Treatment for Self Injury and Stop Cutting

This Recovery Book Covers Healing and Relates to Eating Disorders

Jul 25, 2007 Lori Henry

Treatment for self injury is covered in this recovery book. Stop cutting and start healing from related issues like eating disorders.

Cutting and eating disorders often go hand in hand. Although recovering seems like an impossible task, healing from self injury is possible. Although treatment for self injury seems like an impossible task, healing IS possible. So how do you stop cutting?

One of the most effective ways to kick start healing is to know and hear from others who have been through a similar experience. Sometimes realizing that you are not alone and that others share your pain is an important step down the road to recovery.

In Vanessa Vega’s recovery book, Comes the Darkness, Comes the Light: A Memoir of Cutting, Healing, and Hope, she reveals the struggles, anguish and self torture that were infused in her young life.

The first pages are a personal letter from the author inviting readers into her pain and the recovery it took her over 15 years to find. Her experience is extreme but the book filled with hope. This introduction paves the way for the suffering she will endure and the hope she finds to live her life free from cutting and an eating disorder.

Most importantly, she does not preach that recovery is easy, that anyone else’s experience will be the same as hers, and that it will take as long as hers did. She writes that she's not at a point where she’ll never cut again, but she is at a point where she accepts her slip ups and moves on. This is an integral part of any healing journey.

From when Vanessa was a child, she was taught to hold her feelings in and only appear pleasant when her father got home from work. Whether or not she and her brothers were in the middle of fighting, when dad walked through the door, they all stopped and pretended to get along.

This presented a stable home life that Vanessa never felt. Instead, she found that by hitting herself, she could alleviate some of the emotions she had wanted to express but couldn’t. She learned to go to her room to express feelings her own way; by banging her head against the walls, hitting her legs until they bruised, or digging her nails into her skin, the physical pain was easier to deal with than the emotional.

Her behavior escalated from there and many dark nights were filled with scissors dragging across her skin and scars to prove her torment. A ritual developed, one that would follow her into her adult life, and which could not be broken with even the biggest amount of willpower.

The image of darkness engulfing a person is so powerful. Anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder and cutting can certainly relate to the commanding authority of the dark shadows that soon take over. The gloom that replaces childhood is so beautifully expressed in this memoir.

Above all, the book gives light at the end of the tunnel and hope to those who don’t believe they have any. Vanessa shares the group therapy sessions that would change her life and reveals the hard work needed to recover. But it is possible and a read of this captivating memoir will leave readers feeling hopeful, changed and ready to begin their own journey.

The copyright of the article Treatment for Self Injury and Stop Cutting in Eating Disorders is owned by Lori Henry. Permission to republish Treatment for Self Injury and Stop Cutting in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Comes the Darkness, Comes the Light, Vanessa Vega

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Comments

Jul 27, 2007 4:45 PM

vicky ann smith :

Thank you for writing about this book; a few years ago I used to cut regularly, I know it is possible to stop and recover from self harm and the more we hear stories of recovery, the more we know it is possible.

Vicky X

Aug 13, 2007 6:51 PM

Lori Henry :

I agree. This book was so powerful. Although I have never cut before, it really made my feel like I had gotten into the head and spirit of someone who has.

Oct 4, 2008 10:58 PM

Guest :

do not tempt me she thought. with razor in hand, thoughts andfeelings screaming so loud, would the memory of her being so angry be whats left of her. what was left inside she did not know. her anger grew like a wild fire. lit at any moment. her anger was beast. it fed on anything someone would say. eating away even at herself. swallowing but never chewing. what made her angry the most would be herself. o how she hated herself. and the razor could would relief her of that anger. for the moment. nobody knew. if they did they would not say anything. help was but not far away. but she could not make the words speak from her mouth.

o how the razor felf inside her skin. the blood leaveing her body, the mind numbing pain. so good so beautiful.

the sun goes down and everybody gets ready for bed, in her mind as she stands in the shower, the view of her most recent cut, so deep so good. the thoguhts persits, and how good her razor would be. at night when the rest sleep, a night light to giude her hand in one stedy motion the razor goes in. cutting the soft flesh, blood drips form her wrist. the satifaction is not yet complet untill it is deep enough. to see the very vein inside that could decide fate, life or death. and how mind numbing satifactional that would be. the blood rushes out fast in motion. the pain feels so delicious, the wormth of the blood funning down her hand to the tips of her fingertips. driping to the towel placed down to hide the evidence of the night. watching as it spreads around the towel fibers...
her anger is not but yet only a memory, to forgive and move on, it is the lesson to learn.

at a time i did not go one night without my razor. i guess u could call it an addiction one i must even today still get over. though i have not used in months, the memory is still there.

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