Thought #10: I Love Supportive “Friends”
Thought: I’m getting sick so I’ll write a thought instead of the post I was going to. I randomly remembered yesterday something my some of my friends would do in the beginning months of my self harming. I remember sitting in my friend’s bedroom and she had seen fresh cuts. She was angry so she grabbed body spray from her dresser and sprayed it onto my cuts. As the perfumed spray hit my wounds it burned. I said “ow” and pulled my arm close to me. She angrily said, “Good! You deserve it.” I think this happened a few more times after. Was I supposed to learn something from this? All I learned was that my friends didn’t understand, that they didn’t care (or cared in the wrong way), and all that just made me feel worse. I’ve never been one to be negatively motivated.
Posted on April 16, 2012, in Thoughts and tagged body spray, cutting, friend, mean, motivation, pain, self harm, self injury, support, wound. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
I think that people don’t always know how to handle such an issue. I think that sometimes people expect that it’s something easy to stop. It isn’t. It’s also something that is typically done while in a highly disregulated place or an empty place (for me anyway). It is an attempt to change the way I feel when I feel like I have no control. I actually tend to scratch because I can use any object available – keys, scissors, fingernails, etc. At one point, I had a circle like mark on my wrist from two separate instances of self injury and it came up with my sister. I don’t think she knew how to approach it.
To a certain extent I take into consideration that we were 13 years old but you are right when you say that people think it will be easy to stop something. My elementary school had a brief epidemic of all the grade 8 girls cutting. I was the one that kept with it when they all stopped so it was confusing for them as to why I couldn’t when they could.
I’ve oddly enough been very picky what I use to self harm and that’s gotten to be more true as I’ve gotten older. I don’t talk about my self harm specifically with anyone in my family. My parents tried when I was younger but I wouldn’t respond. I don’t even really know how to approach it because I understand. I don’t want to appear to be condoning it.
It’s one of the worse reaction I’ve ever heard of – if not the worst.
I perfectly know that self harm is a difficult topic to handle, and that seeing something like fresh cuts on someone you care of may be overwhelmingly frightening, but is screaming, insulting, making fun of, ..making wounds worse on purpose (! that’s sadly unbelievable) something that would actually work on someone who’s suffering the hell inside himself? What the f is people thinking? The most logical thing to do at this point is doubting of their claimed care and affection. (..and what’s hurting the worst, wheather our internal and external wounds, their unhelpful reactions or the evidence of their uncaring feelings, nobody knows..)
I can’t believe that. I go out of my way to make sure my depressed friends are understood (the only perk of having been there?). That “friend” needs to go- well, I have a lot of comments, none printable :p