“Its pain was my escape” has been stuck in my mind for weeks now. I recently read an article in the paper about young people that are actually cutting themselves. I know from my teenage son that this is going on all the time with young teenagers, often right in our schools classrooms. It is bothersome to me that this is happening. They are saying they feel relieved after cutting themselves, watching the blood flow from the wound externalizes their pain. Is our society that busy that we have a society of young people doing this to themselves?

Hi Sandy - so glad to hear you here!

What an astute connection of the line in the poem Evolvement", http://www.selftoself.com/poetry/evolvement.htm (...it cut me down to bleeding bone, its pain was my escape...), to something specific in the real world (creating/enacting/producing physical pain as an external expression of inward pain); and isn't it frightening to think about what it is these people are thinking, feeling and believing that leads them to such actions.

What do you think is at the heart of such behavior? - and yes, I agree that it has to have something to do with a society grown too busy with trying to maintain its external status quo structure to notice that structure is invisibly disintegrating from the inside out.

To some degree, perhaps part of the problem originates with the realization that adults, parents, and society-at-large, may not understand their own self-to-Self relationship of both inward and exterior values. Often, from different generations (at least in our own culture) we've been brought up by well-meaning parents who themselves had no grasp of the the connections between their inner world of feelings, intuitions, thoughts, beliefs, dreams, creative desires ... and the "real" world of their financial, social, and family responsibilities. The connection between dreams and dreamers is so fragile and easily mislaid and de-valued in an increasingly fast world.

We cannot pass on, teach, share, give - or even use personally - what we do not already have for ourselves - if I don't possess it myself first, then it's pretty hard to "pay it forward" to anyone else.

How will we instill the foundation for empowered life experiences - or develop meaningful, authentically shareable bonds with our young people, if we do not first understand - self-to-Self, how to empower our own lives of self-to-Self, and selves-to-others through our mind-full efforts to create experience from a basis of genuine, life supportive values?

Sometimes I think the problems of relationship are as much about our ability to clearly voice our problems, in order to make sharing them possible, as they are about identifying the problems to start with!! So often it seems we have the knowledge - inside of us - but what we don't have is the vehicle of bona fide methods and skills to engage the other person in a way that empowers them toward their own learning - about their own values.

There is no way that I mean that we as adults/parents are to blame here - solutions can never come out of blame. Solutions will always grow out of understanding responsibility in a way that allows each of us to claim the accomplishments that come from accepting such responsibility. To a huge degree, this is a vital understanding to helping these young people - even when it seems to be "in spite of themselves".

Assuredly, lots of us have had the experience of "hitting the wall" with people who are entirely disinterested in changing their own experiences and people who are completely bent on self destruction. I think self destructive behavior is drawn from such a wrenching dislocation of our inner-Self of intuition and emotional knowledge, from our personhood-self of mind's outward thinking, that the only perception we have is that there is no other way to understand a situation than the way we are currently understanding. When you are defining experience from within a dilemma, it is difficult to see that you are caught within a closed system of reasoning that operationally leaves little choice beyond those choices we are already making.

Often, the only appeal even minutely left open for us to try to help someone, is through their intimate identification as a thinking person... a person who is entirely capable of realizing that their behavior is within their own power of choosing. Generally, none of us really believes that someone else is choosing our actions. And generally, none of us seriously believes that we can't and/or don't know how to think - since we do so all the time.

That's a great point you are making about how physical pain is so often a method to externalize inner pain. If inwardly, you live in a world that has become too psychologically painful to deal with, you close off the links of emotion-to-thinking and thinking-to-actions. It is often very real experiences that are being read through belief systems that leave the self fractured from the Self, until the inward turmoil of struggling for sense, drives outward behavior into corresponding, matching, chaotic and irrational shapes. When our struggles seem unanswerable to us, indeed, we will try to close off that inward source of our pain - we will close off our emotions and unwittingly close off our power of mind that can be triggered from our emotional short-hand of pain.

When we're in turmoil, or distress, and we have no method - no directed, specific way to question the cause of that distress that doesn't leave us feeling buried under misunderstood guilt, responsibility and powerlessness, many of us close down our self-to-Self help lines. It's a vicious negative spiral that's hard for any of us to sort through, and without help, and coming from the fact of less life experience than adults, it's no mystery how so many young people close down the connections between their emotions and thinking, to the point of collapse! Without a way to address, understand, use our power of mind, as that power is connected to our emotions, then we're in a closed system of pain that eventually destroys us - sooner or later, in some way or another!

Personally, I believe there are answers for this truly sad scenario - maybe we just haven't written them for our selves - and our children - yet. Maybe that is the point - to recognize that we CAN "create" new solutions from a different kind of thinking, that will lead to different actions, re-actions and interactions. Maybe that's the point, to help us begin the process of building such new solutions.

With people as thought-full as you Sandy, those new solutions, new paths, new developments, WILL be forthcoming. I can't see any other solution to these kinds of problems, than to develop new knowledge and methods, new skills-of-mind, connected to new skills-of-emoting - giving all of us a new choices about creating our lives.

Thanks so much for this insight into how words can trigger such real and powerful reactions in us, and lead us to examine our ideas in such a meaningful way.

Would love to hear more of where this whole subject has taken your thinking.

See you later
regards,
Spinfo

Hi Sandy,

Society, (In My Humble Opinion) is ill. “IT” doesn’t feel well.

When our children resort to self mutilation to “stand out”, to say “this is me”, to initiate adult response and justify it with statements like “it externalizes my pain”, tells me that society is busy, and yet have too much time on their hands.

It’s busy in the sense that we no longer watch over our children the way we used to. Duel income families are now the norm, not the exception. So when both mother and father work, then WHO is raising the children? That list of “WHO” goes on quite a ways, but it is easier to answer who is NOT raising them, and that is their own parents. We as parents want our children to have all those “things” that life provides for today, but again, IMHO, the experiment of the duel working class mom and dad has failed quite miserably. Now finding an “official” government source that would be willing to back that statement is not to be found. Why would you think that would be?

The parents don’t have time to breath these days, but the children have plenty of time. This is a bad mix of reality. The result is an illness that is hard to pinpoint and hard to cure. The illness will continue to grow.

We need to spend more time getting information of the likes of this web site and a LOT less time getting information from “TV”. (In our house it has been several years now without a TV… Amazing how one can survive without it.)

Don’t let your own KNOWN “rights and wrongs” get mixed up Sandy. It is obvious you have them straight. The world around you may not agree with you. So be it. You know self mutilation isn’t right regardless of the justification used. Stand by it, and remember there are always others you may not know that stand with you as well.

Hope to hear from you soon,

David4444 -