Tag: self harm | Page 2 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Tattoo

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on August 23, 2015.

So I got a tattoo.

In April this year, the word I’d written in Sharpie on my wrist for two years was etched into my skin. Became a part of me. It was kind of a spiritual experience.

Here, I’ll explain.

A couple of my friends from CleanPlace, the writer’s forum I joined in 2009, did a lot of growing recently. One of them had been writing “love” on her wrist for four years, inspired by To Write Love On Her Arms and suicide prevention.

Mary's tattoos. Love and Grace. — Mary’s tattoos. Love and Grace.

Another one hated herself, despised her name. She begged God to give her a new name, and she heard a name: Glory.

“I wanted a name I could grow into. I wanted something I could become. Something I could keep becoming and never completely finish being. Something that was bigger, grander, limitless,” she said.

And they marked these revelations on their bodies, etched them permanently. They didn’t want to slip back into those old patterns of self-loathing, they wanted something to mark their healing.

It’s like the ancient practice of standing stones.

In both Jewish and pagan tradition, people used stones to mark significant events, like this:

The stones were supposed to prompt questions.

Ray VanderLaan, who studies Jewish culture and archeology, explains to his Israel tour group: “Anybody who walked by and saw them could say ‘Woah, what happened here?’ And you could say, ‘Let me tell you what God did.'”

And I think that’s what my friends and I wanted. A sort of living memorial.

I used to believe that any body modification would damage my body as a temple of God when I was a fundamentalist. Then I pierced my ears for the first time in May 2014.

I’d read the verses in Leviticus about not tattooing yourself for the dead, but the context was 1) for the dead and 2) that’s Old Testament regulations anyway, which don’t apply under the new covenant.

There’s another practice in the Old Testament that interested me: piercing the ears of a slave who asked to be a bondservant for life. Because they chose it, because it wasn’t forced loyalty.

I don’t want to leave Christianity.

I’m just tired of watching people distort and manipulate something beautiful to me until it’s monstrous. I wanted a living standing stone, I wanted to mark myself as part of this journey for life.

So back to the word: ἄφες.

That one word encapsulates over 30 nuances of meaning in two syllables: “to send forth, yield up, to expire, to let go, let alone, let be. To let go, give up a debt, forgive, to remit, to give up, keep no longer. To permit, allow, not to hinder, to give up a thing to a person.”

Jesus uses this same word for “let the little children come to me” and “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Ἄφετε τὰ παιδία
Permit the children
– – – –
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ
and forgive us our debts
– – – –
Πάτερ ἄφες αὐτοῖς οὐ
Father, forgive them

You know that scene in the Passion of the Christ where they’re nailing his hands, and like, /while/ they’re doing it, he’s saying that? (Not before, not after, but during?) And the soundtrack crescendos in the background?

It sounds like a release… like some sort of freedom within pain… and it seemed very different from repression.

When I first saw the movie in fall 2012 after moving out, I was like, “I am going to find out what that word is in Greek,” and I did. And I learned ἄφες means “to let go, to release.”

Much different than how churches taught me “forgiveness,” which is more like burying the hurt, or feeling guilty about being angry about it.

It’s letting go when /you’re/ ready to, and it frees you, it lets YOU be your own person. Like, we were always told forgiveness was the answer?

But we also always had to forgive instantly and never harbor resentment ever because 1.) Jesus clearly suffered worse than you ever could! Why can’t you forgive? (because you’ve never been tortured or crucified) and 2.) the faster you forgave, the more Christian you were.

But this, this thing I saw in the film, is way, way different. There’s no obligation or guilt involved.

So I marked it on my wrist, this word that spoke life to me.

Thanks to my friend Sam, who gave me a gift certificate to Pens and Needles.

– – – – – – – – –

P.S. This dude who blogs also has two awesome tattoo stories:

A Roadtrip. A Tattoo. A Damn Good Story.

Keep Walking

Emotional Hypothermia, Part 1: The heart is deceitful

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on September 22, 2014.

In this cocoon
Shedding my skin cause I’m ready to
I wanna break out
I found a way out
I don’t believe that it’s gotta be this way
The worst is the waiting
In this womb I’m suffocating

Feel your presence filling up my lungs with oxygen
I take you in
I’ve died
Rebirthing now
I wanna live for love wanna live for you and me
Breathe for the first time now
I come alive somehow
– Skillet, Rebirthing

“How does God speak to you?”

My friend Cynthia Jeub was asking me. It was January 2013. I’d only been moved out on my own for five months.

“Through his word. Through the Bible,” I answered.

“But how does God speak to you now?” she persisted.

I hesitated. Cynthia wanted to know if I believed God could speak directly to me.

“But doesn’t the Bible say that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked and who can know it?”

