Laura's note: As the first paragraph of the following blog post excerpt implies, a lot of adults need someone to tell them their "normal" isn't "normal" too. If it's all you've ever known and you're surrounded by friends and family who've had similarly unhealthy early experiences, how would you know otherwise?
It took me a quarter of a century (literally) to realize that I experienced trauma throughout certain points in my childhood. It took me another year to realize that my behaviors were deeply rooted in how I responded to that trauma. And it took me even longer to realize that my emotions during those years were not normal.
It seems obvious, doesn’t it?
The thing was… no one told me that the things I was doing weren’t normal. And a lot of times, as a kid, if someone doesn’t outright tell you something, then you have no idea.
I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal to self-harm at twelve years old. All of the friends I’d chosen were doing it so I assumed ALL preteens were doing it. None of us hurt ourselves to fit in with each other (we actually knew each other for quite a while before admitting to one another that we were self-harming), but we were all doing it to cope with something. We were all kids with messy stories, which drew us together like magnets.
Because of my relationships with other kids like me, I genuinely assumed that all middle-schoolers felt the need to cut their skin to release overwhelming emotions.
No one told me it wasn’t normal. I think if I’d have known that it wasn’t normal, and that I was doing it because I had deep mental health problems during those years, I would have viewed it differently. Imagine if someone had told me I was using that self-harm as a coping skill and then explained to me what that meant.
[To read the rest of this blog post by W.R. Cummings, click here.]
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