In Crying Scarlet Tears, Sophie Scott recounts her experience of becoming a self harmer who eventually found her way back to emotional health. It is a book that can offer inspiration to others who are struggling with this problem.
How Sophie's Self Harming Habit Started
Sophie Scott could be the girl next door. A slightly overweight teenager, she lived with her normal family in a suburban family home. She had all of the usual pressures of a teenager at school - fitting in with her peer group, loneliness, pressure of examinations, and so on, but nothing that would mark her out as a potential self harmer. The problem is so insidious and secretive that many self harmers succeed in keeping their compulsion hidden from their family.
Sophie tells about how she started injuring herself mildly at first but found that it quickly escalated into cutting and taking paracetamol tablets. She experimented with other ways of harming herself. It was as if she couldn't resist the urge to hurt herself, and she didn't really understand why she needed to do it. She managed to keep it a secret, but occasionally injured herself so badly that she couldn't hide it. However, she was able to hoodwink her family by telling lies.
Self Abuse - A Guilty Secret that Needs to be Told
Sophie tells about her guilt at lying to friends and family. A committed Christian, Sophie also felt that self harming was sinning against God, which made the guilt all the stronger. She struggled with very low self esteem and it was hard to bring herself to tell anybody about the problem. Thankfully she was able to speak to a sympathetic church youth group leader who mentored her - the first steps towards her recovery.
She tells about some disastrous counseling that she received at the hands of a counselor who was untrained in dealing with such cases. This episode sent her back into self harm again and slowed down her progress. However eventually she was able to get counseling from a professionally trained counselor who understood the problem.
Sexual Abuse - A Cause of Self Harming
Sophie's real breakthrough came when she remembered something that she had been suppressing for a long time. It was as if her mind had closed off the memory of sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of a neighbor's child who had been allowed to babysit her.
This led Sophie to understand that by suppressing these memories, she had closed off her feelings too. This is referred to as disassociation - when a person shuts down their feelings because they are afraid to experience the pain. She realized that her self harming was the way that her mind tried to express the pain of those suppressed memories.
Those who suffer from abuse are often told that it is their fault, or threatened to prevent them from telling anybody. This leads them to become very secretive and more likely to disassociate. Sophie recognized that this was one of the reasons that she started to harm herself. This can also slow down the recovery as the self harmer has to learn it really wasn't their fault.
Crying Scarlet Tears - My Jouney Through Self Harm
This book, which would be very useful for self harmers and their families, or for those working with the public, is published by Monarch Books, ISBN 978-1-85424-818-3 (UK) or 978-0-8254-96169-9 (USA).
