Self Harm in the Abstract
living and escaping a life of self punishment
When I was a teenager I used to cut myself. It started with a safety pin in the shower a few days after I started Zoloft and then expanded into fingernails, erasers, and Men’s Gillette ProGlide razors over a five year period. When I was hospitalized at seventeen, they placed me in a DBT focused post hospitalization program made specifically to treat self harm and disordered eating. The basis of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is to replace harmful coping mechanisms with healthy ones and teach patients how to better communicate and self sooth. Despite all my criticisms of therapy and psychiatry, this was one of the best things to ever happen to me.
In the past ten or so years, the word “cope” has gotten a bad reputation online. “Cope and seethe” originated on 4Chan as a dismissive insult against people who were rage-posting in comment sections and forums. It has since become a meme amongst crypto-bros and redpill-ers as a common reply to anyone that over-passionately disagrees with them. I remember casually mentioning “coping mechanisms” to a crypto day trader a few years ago and watching him absolutely lose his mind over the simple mention of the word.
Much to the dismay of the 4Chan and crypto communities, most of us are coping all the time. Some project inward; others project outward. Some are aware of their coping mechanisms; most are operating from their subconscious mind. As the Buddhists say, “life is suffering,” and unless you’re facing that suffering head on, you’re using some strategy to cope with it.
In the world of psychology, therapists and psychiatrists are typically only trained to treat certain, life threatening coping mechanisms: addiction, self harm, disordered eating, etc. But what about the abstract ways people punish themselves? What about the people that self destruct by placing themselves in inescapable traps, cyclical abusive relationships, and suffocating levels of pressure? What about the complexes, the narratives, and the illusions people create to keep themselves from becoming more than they already are out of fear or low self esteem or refusal to take responsibility for the ever unfolding trajectory of their lives?
When people started finding out that I cut myself, it was usually met with confusion—"why would you do something like that to yourself,” “what does it do for you,” and “what do you get out of it?”—or the common series of assumptions—"you don’t need to be doing that; you’re just being dramatic,” “you must be desperate for attention,” and “if you’re trying to kill yourself, you’re cutting in the wrong direction.” When I was cutting, I wasn’t trying to kill myself. Most people that look like they’re trying to kill themselves—addicts, anorexics, adrenaline junkies—aren’t trying to kill themselves; they’re trying to live. We’re all trying to live, and we think we’re more likely to survive if we avoid the things that scare us because we’re worried they might scare us to death. In reality, the scary things, the things we think we’re coping with, the suffering we fear might break us, are the very things that free us.
Exile: Living a Life of Self Punishment
Since I stopped cutting, I’ve observed myself and almost everyone around me continue to self harm in all kinds of ways. I’ve watched grown women with victim complexes jump from abusive relationship to abusive relationship. I’ve watched men with low self esteem make millions of dollars just to spend it all on useless objects. I’ve watched my friends sell their bodies for beer money and stay in housing situations that any professional would certify as traumatizing.
I myself transferred from cutting to sexual deviancy. Both produced the same feeling within me: pain, fear, and eventually dissociation. I’ve never done heroin, but I imagine shooting up feels similarly. There is the pain of the injection, the fear it might kill you, and then the high, the release of all your worries, doubts, and responsibilities. I hear the same pattern amongst workaholics and people with depression and OCD and women who keep going back to their abusers.
I realize what I’m saying may be misunderstood as “victim blaming.” To be clear, I don’t believe anyone deserves to be subjected to the destructive and violent reactions of others, but when we are engaged in a pattern, it is almost never coincidental. People who keep returning to abusive relationships, substances, false identities, self diagnoses, and delusions—new or old, consciously or unconsciously—are not victims of those relationships as much as they are victims of their own subconscious minds. The only way someone living within a cycle like this can liberate themselves is to be brutally honest, to change what they can, and to take responsibility for their own participation.
I don’t say this to blame people for their afflictions but to empower us all to overcome them. Maybe the most dangerous delusion of all is that we are powerless, heteronomous, subservient creatures that life happens to rather than is coming from. Many seem to have forgotten that we are catalysts of life, that without action and enough time our bodies would simply turn off and dissolve. And so, when we act, perform, build, and create whatever comes of it is the truth of our lives.
The lives we create in adulthood often become a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. My decision to make myself bleed, dissociate through sex, stick around in codependent relationships, and eventually self isolate were all a mirror to my own internal self loathing. I kept waiting for my life to change, for someone to save me, for something to happen that would change my self concept, but what I didn’t understand was that everything that happened to me was unfolding from that identity. If I wanted a new life, I had to rewrite myself; I had to create a new character. I had to stop identifying with the victim and make myself into a hero.
The Scariest Things in Life Are Free
When I was climbing my way out of chronic depression, I used to say, “I think I’m afraid of success.” This seemed ridiculous and counter intuitive, but it was the truth. At first I considered I might be misunderstanding this feeling for something more textbook, like “fear of failure” or “fear of rejection,” but I didn’t struggle to create or share. I struggled to sustain. I couldn’t labor with enough consistency to achieve any significant progress; I thought my work would simply speak for itself and something magical would happen.
The more I stared at this “fear of success” the more it revealed itself to me as a “fear of responsibility.” When my self esteem was low, responsibility, accountability, and commitment felt overwhelming. They felt like recipes for disappointment because I did not see myself as someone capable of persevering. If I were to succeed at achieving my desires, I would be responsible for sustaining that success. What I wanted was huge. I was and still am viciously ambitious, and the idea of having to die and be reborn into someone who could handle receiving it all was terrifying, but not as terrifying as the idea of not achieving it.
This mentality seems to be the defining difference between people who overcome and those who remain stuck: the willingness to take ownership over their life. Whether it’s for their love, their health, their family, their career, or their mistakes and shortcomings, those who accept responsibility are those who succeed. And the mechanisms we use to avoid looking at that fear are the exact kind of “coping” the crypto bros and redpill-ers are repelled by.
That’s not to say we don’t need coping mechanisms; the skills I learned in DBT are actually the very reason I’m able to look at my life, my fears, and my behaviors with honesty and objectivity. Without the ability to cope with harsh truths, I imagine I would have continued to self harm (in the myriad of ways it manifests) or spent my life anxiously avoiding the truth as a means of survival. Either way, I would have been chasing my own tail.
We need to self sooth to see past our emotions and into the truth, but sometimes we cope to the point of shutting our eyes on the very truths that were made to set us free. We meditate to achieve numbness rather than fullness. We distract ourselves until we can’t bring our eyes to look up at the state of our lives. We build a character and a story around what we’ve experienced that keeps us trapped in perpetual victimhood, a forbidden tower of our own making. We cope to avoid rather than to see beyond our projections and reactions, and it becomes a cosmic, psychological cage that only we hold the keys to.
The scariest things in life are not violence, manipulation, or public denigration. They are the things we do to harm ourselves without even realizing. They are the insidious blind spots in our behavior and psychology that keep us in a constant, inescapable loop. They are the parts of ourselves that we cannot see without careful examination and yet gradually erode our potential and development. What makes them so scary is that they can contort. What we think is a feature can be a flaw. A comfort can be a trap. A support can be a mirage, and the only way to break the spell is to diligently inspect for them, like checking the body for ticks, without fear or disgust but necessity because you know to remain stuck would be it’s own kind of death.