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The sight of my own blood running down my arm produces a near-orgasmic sensation in me, and the pain, which is actually relatively minor, distracts me from thinking about whatever emotional hell has provoked the self-injury. I am free from emotion other than exhilaration as I wait for the bleeding to stop and while I bandage myself up as needed. That exhilaration lasts perhaps 10 or 20 minutes before I am overcome with shame, self-hatred, and regret. In other words, it's not worth it. But in the crush of pain before the self-injury, it's difficult to convince myself of the truth of that. It is this viscious circle that in part causes the need for increasingly more severe wounds over time.

In early 1999, I finally began to realize that my self-injury was getting out of control. I was hurting myself 4 or 5 times a week, and stitches were called for quite a few of those times. After several stints in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital, I contacted S.A.F.E. Alternativestm, a 30-day program in suburban Chicago which specializes in treating self-injurers, and was accepted into the program within weeks. It's a tough-as-nails program (I've heard it described as "mental-health boot camp") which takes an enormous amount of energy to fully participate in and complete. It entails voluminous writing, endless numbers of group therapy sessions, and requires a measure of self-control and self-scrutiny most therapists would find daunting. In late May of this year, at the end of my 30 days there, I felt confident that I would never injure again, that the alternatives to it I had come up with would work for me, that I had it all under control. (If you have or think you may have a problem with self-injury, you can contact S.A.F.E. Alternativestm at 1-800-DON'T-CUT.)

At first I really did seem to have it under control, but as I got reacclimated to life without rigid structure, things looked less bright. I felt, and feel, strong urges to injure myself when things in my life are particularly difficult, and resisting those urges has been unspeakably hard, and not always successful. Recently I cut myself and had 44 stitches in my arm, and I felt an overpowering sense of failure and anger with myself for being unable to stay safe. However, as I've thought more about it, I realize that I have not failed, but only relapsed, and that doesn't necessarily mean I have to fall back into my old ways. I can't be perfect, and as long as I continue to work on my issues and what's difficult for me, I can accept (and even expect) to stumble once in a while. My goal is a life without self-injury, and I think that is a perfectly reasonable goal for me, but perhaps not immediately. I think I can learn to live with that.

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