Cutting is my most destructive addiction. I started myself when I was twelve – after my first suicide attempt. It wasn’t a behavior. In fact, self-injuring was my coping mechanism for life. It’s what kept me from killing myself. Granted it wasn’t a constructive or healthy method, but it worked. Until December 2005 I hadn’t cut since high school.

I’m not quite certain what caused me to start doing it again in the first place. There are several possibilities: maybe it was the need to release pent-up emotions (rage, , , hatred, , ); maybe I wanted to punish myself; maybe I felt I deserved it; maybe it helped me regain control; maybe it distracted me from all the emotional pain; maybe I used my blood as a substitute for tears. It was probably a combination of all those things.

Regardless of why I did it, the need consumed me until it drowned out everything else and all I could think of was seeing my blood running down a drain, filling a pickle jar, or soaking a towel. It was so hypnotic and relaxing and beautiful.

I don’t really know when it became a need or why I continue despite my better judgment. Maybe I needed permanent physical scars to remind me of the emotional ones. Maybe I wanted someone to see the cuts, bruises, or needle holes and see past my everything-is-just-fine façade. Maybe I secretly hoped that my efforts to cover up my behavior would fail; a passive-aggressive cry for help. Maybe I wanted someone to care enough to intervene and force me to tell the truth about how I felt.

I had always known I was a mess, but I never knew why or how to fix it. I felt intrinsically bad and unlovable. I never knew why I hated myself the way that I did; I just knew that it felt right.

My childhood made me a master at hiding things and guarding secrets. I became a great pretender. No one knew the turmoil or shame deep within that was eating me alive. When I did express how I felt (through black clothes, lots of eyeliner, black lipstick and fingernail polish, morbid poetry, loud , atheism, etc) it was attributed to normal teenage angst – a phase to be grown out of and nothing more.

I never wanted to be one of those people who impute everything negative on their childhood. I had been conditioned to believe everyone has a bad childhood and only the weak let it get to them. The past is over and cannot be changed. We are supposed to survive it, overcome it, and abandon it (never think or talk about it again). I didn’t want to deviate from the norm and challenge my programming. I tried my best to appear normal on the outside because I always felt so different from everyone else on the inside. I dismissed the bad almost to the point of dissociation and bottled up the consequential emotions.

I wasn’t lucky enough to repress the memories; I knew what had transpired during my childhood and adolescence. Sometime after the severe started I completely isolated myself until I became voiceless and invisible – a ghost of the person I could have been. For some elusive reason I didn’t make the connection that the effect was actually linked to the cause. it took almost twenty-three years for that fact to dawn on me.

I have come to understand that the things you hear, experience, and feel as a child, (and the things you don’t), define your self-image and self-worth so completely that it seems nothing short of a do-over could supersede it. I was acting out my conditioning; repeatedly, automatically, obediently and unquestionably. I want to change the programming and recondition myself, but I don’t know how. I don’t even know where to begin.

In , I’ve learned that you can’t go forward if you don’t go back first. The reasoning behind it is that one must know the source of the problem before it can be fixed. I believe there is something to that because I’ve tried to repair myself for years without making that connection and exploring the past; it has gotten me absolutely nowhere – except a short-term stay at a psychiatric hospital.

Change of circumstance alone hasn’t made me see that I am no longer the powerless little girl I was when the world was bigger and meaner and filled with people who got pleasure from hurting me. For many years I’ve been the emotional equivalent of a five-year old tugging on everyone’s shirt and asking them, “Do you me? I don’t myself, but if you me then maybe I deserve it. Am I worth anything? I’m pretty sure I’m not, but if you tell me I am, then maybe I am.” Then ignoring their praise and reassurances because I know the “truth” already.

Geez, no wonder I’m depressed so often.

The last few weeks I began to realize that one of my core beliefs is that I am inherently bad and unlovable, worthless, and undeserving of happiness. I hid the “real” me, no matter the cost, because I “knew” I would be utterly alone if anyone found out the “truth.” I detached from my true self so effectively, that I didn’t know the vastness of my self-loathing and self-hatred and how much it had defined me and my entire life; I had been oblivious to it. I just knew I felt “bad” about myself.

How do you re-parent yourself and re-record the voice in your head?How do you stop assigning guilt to yourself for things you already intellectually know weren’t your fault, but nonetheless, still FEEL like they are?

You can reason yourself into a myriad of new ideas on an intellectual plane, but how do you reverse how you feel about yourself?

How you feel is largely based on what you believe, and belief is much more about faith than knowledge, you can’t simply will yourself into new beliefs the way you can will yourself into a change of mind. I have tried so hard to will myself into being “cured” and it just doesn’t .

I can tell myself “don’t hate yourself anymore, don’t blame yourself anymore, don’t believe those lies anymore. The things that people did to you was evil, but you aren’t evil. It wasn’t your fault…” until I’m blue in the face, but saying those things alone won’t be able to make me believe them.If my conditioning is ever going to be altered, it’s going to take a lot of hard work. I learned that I have the power to take my life back, overcome my programming, and become the person I want to be, but I can’t do it all by myself. In addition to all this therapy I need a support system – a friend who will not judge me and that I can . How do I ask for help from people who actually know me?

I searched over and over for someone to rescue me, to love me, and to make me feel like I was worth something, but when I found someone I soon turned my back and pushed them away because I didn’t really believe I deserved to be happy and that no one could possibly love me if they knew the “real” me.

I have finally come to realize that the only person that can rescue me is me. No one can do this work for me. No one can take the pain away. No one can make me love myself. No one can make me stop hurting myself. No one can change my past. No one controls my future, except me. I have to accept these facts before I can make any real and lasting changes in my life.

On this day..