At some stage, I can’t remember how old she was but I do remember she explained it very coherently. If your head is hurting with emotional pain, if you’re unhappy, if you’re really, really hurting so badly in your head, to harm yourself on your skin, to give yourself other pain, stops the feelings in your head. Shes always been very coherent at explaining the things that shes done and I could, even though I can’t really understand why anyone would do that, I understood that. It’s deferring that pain away.

Did she talk about it again later or at other times and give you any more kind of concrete information about what was happening to her?

Yeah, this is going to sound strange, she did but she wasn’t able to necessarily articulate in a way that was clear but I totally understood it. I still think her dad is completely none the wiser. But I think I got it because that’s how I feel most of the time. She, you know, sort of said things like about just feeling, just didn’t, hated the way that she felt but she didn’t understand why she felt like it. Never felt like she, she didn’t feel like she fitted in anywhere and the way that she felt was sort of like, sort of almost a self-loathing but not understanding why. And I was like, well, yeah, welcome to my world [laughs].

And that’s exactly how I felt at that age and that’s exactly how I feel now at the age of forty five, most of the time, quite frankly, and there are a lot of people around who do feel like that. But you just have to learn to deal with it. And we have like a bit of a, sort of joke about it, like a private joke between us now that, you know, that were both sort of a bit strange and a bit awkward and were both a bit nerdy [laughs]. But, you know, nerdy is now the new sexy, apparently, so that’s all right [laughs].

So yeah, in a way so she did go on to explain it and I was like, Yeah, but I understand that completely that’s it, it’s, you’re not the only person that feels like that. That’s how I felt. And, you know, she now knows that, obviously, shed known about my drinking, yeah, but she now knows about the fact that I had an eating disorder and stuff and that she, you know, she can see that what she did was just a different way of expressing what I did through an eating disorder. So she sort of, now she sort of, now shes seventeen, shes nearly eighteen now and shes got a much better understanding of, you know, sort of almost acceptance I hope, in the way that I have, that, you know, okay, I’m a bit different. I’m not necessarily like everybody else and I don’t necessarily deal with things in the way that other people do, but that’s all right as long as I recognise my behaviour and recognise why I think I want to behave in certain ways, then you can deal with it.

She definitely sees it as a way of expressing her pain. She sees it as a way of counteracting emotional, deep emotional pain and replacing it with physical pain. And I can see how that, that would be the case. I can understand that. And I’d certainly understand it if it was somebody elses kid. I could, I could say, Oh, well, that’s, you know, that’s how it is. It’s just, it’s just awful when it’s your own child. She dresses in, I mean I think she always looks really nice usually, actually. You know, I don’t disapprove at all of the way that she chooses to dress and her hair and her make-up and everything. And shes a really, I know I’m obviously biased, but shes an attractive girl and shes got a wonderful personality and shes bright and everything. And I think that that’s a separate issue to this altogether, I really do. And, and, it was certainly, it was her words, it was her, it was her choice of phrase to say that that was how she expressed herself, as if it went along with everything else about her appearance and her tastes.

What does she say herself about the reasons for her self-harming?

Well, I, after I left her dad I had another relationship, a seven year relationship, which ended in July, and she says that she was self-harming because she can’t, she couldn’t cope with the thought of me having a physical relationship with somebody because for her, it’s bad and evil and dirty. And so for the person that she loves most in the world to be bad, she can’t deal with. So I didn’t realise that she was self-harming because of that. She got on very well with my partner, never, in fact, probably I was the one that felt left out in the [laughs] relationship quite often. But it was just that she feels that people in general are bad and finds it difficult to, finds it difficult to feel that people that she loves are bad and so she cuts to stop to stop her feeling those feelings because it concentrates her emotions. It focuses her emotions on something physical. And so I don’t know for the rest of the time. I think that’s, that’s a newish thing but those feelings have got more extreme now and so the thought of me having another relationship is very, very frightening for her, very frightening and she is really struggling. Shes got the crisis team coming at the moment to, to help her. And so that’s, for these years, that’s her reasoning.

I don’t know if that was when it first started. I suspect there had probably been elements of self-harm before that. When weve talked about it, she has said that she said that she started to self-harm because of her dad’s mental health issues. Everything is always about him. Hes always the centre of absolutely everything, even now, you know, at fifty odd, hes still, everything is still always about him and she said to me, I felt really dreadful. I was depressed. I wasn’t coping. I wanted to hurt myself. And hed just go, You haven’t got any reason to feel like that. Grow-up. Sort of attitude and she said, and I did it because I wanted to show him just how bad I felt. And she says that was why she started and she does say that she did start before she moved here but I think she must have been self-harming before that, cutting before that but I wasn’t aware of it.

She said it was because she had stomach pains and it just wasn’t going but it ended up being sort of a small overdose but clearly shes quite angry about a lot of things from her childhood and growing up. She does have difficulty dealing with them because she does have learning difficulties, social difficulties. I would say shes on the autistic spectrum. She also academically finds studies very difficult. So that was really I think the beginning of sort of self-harming sort of thing and I don’t know whether it was an intentional self-harm. I could never get to the bottom of it. She then said she was fine. She didn’t mean to hurt herself. She didn’t want to die. She wasn’t trying to do anything like that so we left it and moved on.

For the first evening, when asked, she just responded with, I don’t know. Until something was said about her dad and then she said, Oh yeah, I’m very upset about things my dad said to me. Well, yeah, he said some unpleasant things but often if she wants a scapegoat and, you know, you learn to read your children. Yes, sometimes shell do things because shes upset about what’s said and you, theres a manner she has when shes upset about something hes said in the past and shell talk to me about it. But this was one of those times when it didn’t seem to quite ring true. It just seemed to be, That way people will stop asking me why I’ve done it. And so I mean, I think I even said to the doctor that night, I don’t know what to feel because I’m at a loss as to why shes done it. I just cannot work out what’s going on inside her head in order to make her do this.

I really don’t know what’s going on in her head because it so much was out of the blue. It wasn’t shes been having trouble with this or, you know, something had been troubling her, you know, and building up. It was just out of the blue and I, you know, the next day when I said things to her about why did she do it, she came out with different, Oh, I was feeling really low. Or, I was just testing myself to see how strong I am. And, you know, there were several other reasons and when you don’t know why somebody has done it, you think, Well, will they do it again.

I’ve had talks with my daughter because, obviously, from our point of view, when we see her going in there, we had the idealistic view, you go into hospital, get better and come out like you would with a physical ailment I suppose. But she went in and really deteriorated. We couldn’t understand it and we were asking our family therapist at the time what,’ is this normal?’ and she was like, Yes, a lot of young people do this. But it, there was a tendency to have a knock-on effect that if somebody else had self-harmed in the day, it would trigger other youngsters to do the same thing. So I had this talk with my daughter and she said that she feels like a failure if she didn’t self-harm because everybody else in there was self-harming quite badly, if she didn’t do it, then she felt like a failure and she shouldn’t be there. So that’s why the self-harm then it went onto blades and razors and things like that.

She said she was really struggling. And I knew that she had a friend, who was going through various different problems of his own, and he had, in fact, taken an overdose and he was all right again but she was really worried about him. And quite often he would contact her and then go off radar, which I thought was a little bit unfair on her that that she was being told, Oh, I feel bad. I feel suicidal. And then he would he would go off radar and she would she would be feeling, you know, really, really anxious about that. And she said that she felt most like self-harming when she was upset about him.