As we battled these last weeks through a particularly rough patch, I found myself thinking that it was time for me to revisit therapy again. Sometimes the skills fade or get sloppy, sometimes I forget to take care of myself, sometimes I just crave an outsider’s voice on our challenges. My family often struggles during the transition time from school to summer and summer to school. And now the stakes are so much higher: summers are no longer about camps and beach trips, they are about internships and networking. Our previous struggles to find bathing suits and flip flops that “feel right” are now struggles to find professional clothing that hides self-injury scars without being too hot. As I find myself pining for the good old days of toddler temper tantrums in Old Navy dressing rooms, I also find myself reflecting on how we got here…
When my kids were younger, we learned a lot about the “worry brain” or “worry bug” or “worry monster” and the anatomy and neurobiology of how our brains produce anxiety. My kids were taught that in the “caveman days” the fight or flight response was an essential evolutionary adaptation that enabled early humans to be alert to and escape from physical dangers in their world such as tigers. In the present, we don’t have tigers on the prowl, but in some people this fight or flight “monster” can still be energized by other things that the brain interprets as immediately life-threatening even when they aren’t. The point of the approach is to teach kids to separate themselves from this mischievous troublemaker, to externalize it, isolate it, expose it by talking about it and therefore diminish its power. It seems to work really well for lots of kids.
Unfortunately for one of my kids, for reasons we still don’t understand well, the worry monster did not come to heel by the time she matured from childhood to adolescence. Nor was my daughter able to fully accept that the “monster” was just a metaphor for overactive brain wiring. As she entered puberty, she took the externalization too far and it developed a more comprehensive, menacing, haunting and actually independent nature. She began to have feelings of being intentionally tortured by the monster, feelings that the monster had malicious intent, wanted to punish her and would never leave her alone. These feelings were strongly reinforced by horrifying nightmares that she was able to remember in startling detail. As she struggled mightily to cope with a brain at war with itself she turned to self-injury for relief.
Many years later she has mostly learned to control these urges, but it is a daily battle and she has a lot of scars. What started in her life as anxiety is now accompanied by intractable depression and she has attempted to take her own life more than once. Strangely for me as her mother, the cumulative nature of the non-life threatening self-injury is actually harder to bear than the suicidality. In her case, the cutting testifies unequivocally that “I hate myself” whereas the suicide attempts have been more about “I hate the world”. I can relate to hating the world, especially these days. So much is so wrong. There are plenty of actual close to home threats to be worried about: school shootings, sexual assault, substance overdose, social injustice, chaotic government, just to name a few. Hating the world is something she and I can have an authentic back and forth conversation about. But for me to acknowledge and confront her inward self-loathing is excruciating. It makes no sense to me. I try but I have no words.
Her scars have faded over time, but they will never disappear completely. Unlike other “unhealthy coping mechanisms” such as drug or alcohol abuse or even bulemia whose traumatic effects on tissue occur largely inside the body, external self-injury is on view for all to see for all time. In addition to my daughter’s ongoing battle for self-love, she now deals with terrible feelings of shame for the damage she has inflicted on herself and the terrible additional anxiety of not knowing how others who see her scars might react. While we circled each other around the rows of tops at Marshall’s, I found my inner voice in imagined conversation with her swinging wildly from “Your scars don’t define you, your ability speaks for itself!” to “People can be cruel and judgmental, who knows what first impression your scars might make…” Before I know it I have aimlessly wandered over to the baby section to be soothed by little pink dresses with matching socks.
I have had enough therapy already to recognize that the responsibility for figuring out these wardrobe issues and how much to “expose” in a work environment ultimately lies with my daughter. The work of learning to love herself is her work. Though I can be a relentless cheerleader for her, my work is to manage my own anxiety about her future. At the same time there is undoubtedly something especially viscerally difficult between mothers and daughters in this pursuit. My daughter is literally a part of myself that often hates itself, though all I have for it is love. This monstrously cruel paradox of our connection haunts us both. We might be able to learn to separate our anxieties, but I don’t think we will ever separate our pain.
By: Allison Kretzmeier, Anxiety In Teens Contributor