blank and not remember what was said or done. They may observe their actions without any sense of control over what they are doing as if watching a movie. Or they may face the sanity-threatening experience of feeling their mind slip into freefall, shattering into bits and pieces.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“The messages implicit in sexual abuse are as psychologically assaultive as the act itself. Abused children are taught at a very young age that they exist only to give pleasure to others. They are not recognized as beings in their own right, but simply as a tool of some other more powerful person's needs. So they shut down their own emotions, needs, and desires. They bury their feelings so deeply that to even imagine letting them out feels completely overwhelming, as if they would drown in their tears or erupt in anger so savage they would kill.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“No one should have to live in secret shame. The burning desire of every self-injuring person I've ever spoken with is simply to be seen as human and not as a freak or an attention seeker—despite their scars, despite the fact that, yes, cutting is self-inflicted. As we begin to see that people who self-harm can be found in nearly every neighborhood, school, college, house of worship, or school group, we must become better informed so that we can better understand their language of pain and help them find a way out of their suffering. The first step, however, takes no special training or sophisticated understanding of psychology or neurochemistry. It simply takes the effort to listen with compassion.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Clearly not all abused children become cutters. Why do some people need to hurt themselves in order to cope with the pain and confusion of childhood trauma? One major factor appears to be how the experience is handled within the family. When the abuse is denied, and the family lacks empathy for the child's suffering, it is much more difficult for the child to give appropriate meaning to the experience. "To the extent parents can acknowledge and take responsibility for what took place, kids have an easier go of integrating the experience," says Michael Wagner.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Biologists marvel at the elegant efficiency with which the brain stores fear-laden memories, which provide a superb defense system against external attacks and an amazingly fast and effective system for physical self-preservation. But they warn that these same kind of powerful memories turn out to be extremely difficult for the brain to process when life is no longer in danger and the person desperately needs to extinguish the memory and break the cycle. The hippocampus, a small part of the brain that would ordinarily help integrate information, has a very difficult time processing the fear-imprinted memories because of the high degree of physiological stress those memories trigger. People suffering from PTSD, including some cutters, are in a sense trapped—hardwired. Their terror-bound memories can return or be reactivated by other stimuli, but they are never able to effectively process the original emotional memory for reasons that are physiological. When the door opens with a loud bang, to continue the analogy, what is replayed in their minds is a startingly real experience of a ferocious tiger charging at them.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Among self-injurers, at the root of dissociation and behind all of the symptoms of traumatic stress, from numbness to loss of control, is a range of painful childhood experiences, including emotional deprivation, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and childhood loss. Because the combination of pain, shame, and grief from these early experiences often remains unresolved, feelings of dread and emptiness can build up and quickly grow to unbearable proportions.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“We are shaped, in a way, by our earliest primitive memories and sensations that come through the skin. Later in life, the skin becomes not only the receptor of rich and constant sensory input, it also serves as a kind of organ of communication through which we both experience and express tenderness and pleasure and, alternatively, hurtfulness and pain. And in a thousand different societies—ancient and modern, technological and preliterate—the skin has been manipulated, decorated, scarred, revealed, hidden, tattooed, cut, and branded to communicate standing, prestige, status as a warrior or wife or slave, and attainment of adulthood. Skin communicates. Skin signals. Skin tells a story.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“After any highly stressful event, such as an automobile accident, it is normal for memories, emotions, and sensations associated with the trauma to flood involuntarily into consciousness. In most cases, people replay these memories over and over again, and this "replay" mechanism actually helps defuse their emotional content and allows people to put the experience behind them. This kind of mental processing is healthy and does not lead to long-term problems. But events that are extremely traumatic—being caught in a hurricane, attacked in a war, being the victim of an assault or a rape, or having suffered severe abuse as a child—are not effectively processed by some people. When images or memories of the event return, they are not able to think about them analytically or dispassionately, but instead they reexperience the terror all over again. These intrusive thoughts do not fade with time but are persistent, and each time they occur they are newly traumatizing. Such people are haunted by nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of anxiety, fear, and foreboding that make them experience the trauma not as a painful event of the past but as a real, in-the-present, on-going threat. As a result, their entire stress-response system, in body and mind, becomes stuck in a state of constant alert, but the state tends to be unstable. Their emotions tend to swing from one extreme to its opposite. To cope with such emotional overload, these people organize their lives around avoiding any reminder of the trauma and the feelings it invokes. It is ultimately a futile struggle, however—like fighting an invisible enemy. The battle for control sets off a vicious cycle of intrusive thoughts that produce fear and anxiety followed by desperate attempts to achieve psychological numbing to reduce the anxiety. They progressively lose the ability to control or modulate their physiological response to any kind of stressor, and stimuli completely unrelated to the trauma may trigger intrusive memories. Lit up like a pinball machine, all their internal bells and whistles blaring, they cannot articulate how they feel because they cannot decipher the messages that their nervous system is sending them. Eventually, just having a feeling, any feeling, can seem enormously threatening.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“It's horrifying for kids to be able to see and feel more than the people who are caring for them," his social worker explains. "They can't accept the lies. It makes them feel crazy because they literally have to invalidate their own perceptions.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Another reason incest is so "murderous" to the soul is because it is like a form of psychological captivity from which there is no escape. An abused child lives in a perpetual state of fear but can neither fight nor flee an incestuous parent. "There is no stranger to run from, no home to run to," writes therapist Susan Forward in her 1988 book "Betrayal of Innocence." "The child cannot feel safe in his or her own bed. The victim must learn to live with incest; it flavors the child's entire world." The only recourse is psychic defenses—denial, self-blame, dissociation, repression—to blunt the overwhelming horror of the experience and feel some sense of control. This can lead to a fragmenting of the psyche into an outer "impostor" self, a sometimes quite successful front presented to the public, and a secretive, shame-filled inner self compulsively reenacting the trauma in a futile attempt to master it.