Between 1991 and 2006, I was a high school junior English teacher. With over 2000 sixteen year-olds in those fifteen years, I had the opportunity to teach English to all types of teenage students with all types of diverse learning styles and lifestyles. Over those years I saw and experienced a lot of wonderful moments. Over those years, I also saw a lot of pain and heartache, too. Nothing prepared me, however, for my encounter with Nina, my first “cutter.”
Nina was what psychiatrists and authors Harold Graff and Richard Malin defined as a typical cutter: “a young, highly intelligent woman who is prone to alcohol and drug abuse and has a great difficulty in relationships. They found that most of these women had suffered painful childhoods, with cold, rejecting mothers and distant, hypercritical fathers” (Strong 32). Nina was in my advanced placement English class, a class designed for students to earn college credit during their junior year in high school. At the beginning of the school year, Nina appeared highly motivated and highly intelligent. As the year progressed, I began to see some fluctuation in her grades, so one day I asked to see her after class. When I approached the subject of her grades, she told me that she had been having problems at home. We chatted a little more, and Nina confided that she was saddened by not having a boyfriend and being overweight. She was a very pretty girl, a delightful young lady, but did not seem to think so. We discussed what we might do together to help her feel more successful in my class and, more importantly, in her life. Her grades continued to decline, however, so I placed a call to her parents to schedule a parent conference, leaving a message when no one answered. Her parents did not return the call, so I contacted the school counselor. The next day, the counselor came into my classroom.
“Deborah,” she said with a serious look on her face. “I looked into Nina’s performance in other classes, and her grades are falling there, too. Also, Deborah, you need to know that Nina is a cutter.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A cutter, a person who cuts themselves.”
“A what?” I repeated my question. I had never heard of such a thing.
I learned that Nina had a long history of self-mutilation. She wore long sleeves and jeans to school, not atypical to teenage regalia, but for Nina, it was to hide the wounds and scars on her arms and legs. When the counselor called Nina’s parents, we discovered that Nina was “cutting” again, and she had been sent to a hospital. A month later Nina walked into my classroom like nothing had happened. After school one day we sat down together. I stayed very quiet while she talked.
“Ms. Louis.” She began. “I don’t want you to think I’m weird.”
“I don’t think you’re weird, Nina.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Ms. Louis, but when I even see a paperclip on your desk, I can’t think of anything else but using it to cut myself.” She continued to talk, and I continued to listen. Nina didn’t finish her junior year that year.
I was reminded of Nina as I ready Greg Mogenson’s A Most Accursed Religion: When a Trauma Becomes God. Mogenson discusses our proclivity to reach for God when we are “crushed and broken by an overwhelming event” (29) in our lives. This overwhelming event might be a death or a divorce, a loss of job or a deadly disease, but in each of these cases, the event itself is a finite, temporal one with ongoing ramifications. In contrast, Nina’s traumatic event recurs relentlessly, a “cumulative trauma” (Strong 51). While a divorce or a disease or a death is an external trauma that happens to us, the primary trauma in Nina’s case was psychic and internal but expressed externally.
Self-mutilation has a long history. Mogenson explains that in order to enhance their relationship to God, mystics, saints, and martyrs have long exploited the physiological relationship between suffering and spirituality by intentionally subjecting themselves to pain and affliction” (45).
Why do people inflict pain on themselves?
Moreover, according to Marilee Strong in Self-Mutilation and the Subject of Pain: Throughout time, blood has been used in religious ritual to demonstrate suffering and salvation, piety and enlightenment: from blood sacrifice to crucifixion, mortification of the flesh to the martyrdom of saints, from ecstatic stigmata representing the wounds of Jesus to the drinking of wine representing Christ’s blood at Holy Communion. . . . Scars, like blood, are also richly symbolic. They provide a permanent, physical record not only of pain and injury but also of healing . . . they signify an ongoing battle and that all is not lost. As befits one of nature’s great triumphs, scar tissue is a magical substance, a physiological and psychological mortar that holds flesh and spirit together when a difficult world threatens to tear both apart. (34-35)
The “interior saboteaur”
Of course, self-injury may be the soul surrendering to what Mogenson considers an “interior saboteur” rather than the “ontological God of religion and theology” (43). Regardless, Mogenson also suggests “the more we are hurt, the more we are beside ourselves with pain, the closer we are to ecstatic union with that overwhelming intensity of stimulus the pious have called God” (45).
Childhood aspect of the collective psyche
So how would Mogenson approach the crust of a cutter? In his A Most Accursed Religion, Mogenson suggests that “all creatures great and small—live by virtue of a protective outer crust of dead matter, [and] the purpose of this protective crust or shield, according to Freud, is for ‘protection against stimuli.’” (118-19). Further, he intimates that “soul-making is the human refinement of the crust-making process, which is present in all living beings” (119). Mogenson’s idea of a human’s crust is that of the metaphors and analogies we filter. With a cutter, then, what happens when the “arrows and slings of outrageous fortune” are inflicted not by the external world but from one’s own hands? What happens to the metaphor? What happens to the ability to filter? What happens to the soul-making? If “soul-making is an attempt to experience more and more of the traumatic stimuli emanating from the world external to us [and] a precarious process of refining sensitivity and perception” (Mogenson 120), then if the external stimuli comes from within, what happens to the soul? Like oysters, have cutters “lost their head” (120)? Too, in his chapter entitled “Trauma Anonymous” Mogenson discusses the addiction of the alcoholic: “If whatever we do once is a trauma, whatever we do twice is a ritual, a religion (162). Insofar as the cutting becomes a ritual, it, too, produces a thick crust that prevents soul-making. Mogenson suggests that “a child and its family go wrong because the culture in which they are embedded has lost its connection to what C.G. Jung has called the childhood aspect of the collective psyche” (84).
I do not know what happened to Nina. I do know that I had other cutters in my classroom and in hospitals over the years. Nina did not finish her junior year in English, and the remainder of her high school years was marked by scars and absences. If trauma is god, he is a ruthless one at times.
Works Cited
Austin, Len and Julie Kortum. Self-Injury: The Secret Language of Pain for Teenagers.
Education: Spring, 2004.
Mogenson, Greg. A Most Accursed Religion: When a Trauma Becomes God. Putnam, Conn.:
Spring, 2005.
Strong, Marilee. A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain. New York:
Viking, 1998.