“That,” Cynthia Jeub said, “is the number one verse that has killed the Awana generation.”

– – – – – – – –

Rewind to July 2012.

My parents had just presented me with two options: transfer from my state school to Bob Jones University or move out without assistance. I’d stopped obeying their 7:30 pm curfews and read the Harry Potter series the previous summer. Clearly the secular university experience had corrupted the homeschool alumna.

“Eleanor, I think you should have a conversation with your heart before you decide,” my chemistry undergraduate research professor said.

I gave her a puzzled look. My mind whispered, But the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, how could I trust it?

– – – – – – – –

I’m a frustrated, sobbing four year old.

“Stop crying. I saw how fast you turned those tears on, you can turn them off just like that,” my mom commands, snapping her fingers.

I stop. It hurts, but I shove all the tears back in where they came from. My breath is ragged from crying after a spanking.

If I’m ever going to earn my grown-up card one day, I must learn to hide what I really feel.

– – – – – – – –

Hannah Ettinger writes on her blog Wine & Marble about rediscovering her identity after being taught to avoid following your heart, and about what emotional repression did to her friend, whose parents and church victim-blamed her when she was raped.

“Jori is a very smart person, and after such strict parenting and high pressure in our church to have your emotions under control all the time, she became highly skilled at playing social roles that were expected of her. But when something traumatic happened to her, she wasn’t able to connect with her emotions to display them for an audience on command — she was too far gone into trained disassociation with her own feelings.”

Back in 2010 to about 2012, when many of my friends first met me, I couldn’t tell them how I felt. My typical response was to quote Bible verses or renowned authors on a given subject. But what did Eleanor think about this? What does Eleanor want to be when she grows up? How does she feel? No one knew.

I went around everywhere being really HAPPY for everyone. Because I hoped if I could shoo away their sadness and make them whole, somehow I would defeat my own issues with self-harm and suicidal thoughts. That maybe I would be healed in healing others. But that’s not really how it works. You kind of have to confront and do battle with your own darkness before you are ever ready to help someone else with theirs.

I lived in a state of emotional hypothermia.

Another friend, Cynthia Barram, defined that for me earlier this year, when I wrestled with accepting all of my emotions, even the angry and ugly ones, as part of being human.

I explained this over chat to Cynthia Jeub in March: “when you [guys] first met me, I was in stage 3. Where *I* didn’t even know there was a problem. In stage 1, you shiver a lot. In stage 2, you’re going numb, but you’re still fighting it. Stage 3, you don’t even know you’re cold and dying.”

Cynthia Jeub responded, “Right, they went really in detail about hypothermia in my hunter’s safety class.”

“But…Eleanor. One major symptom of stage 3 hypothermia is ecstasy.”

In tomorrow’s post, I will discuss why daring to feel is worthwhile.

The Herdsman, the Maiden and the Coyotes: A Fable

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 17, 2015. This story has also been reprinted on the 412teens.org blog under the title “The Herdsman, the Maiden & the Coyotes: A Fable.”

Sometimes, she danced with the wind, her blue skirt swishing to synchronize with its rhythm.

One day the whimsy of her dance led her to a crater blistered with brambles and dagger-length thorns. She stumbled over the precipice into the midst of them. Her dress tore, and her skin scratched.

A herdsman from the village nearby heard a child crying. He looked down and saw her caught in the briars. He leaped down into it, wincing as the thorns tore at him, but he struggled toward the girl.

When he reached her, he half-smiled and reached out to pull her up. But she was crying so much that his face was blurred, and all she could see was the blood covering his clothes and hands. Shrieking, she drew back from him, wounding herself further.

Finally, she let herself be carried out of the thicket. The herdsman tried to soothe her, singing her a lullaby. All she could hear was the painful undertone in the song.

By the time they returned to the dandelion field, the girl had cried herself to sleep. The herdsman laid her down under a tree, cleaned her scratches with a damp cloth, and kissed her forehead. And he went back to tend his flock.

The girl awakened the next morning. Glancing at her scabs, she sobbed again, remembering the herdsman’s wounds. She sat in the field all day staring at the dandelions. She had lost the dance.

In the evening, she crept back to the edge of the valley, grasping at the brambles.

She separated out the thorns from the stems of the plants, clenching them in her fist.

If she hadn’t fallen into the crater yesterday, she wouldn’t have cried out, and if she hadn’t cried out, the herdsman wouldn’t have come, and if the herdsman hadn’t come, he wouldn’t have bled. It was all her fault.

She used the thorns like claws across her arms. Surely she must hurt, because she hurt him. Only her own blood could satisfy this.

