Girl in a Box
© Girl in a Box 2004
words and art...
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Girl in a Box |
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New pages in my Altered Books
Demands/Death of Me
A Way Out...Disappear
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Progress
I spent the beginning of the year at R's. Came home this morning to get my stuff done before the work week starts once again. I stopped by the thrift store and bought a really cool choker necklace and a promo Bob Dylan CD called Love Sick from Victoria Secret. Odd mix, Dylan and Victoria's Secret isn't it? Did I mention I got a ticket on New Years Eve? Did I mention that I don't really care? I was due, I was speeding and had been speeding for years, just not caught. Time to pay the piper. when I got to work I kept asking everybody at work if they knew there was a race on the way to work this morning and that I lost. Net is on her way over, I can't wait till she opens her Christmas gift I bought her. It's a beautiful polished marble mortar and pestle. I think she will love it. We are going to have a girly night and start watching the last season of Sex and the City. This weekend I admitted to R something that I had never told anybody.
Not even you. Nobody. It was something that I had done that I
thought was really cruel and evil that I did. I cried when I told
him, he said he was expecting worse. He came over and put his arms
around my neck from behind. It was the worst and best moment
of the weekend. My other part of the weekend that I enjoyed was
when I was going to kick an empty box down R's basement stairs and R
forbad me to do so. I did anyway right in front of his face. Then
I ran away and he chased me! sliding in socks on the wood floor.
Net is on her way over, I can't wait till she opens her Christmas gift I bought her. It's a beautiful polished marble mortar and pestle. I think she will love it. We are going to have a girly night and start watching the last season of Sex and the City.
Some excerpts that I could highly relate with that I highlighted in my book A Bright Red Scream by Marilee Strong "When she cuts or burns herself it is like she is outside her body watching herself- What she calls "stepping out." It was a form of psychological escape she had been utilizing since the age of nine or ten, when in response to her mother's harangues "I would give myself what I describe as a push and I'd be standing outside myself watching the whole scene with rather bemused detachment." "Sometimes I self-injure to make myself fell something because I'm just totally numb. Other times I cut to make myself numb because I can't deal with what I'm feeling." "and with the kilt pin from her Catholic school uniform carved a single word into the delicate skin of her forearm. In a few moments, the letters D-I-E stood out in bright red, accented by drops of blood." "Her father was remote and introverted, always taking a backseat to her mother. "I have no access to what he might really think of me," she says wistfully. "It is like we are strangers who are careful around each other." "She felt empty inside, like a black hole was consuming her, cell by cell. "when I'm silent and still I can feel that hole, it feels like my chest will cave in." "I knew that it would always be inside me- this empty sadness that would never go away, that could never be explained." "The most commonly described themselves asa feeling empty inside, unable to express emotions in words, afraid of getting close to anyone, and wanting to desperately stop their emotional pain." "Studying six months of admissions, they defined the typical cutter as a young highly intelligent woman who is prone to alcohol and drug abuse and has great difficulty in relationships. They found that most of these women had suffered painful childhoods, with cold, rejecting mothers and distant hypercritical fathers." "The mother's were most often cold, punitive, and judgmental. Cutting for these patients, they wrote, was a "self-prescribed treatment." releasing tension, ending a painful state of feeling dead or unreal, and expelling the feelings of badness they had internalized from their painful upbringing." "I stood in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and I didn't recognize myself." She says, recalling that fateful day. "It was my face looking back at me in the mirror, but my soul wasn't there. It was just a body to me, and I didn't feel part of it anymore. I felt I had lost control of my thoughts, my emotions, and my actions." "Feeling profoundly alienated from her own body seen in the mirror, the sense of her mind or soul being split apart from her physical self. Psychologists call this sense of an internal split dissociation." Dissociation in its more serious forms is a psychological defense mechanism that keeps traumatic memories, sensations, and feelings out of conscious awareness. It is a key defense used by abused children. In the face of overwhelming danger from which there is no physical escape, it is an ingenious bit of mental gymnastics- in the words of therapist Eliana Gil "A life saving, pain sparing survival strategy." Mind and body separate. Pain is anesthetized. The individual feels depersonalized: numb, unreal, outside oneself, a dispassionate observer rather than an anguished participant. " "Among self-injurers, at the root of dissociation and behind all 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." "The children's sense of guilt, abandonment, isolation and
unlovablity was stunning." "Cutting bouts are generally precipitated by an experience- real or perceived- of loss or abandonment. Self-injurers are acutely sensitive to abandonment. Because they never really properly attached to and then separated from their early caretakers, they live in a perpetual state of separation anxiety so unbearable it feels annihilating. Their sense of themselves and the ability to control their lives has been dictated so much by external events that they believe that their very existence depends on how others perceive them. Alone, as Lindsay so heartbreakingly put it, they see nothing in the mirror. Cutting is really a remarkable, ingenious solution to the problem of "not existing." It provides concrete, irrefutable proof that one is alive." "The fact that cutting and eating disorders often coexist should not surprise us, as the two behaviors share many of the same roots and serve many of the same functions. Each uses the body to work out psychological conflicts, to obtain relief from overwhelming feelings of tension, anger, loneliness, traumatic symptoms as dissociation, flashbacks and hyperarousal. Both behaviors are impulsive, secretive, ritualistic, and ridden with shame and guilt. And they each involve attacks on the body, a disturbance in body image, and an attempt to control body boundaries." "one reason cutting and eating disorders are such difficult behaviors to relinquish is because they are so effective at reducing tension that they become self-reinforcing."
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