“To most people the overdosing, the cutting, and the episodes that I was having at school appeared to be spontaneous, erratic behaviour. Those who had sympathy for me understood me as sick and in need of help. Those who did not understood me as selfish, irresponsible, and attention-seeking. My embodied experience of my behaviour, as expressed in the above vignette, was not linked to the abuse. I understood my behaviour as a pressing, urgent reaction to extreme physical and emotional discomfort. As someone who was experiencing ongoing sexual abuse and who was being told that nothing out of the ordinary was actually happening, my traumatic “acting out” was a means of making visible the violence that I was experiencing. Though I was not consciously aware of my reasoning, my self-harm functioned as a strategy of resistance. My cuts produced an alternate claim to truth from that of my parents. My cuts declared visibly that something was very wrong and bore witness to “an event about which ‘something ought to be done’” (Cresswell, 2005, p. 1672). In this case, my strategy of resistance was successful in that my self-harm directly resulted in me never having to see an adult who was abusing me again.”
failure to comply: madness and/as testimony by clementine morrigan