Every night for years, she returned to the crater. The bleeding was never enough. The craving to satiate the guilt was as fresh each night as the one before. Sometimes the coyotes came out to follow, nipping at her heels, licking up the warm blood dripping from her wounds.

She thought she must be an outcast, even though the villagers never mentioned it to her. A word or sharp look made her tremble, thinking they blamed her. Surely everyone knew what she had done to the beloved herdsman.

She sometimes would see him or other men leading their flocks over the distant misty hills. He tried to approach her on a street corner a few times, but she shuddered and turned away, lest she see his blood. The blood. She could never forget the blood.

But the coyotes never left. They became the girl’s companions when she felt like the village hermit. They walked with her when no one else would.

The girl grew into a maiden. A lonely maiden, wearing a ragged blue gown that barely covered the dried clotted mess covering her arms and legs.

One night at the crater, she returned to the top with her fist full of brambles. A coyote was waiting for her. She could smell him. He would lick her wounds before he’d let her pass by. She wondered when he’d just lunge for her throat and the pain would end. Coming over the edge, lantern light fell across her form and she shrank back into the shadows.

“Little girl.”

The voice.

“Little girl. Don’t be afraid. You aren’t lost, are you?”

She trembled and clenched her teeth. Of all the villagers, he especially she could never face. Not with her scars.

He reached down for her hand.

“Come on. It’s all right.”

The coyote snarled in the brush nearby.

“Wait here.” She heard his sandals crackle against the dry grass, and the swish of his club.

His footsteps returned, and he peered over the ledge down at her. “It’s safe now.” He smiled.

She dared herself to glance into his eyes. “Thank you.” A girlish whimper.

She let him pull her up into the lamplight. They both sat down, each looking off into the distance. Her gaze wandered to the herdsman sitting beside her, to his rough cotton robe, to his ragged sleeves.

His arms. So many white echoes of pain. But just echoes. No blood.

Without thinking, she traced one of them lightly with her finger, then drew back. “I’m sorry.”

He turned to her. His eyes twinkled in the dim light. “No need to apologize.”

Pulling her arm closer to his, he drew it into the light. “Those look painful,” he said as he traced the dark crimson lines on her arms.

One wet drop fell onto the lap of the blue gown.

“You know,” he said, “If a little girl fell into the crater tomorrow, I would pull her out.”

The sob couldn’t be stifled. She looked down, eyes memorizing every hole and rip in her dress. His arm wrapped around her shoulder like a winter’s cloak, warm and safe.

“I carry my own lambs high above the thorns when I pull them out of the crater. I can handle being scratched, but I don’t want them to bleed,” he said.

Tears trickled, refusing to be shoved back. At last, she relaxed and lay against his shoulder.

He plucked a dandelion head and handed it to her. They blew it out together. And dandelion seeds floated past in the moonlit breeze, the wind gathering the fluff up into the stars.

He spoke again, his hand held out towards her. “Would you like to dance?”

Self-injury: A Worldview

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on August 15, 2013.

Content note: self-harm, suicidal thoughts

“Told I talked too much
made too much noise
I took up a silent hobby—
Bleeding.”

― S. Marie

Self harm. When the darkness inside at last leaks out and mars your body.

The reasons most people give for hurting themselves are complicated and diverse. Verbalizing the pain, punishing and satiating guilt, desiring control, a grasping to keep out the numbness.

My years of personal self-injury were mostly guilt-driven. As a preschooler, I saw an Easter play and believed that I needed to hurt myself for hurting Jesus. Every year, the repeat of the same drama I desired and dreaded so much drove deeper into my heart this need to crucify myself.

Little girl me thought that Jesus had to obey His father in the Garden of Gethsemane and die for me because she was a child and had to obey her parents. Surely it would be wrong not to, and Jesus couldn’t sin. Therefore, little girl me believed Jesus was like this abused child that was forced to sacrifice Himself for her.

She couldn’t understand free will. That Gethsemane was not about “I must” but “I choose.” That His love could never be forced.

So self-injury was more than just cutting. The bruises in hidden places and perpetual scabs all around my fingernails were just a symptom of an underlying issue. The proverbial iceberg that sunk the Titanic. An entire worldview lay under the icy waves.

When you believe that you are worthless, that you deserve to be punished and denied love, this perspective seeps mercilessly into every area of your life.

Self harm can be subtle. Some of my closest friends have said that they don’t deserve friendship or to even simply enjoy life.

“Aren’t we supposed to be focused on the next life and not enjoying this one? I don’t have to have friends. I’ll just be alone.”

“Why I am so stupid?”

“I don’t want to inconvenience the waiters at IHOP because I’m in a wheelchair. I don’t have to have pancakes.”

“Wouldn’t you eventually get over it [my suicide]?”