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“It is not just the acts of intrusion and violence that are so damaging to victims of childhood sexual abuse, but the whole dysfunctional family system that allows such abuse to occur—and which often remains dysfunctional and invalidating long after any sexual contact has ceased. In fact, incest survivors may feel even more betrayed by the nonabusing yet nonprotective parent Susan Forward calls the "silent partner"—who either tacitly encourages the abuse or fails to recognize and stop it. Even if the silent partner had no conscious or unconscious involvement in the abuse, her guilt for not knowing or not protecting the child may cause her to deny or minimize what has occurred.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Intimate relationships after sexual abuse require a level of vulnerability that is hard to tolerate. Often unable to recall what happened to them due to dissociation, abuse victims instead respond to closeness with panic, rage, and anxiety, and may use self-destructive behavior to create distance and a sense of protection. Cutting and eating disorders may both be attempts to make the body less sexually desirable in order to avoid intimacy. Anger is often directed at the body parts associated with gender and sexuality.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Sexual abuse is the most obvious, and perhaps the most devastating, attack on body image. The body is never wholly one's own again. In fact, the victim's own body is used as a weapon against her. It is controlled by others and can be made to respond—the ultimate betrayal—against it's owner's will. Its boundaries are violated and intruded upon, creating a lingering confusion between inner and outer. The out-of-body experience of dissociation, initially a form of self-protection that may become a chronic response to fear and anxiety reminiscent of the trauma, adds to the body's sense of impermanence and unreality. An abused child may come to feel totally divorced from her physical self.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Comfort and consistent tactile experiences help the baby develop a sense of its body as a safe and consistent boundary. If the baby is not held and comforted, or is frequently dropped, or handled roughly, or neglected or abused—painful, disruptive experiences British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called impingements—the child will not grow to feel like a whole entity, sheltered and contained by her skin. The failure to master this first important developmental task makes it difficult to differentiate between self and others, inner and outer, thought and action, fantasy and reality. Later, the child or adult may use cutting to work out these conflicts in a concrete, literal way on the body, reverting back to the most primitive means of psychic organization the knows to test her own reality.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Could a child in the comfort of her own home experience anything as overwhelming as the terror and stress of a soldier in combat? In fact, children who are chronically physically or sexually abused must endure precisely the kind of protracted and inescapable fear, unpredictability, and helplessness that results in posttraumatic stress disorder. What makes an experience traumatic, says van der Kolk, is not its objective reality but the subjective meaning the victim attaches to it. In general, the more terrified a victim feels and the more powerless she is over her fate, the more likely she is to develop PTSD. Factors that may compound the sense of trauma include the relationship between victim and perpetrator, feelings of shame or guilt over actions the victim did or did not take, lack of support after the trauma or blaming or rejecting the victim, and any symbolic or psychosexual interpretation overlaid onto the experience. All of these are factors that come into play in childhood abuse. In some ways, an abused child faces terror and uncertainty far worse than anything a soldier experiences on the field of battle. She lives in a world of continual and unpredictable danger and may, with good reason, fear for her life. Yet she has no gun to protect her, no squad to back her up, no training for her combat role. She is completely alone, completely powerless, completely at the mercy of her parents' will. She cannot fight back, cannot escape. She is trapped. Like Pavlov's dogs, she endures a punishment inescapable. Her experience may actually be more akin to that of a prisoner of war, but it is even more psychologically pernicious than that. Her captors are her own parents, the people who are supposed to love and nurture her, teach her right from wrong, and protect her from harm.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Some incest survivors will do anything to maintain a connection, however false or feeble, with the offending parent. Pain and self-punishment, comforting in its familiarity, maintains the psychic relationship. Through cutting they can re-create the childhood drama but also control its outcome, meting out pain in safe, measured, manageable doses. They can play the parts of both abuser and victim, then assume the role of loving, protective caretaker—bandaging their wounds and watching them heal. They can take comfort in knowing that no one can hurt them as much as they can hurt themselves. Even if the only outward concern they receive is from therapists and emergency room doctors, it is proof that someone cares—perhaps the only proof they have.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“The physiological and psychological dysregulation caused by trauma has a lot to do with how traumatic memories are stored and processed in the brain. Heightened emotional arousal and dissociation at the time of trauma cause memory to fragment, with some or all of the experience stored outside conscious awareness. Unlike normal memories, which compose a cohesive, dispassionate verbal narrative, traumatic memories usually are recalled as vivid momentary sensations—smells, sounds, sudden waves of intense fear—with all their original emotional intensity. Despite the continual intrusion of elements of the trauma into consciousness through nightmares and flashbacks, it is not unusual for traumatized people to be unaware of what happened to them.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“Since children are totally dependent on their parents for their very survival, they cannot bear to believe that their parents are malevolent. Instead, they internalize their parents' "badness" as part of themselves. Many abusive parents directly tell their kids they are bad and responsible for the abuse they receive. Even if they don't children can't help but think "If my own parents hurt me, I must be unloveable." If they can maintain the illusion that their parents are good and loving and safe, then hope remains alive that one day they will be loved and cared for in the way they so desperately desire.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“The sheer intensity of a child's feelings means they cannot be repressed without severe consequences. The thicker the prison wall grow, says Miller, the more future emotional development is impeded. When that wall is especially impenetrable, and the pain behind it is overwhelming, cutting is the strategy some use to try to break through and achieve some sense of control.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain