Cutting - Page 3

The First Cut Isn't the Deepest

Lucy made her first cut in seventh grade. "There was an accelerated math program I wanted to get into, but despite all my studying, I missed getting in by one point," she recalls. "I was so frustrated, I wanted to kick or punch something, hurl the TV through the window. Instead, I just thought how stupid I'd look if my mom heard me."

Somehow, Lucy ended up in her backyard tree house. "I was really agitated. I pried a nail loose and began running it over my forearm," she recounts. "As soon as the blood came, I calmed down and watched it. I immediately felt centered." Lucy's first cutting experience is typical. "Ninety percent of the self-mutilators I've spoken with just stumbled upon it during a moment of unbearable emotion and -- wow! -- they noticed a lot of tension went away," says Favazza. Furthermore, cutting is an addictive-like behavior. "Although it's not an addiction that you become physically hooked on, you cut yourself once and feel better, so you do it again. Soon you're doing it more often, even to cope with smaller things," says Conterio.

After that first slice, Lucy cut herself about once every two months. Yet as she got older and her life became more complicated, there were more things to get upset about -- and more reasons to injure herself. "By the time I was 15, I cut every three weeks -- at 17, every 10 days," she says. "If I was only mildly upset, maybe one cut would make me feel better. But when my grandmother died, I took an hour and 40 minutes and did 15 cuts."

Cutters not only increase the frequency of their behavior, they begin etching deeper into their skin to get the same calming effect. As illustrated by Lucy's near-fatal experience, they often don't even realize that their cuts are getting deeper. This mirrors the behavior of an alcoholic. "When a person starts drinking, they may not need much to get tipsy, but as their problem grows, they become desensitized, so they unconsciously drink bigger quantities to get the same effect," explains Conterio.

The Eating Disorder Connection

Although Conterio draws a parallel between alcoholism and self-injury, female cutters actually have more in common with people compelled toward another condition: eating disorders. Indeed, Conterio finds that more than half of the self-mutilators she sees also struggle with some type of eating disorder -- or they've replaced an eating disorder with self-injurious behavior. "Both are high-risk behaviors affecting individuals who don't have much regard for themselves," she says. "In both, an unhealthy person tries to regulate her feelings by harming her body."

Molly Brown, an 18-year-old high school senior from a Chicago suburb, traded her bingeing for cutting when she was 15. "My mom was always critical of me -- my weight in particular," she says. "We'd just had a nasty fight about the C+ I'd gotten in gym, and I headed for the kitchen, but my mom had gone in there to clean. There was no way I was going to raid the cupboards with her watching. But I had all this rage and no food to drown it in."

So Molly headed for her room, where she absentmindedly pulled a knob off her dresser drawer. "There was a screw on the end and I started running it over my calf. At one point, I broke the skin. I suddenly forgot about how bad I felt and just watched the blood. Two weeks later, when I was upset about some school thing, instead of eating, I cut my calf again -- although I switched to a Swiss Army knife," says Molly. "I was hooked."

Like addicts, Molly and other cutters strive to hide their behavior -- including the physical evidence: scars. "I told my mom I got caught in a blackberry bush," says Deborah of the first time her mom saw her scars. And no matter what the weather, Deborah always wears camouflaging long sleeves, Molly wears long skirts, pants, or tights, and Lucy wears both. Although marks left from light cuts fade, deeper ones often don't. After a few years of cutting, a girl's actual scars combined with her inability to stop the addictive behavior can trigger bouts of depression and intense dislike of her appearance. "Some of these individuals become so demoralized, they feel suicidal," says Favazza, whose research found that 40 percent of cutters eventually do try to kill themselves -- not with sharp instruments, ironically, but usually with an overdose of pills.

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