The words from our conversations drip like blood. Emotional wounds seeping silent tears. They don’t see that every person’s unique genetic composition and personality combination makes them irreplaceable. John Powell explained it like this: “You have a unique message to deliver, a unique song to sing, a unique act of love to bestow. This message, this song, and this act of love have been entrusted exclusively to the one and only you.”

The voices in our heads telling us that we are worthless are lies. Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

Abundant life. Abundant even in the little things. Enjoying hot, syrupy pancakes with friends. Late night laughter. Life contains hardships, but we don’t have to seek them out. My friend Cynthia Jeub recently wrote that we don’t need to live like we were born to be martyrs.

I can live free, and be “free indeed.” I have not been denied love. I am (and YOU are) so loved.

P.S. Me and Pastor Mark Adams from First Baptist Church of Beaumont who used to play Jesus in the Passion Play. I went back to visit last month.

********
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#WhyILeft Fundamentalism, Part 1

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 9, 2015.

I’ve been trying to erase myself
By trying to be someone else
They say there’s no hope for me
I guess this must be hell… – TFK, In My Room

“I have to go, my dad’s calling me again.” I head for the door of the campus library.

My friend rolls her wheelchair closer to me. “What’s wrong, honey?”

I fidget. I’d never told anyone. Not even a pastor or coworker.

Pause. Deep breath.

“I…I…My dad, sometimes, he gets really angry. He doesn’t hurt us, but if anyone in the family makes him mad, he takes it out on everybody.”

There. I’ve said it. My friend doesn’t shrink away. “Have you thought of talking to TESSA or Social Services?”

“But…won’t they take away my siblings?” I had trained myself to fear any outside interference, to protect my family and their reputation above all.

“No, honey. They don’t just come in and haul people off. They try to help.”

———–

My friend pointed out the tip of the iceberg. I knew my ship was sinking.

From my earliest memories, my family’s unity wobbled on tiptoe, depending on careful balancing. My mom taught us all how to survive.

Don’t do anything to make Daddy angry. He’s the head of the household. God wants us to respect him.

Daddy’s displeasures were arbitrary. He didn’t like any of us girls wearing green, and he said we couldn’t have friends outside the family, even at church.

Until I was nearly seven when my sister was born, I was an isolated only child.

The smoldering, bitter 9 year old who bruised herself to ease her guilt became the submissive 13 year old with separation anxiety too severe to attend the only slumber party that met parental approval.

Weekly panic attacks before Sunday morning church were the norm through adolescence. And our cross-country moves between Texas and Colorado led to attending churches with more and more rules, insulating us from the wider world.

By 14, I wanted to die daily (not in the religious sense) for an entire year. I clenched my arms around myself, blocking out the incessant voices telling me to jump.

My mom read us an HSLDA email newsletter winter 2004 about the homeschooled kid about my age who shot and killed his entire family and then himself. My insides went cold, because part of me is him.

I found some relief when my dad allowed Awanas during my freshman year of high school. I memorized the book of Ephesians with the youth group, and was often allowed phone conversations with Kathleen, my first close friend, for our regular accountability Bible Buddies sessions.

Halfway through 10th grade we moved again. I filled the long, lonely hours between A Beka Academy DVD lessons and homework with lengthy prayer journal entries addressed to Jesus and reading all the Gospels over and over. And twenty page handwritten letters to pen pals and church friends back in Texas.

I went back to cutting senior year of high school. Only blood could wash away sin, right? Jesus’ blood didn’t seem to cover it.

Graduation isn’t enough when you’re decaying from within. I dreaded college.

For a year, my dad had told me dentistry was the best and only valid occupation. He ignored my arguments, even though I devoted hours to researching salaries for other jobs and interviewing people with established careers for a required 12th grade “Vocation Project.”

He said I’d never make it as a high school English teacher or a translator. He ridiculed my desires with off-hand comments.

“You won’t be able to buy clothes like this if you’re just an English teacher.”

“You know, that’s the sort of car an English teacher would drive.”

I graduated, took a gap year to rest for resistance. I worked full-time as a receptionist at my dad’s office, so every waking hour was micromanaged. I gained 20 pounds because my dad didn’t like leftovers in the fridge.

I asked my parents to send to me to Bob Jones or Pensacola Christian College, because I wanted independence but feared the secular world. My dad said I had to study at least two years locally and commute.

When I applied to college, I declared my major in English literature, after a huge fight with my parents in July 2009 when I nearly left home.

Two years in, I’d added a minor in pre-dentistry and I had to be at the house whenever I wasn’t in class. I worked for my dad whenever I wasn’t studying.

And I wasn’t sure who I was anymore.

I hoped maybe I’d be free to make my own choices after dental school, after 6 more years of…well. Hell.

Read Part Two, Three and Four.