Ritual cutting

Tuesday April 29th, 2008 @ 1:48 PM

Filed under: Other

Hi there,

I’m well out of the cutting woods (pun intended?) but now, four years on, I become more and more upset and self conscious about the scars it left on a daily basis. I rarely take off my hoodie or cardigan, even during a hot Australian summer. I can’t fucking stand to even look at them.

I used to worship the ritual cutting section of BME - the sort of things I would see on there would set a benchmark… it was almost a competition in my head. My older brother ended up blocking the whole site (no idea how he did it!) because he was scared to death. He gave a shit. It made quite a bit of difference, but I think I was just more angry that he was barring me from being in a virtual place that I felt comfortable.

Looking at some of the photos on there, it makes me really worried about the younger visitors to the site… or even anyone who has a history of doing it. It may trigger them to fuck themselves as it did me. I was looking at the photos earlier… and it did affect me, it brought up both happy and fucking horrible memories.

I know the whole speel “no one is to blame but yourself”… but do you guys ever feel somewhat guilty or accountable for providing a medium for this shit? Don’t you think that somewhere on these pages you should have some information on where to go to talk to people, to figure out some coping mechanisms?

Who knows how many of the people who have uploaded photos of their gashes have since died.

You may shrug this off or get defensive. I hope you don’t.

In other news, I get lost for hours in the tattoo section. Love it.

Thanks.

First of all, let me preface my reply by pointing that I am a body piercer, and have absolutely no formal training or qualifications to speak on the subject of SI, and while I have friends who are recovered (and recovering) from SI, I have no personal experience on the subject. If I phrase anything incorrectly, please forgive me and be assured that it’s just my own ignorance on the subject, and that absolutely no offense is intended.

You might be surprised to learn that there are people here who agree with you, myself included - I absolutely see a difference between ritual cutting/intentional scarification and rather a lot of the images submitted that are plainly self-injury. Now, I’m not saying that images of cutting shouldn’t be on BME (which is all about documenting all aspects of body modification), but I do think that a lot of people who self-injure view those galleries as possible inspiration and that SI is not in any way a mentally healthy place to be in and help should certainly be offered to those people. That being said, the internet is a big place and I think that people who go looking for images will find them somewhere, and that it’s not BME’s responsibilty to remove any images to protect people from finding them. I do very firmly believe that it is BME’s responsibility to put images likely to trigger SI behind click-throughs on Modblog, but that request has well and truly fallen on deaf ears (and all of those links are triggers to the max, by the way), much as any sexually explicit images are put behind clickthroughs on Modblog - however, that opinion is not shared by Shannon and not only does he refuse to consider the repeated requests to do so, he has, I feel, taunted the people making those requests by joking about the posts being triggers in their titles. I think it’s sad that anyone finds it funny or a laughing matter - as you know, it is a symptom of a dangerous illness, and shouldn’t be perceived as a healthy way to deal with issues (most people who self-injure will say that it’s not terribly effective at helping them to feel better, any feelings of satisfaction are short-lived at best and often become quite habitual and compulsive).

I do hope that anyone reading this who does self-injure will realise that they need help and reach out for it - to a family member, a friend, a loved one, someone who can help you and support you while you get the professional help that you need to understand and overcome SI. You CAN stop and wellness is within your grasp. There are lots of great websites full of information that can help you (Here’s just one of the good ones I found, and here’s another with lots of ways to resist the urge to cut, and this is a thread on an Australian forum with lots of links to get you started), a simple Google search will get you headed in the right direction. Good luck!

(And if anyone wants to go berko at me for replying to something off-topic on AskBME, well, I suppose all I can say is I have a history of taking these sorts of queries seriously and replying to them to try and help people - 1, 2 - and if your issue is that I am obviously disagreeing with Shannon, well, the opinions and values expressed by me on AskBME are my own, obviously, and do not necessarily represent those of BMEZINE.COM LLC, PsyberCity Inc., and/or Shannon Larratt. I was selected by Shannon to join the QOD staff, I should hope he’d respect my opinion even if it disagrees with his own. )

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